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Sarah Milne Pourciau

Associate Professor of German Studies
German Studies

Overview


Before coming to Duke, Sarah Pourciau (Ph.D. 2007, Princeton University) held positions at Stanford University, Princeton University, the Technical University of Berlin, and the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. Her research explores the intersections of philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on nineteenth and twentieth-century German and Austrian culture. Related areas of interest include the history of theology, literary theory and aesthetics, gender theory, opera, and the history of science and mathematics. Her first book, The Writing of Spirit: Soul, System, and the Roots of Language Science (Fordham, 2017), traces the nineteenth-century emergence and twentieth-century transformation of a structuralist approach to language and poetics, teasing out the pivotal role played by the system-transcending concept of Sprachgeist. Her current project, with the working title "The World Suspended: Habsburg Modernity and the King's Double Optic," argues for the existence of an unprotestant, non-national alternative to classical modernist problems of aesthetic and political form. This "other modernity," which has its roots in the Habsburg baroque, finds particularly powerful expression in several twentieth-century Austrian attempts to rethink dramatic (Hofmannsthal), operatic (Schoenberg, Berg), and narrative (Musil, Kafka, Broch) unity against the backdrop of imperial dissolution. Pourciau's articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals like Critical InquiryDeutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, The Opera Quarterly, POETICA, Modern Language Notes, Germanic Review, and Arcadia.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Associate Professor of German Studies · 2023 - Present German Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Director of Graduate Studies for the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies · 2024 - Present German Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published July 20, 2023
German Studies Department Offers Vibrant Learning Experience

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Recent Publications


“The Right Despair”: Kafka’s Nihilist Technique

Journal Article Germanic Review · January 1, 2024 Kafka’s drawing style, like his writing one, is abstemious in the extreme; the question is how to characterize his criterion of subtraction. Studying the diary drawings alongside the text in which they are embedded points toward a general dynamic of deacti ... Full text Cite

The Unpastoral: Walter Ruttmann and the Politics of Symphonic Form

Journal Article Modernism - Modernity · January 1, 2024 The musical analogy that underpins Walter Ruttmann’s Weimar-era city film Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt has generally been understood as a cipher for his uncritical, quietist political perspective—the idea being that Ruttmann aestheticizes rather than ... Full text Cite

On the Digital Ocean

Journal Article Critical Inquiry · October 10, 2021 Open Access Cite
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Education, Training & Certifications


Princeton University · 2007 Ph.D.