add contact to address book

Chair, Department of Comparative Literature
Associate Professor of German Studies

• Affiliation(s)

  • Comparative Literature
  • Germanic Languages and Literature

• Fields of Study

  • Areas of research: Figurality, 18-20th Century German and French Theory,  Long 18th Century German Literature, Classical Reception Languages: German, Latin, French

• About

  Areas of research: Figurality, 18-20th Century German and French Theory,  Long 18th Century German Literature, Classical Reception
  Languages: German, Latin, French

  Silke Weineck received an M.A. in German Literature from the Johns Hopkins University in 1989 and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1998.  She is the author of The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness (2004). Additional publications include articles on Plato, Ben Jonson, Hoelderlin, Kleist, Buechner, Nietzsche, Freud, Carl Schmitt, and Paul Celan, as well as translations of two poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. She is the recipient of a FIPSE-Grant (2000), an Alexander-von-Humboldt fellowship (2004), and a Michigan Humanities Award (2010). She serves on the steering committee of Michigan’s faculty consortium Contexts for Classics, the editorial board of the journal Cultural Critique and the editorial board of book series New Directions in German Studies (Continuum), and she coordinates the kinship and family network of the German Studies Association. She is currently completing a book on the long history of paternal tropes, tentatively titled The Laius Complex: Politics and Tragic Paternity. Teaching interests in Comparative Literature include undergraduate courses on “The University” and graduate seminars on the “Theory of Metaphor,” “Sovereignty,” “20th Century German and European Theory,” and the “Theory of Tragedy.”

  Select Publications:

  • The Abyss Above: The Philosophy of Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche.  Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2002 .
  • The Laius Complex: Politics and Tragic Paternity. Under advance contract with SUNY Press.
  • “God is Dead.” Keywords in German Aesthetics, Harvard UP.
  • “Thoughts Before a Line of Kleist,” Germanic Review 85:1 (2010), 63-69.
  • “The Laius Syndrome, or The Ends of Political Fatherhood,” Cultural Critique 74 (2010, special issue on “Classical Reception and the Political”) 131-146.
  • “’Invisible Person’ Carl Schmitt and the Master Trope of Power Germanic Review 84:3,
  • Summer 2009, 199–221.
  • “Heteros Autos: Freud’s Fatherhood,” in: Dreams of Interpretation/The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, and Thomas Pepper, University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
  • “Dead Children: Ben Jonson Epitaph on my first sonne,” in: Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan Press, 2007.
  • “Digesting the Nineteenth Century: Nietzsche and the Stomach of Modernity,”Romanticism, 12: 1 (2006), 35-43
  • “Kleist and the Resurrection of the Father,” Eighteenth Century Studies 37-1 (2003), 69-89.
  • "Sex and History, Or Is There an Erotic Utopia in Dantons Tod?", German Quarterly, 73:4 (2000): 351-365.
  •  “The Eighth Elegy”, transl. of Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien VIII, American Poetry Review , Nov/Dec 2000.
  • "Somatic Archive: Exhibiting Nietzsche," German Politics and Society 54:18:1 (2000), 66-75.
  • “History, Diagnosis, and Incommensurability,” MSPP News (Michigan Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology) vol 10:1 (2000), 8-11.

   

• Education

  • Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania

• Awards

  • Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship

• Selected Publications:

• Articles

  • (2007) Zuckende Verzeichnung, Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung
  • (2006) Digesting the Nineteenth Century, Romanticism
  • (2000) Sex and History, Or Is There an Erotic Utopia in Dantons Tod?, German Quarterly