Rochelle Tobias

Professor

German and Romance Languages and Literatures
The Johns Hopkins University
3400 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-7512
Email:  rtobias@jhu.edu
Office:  244 Gilman Hall

Office Hours: Wednesday 11am-1pm,
or by appointment

Curriculum Vitae

Article

ROCHELLE TOBIAS received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1996, where she studied German, French and English literature from the 18th to 20th centuries with a special emphasis on modern poetry. She joined the faculty of the German Department at Hopkins in 1996. Professor Tobias’ research has focused on the intersection of literature, philosophy and religion in the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in modern poetics and the tension between immanence and transcendence in the works of such poets as Rilke, George, Trakl and Celan. In addition she has worked extensively on the notion of redemption and utopia in German-Jewish culture and thought. Professor Tobias has held research fellowships from the American Association of University Women and the German Academic Exchange Service.  She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006). Currently she is working on a study of pseudo-memoirs which investigates the vexed relation of life to literature in modern fiction. The authors included in the study are Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard.

Selected Publications:

The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.  Further information is available at http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/8849.html

“A Narrator’s Dual Vocation: The Art of Storytelling in Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten.” The German Quarterly 79:3 (Summer 2006).

"The Homecoming of a Word: Mystical Language Philosophy in Celan’s ‘Mit allen Gedanken.’" Placeless Topographies: Jewish Perspectives on Literature of Exile, ed. Bernhard Greiner (Tübingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 2003), 175-85.

"March 27, 1329: Pope John XXII condemns portions of Meister Eckhart’s work as heretical." The New History of German Literature, eds. David Wellbery et al (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

"A Doctor’s Odyssey: Sickness and Health in Kafka’s ‘Ein Landarzt.’" The Germanic Review 75:2 (Spring 2000), 120-131. Reprinted in Short Story Criticism, Vol. 60, ed. Justin Karr.

"The Ground Gives Way: Intimations of the Sacred in Celan’s ‘Gespräch im Gebirg.’" Modern Language Notes 114:3 (April 1999), 567-589.

"Das Gesicht der Dinge." Gedichte von Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Wolfram Groddeck (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 104-121

Course Syllabus:

213.252 Freshman Seminar: What is a University?

213.672 Literature of Terror, Terror of Literature

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