Annie Pfeifer
Biographic Data
| ID | 257685 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Annie Pfeifer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Annie |
| FAMILY NAME | Pfeifer |
| SIGNATURE | PFEIFER A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8575-0008 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Kafka’s Children
This article examines the elusive status of the child in Franz Kafka’s work as a way of looking back at the future. Unlike Kafka’s bachelorhood, his childlessness has received less critical attention. In Kafka’s oeuvre, the closest we get to paternity is the mysterious, childlike specters that haunt the apartments of lonely bachelors, staging not only the problem of what Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurism” but also the collision between lit…
Nothing to Lose but Their Borrowing Privileges
Veiling and Unveiling
As fascism was taking over Europe, the queer Swiss-German journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled throughout the Middle East and Central Asia between 1933 and 1939. Schwarzenbach spends considerable time photographing and reflecting on the veil, namely the hijab and the chador, a full-length cloak that covers the hair, body, and frequently the face. Her travels coincide with seismic shifts in dress codes in Iran and Afghanist…
Mis)communication in the Age of (Mis)information
As the philosopher Jason Stanley notes, "A puzzle arises in our current moment: in a time in which there is more information available than ever before, there also seems to be an upsurge in willful ignorance." Some have connected this paradox to the polarization of American politics, which has been exploited by different parties and causes for political gain. From the Trump administration's deployment of "alternative facts" and "fake news" to the…
Orphans with Parents
Most scholarship has treated Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909) as a variation of the Bildungsroman. By contrast, this article examines Jakob von Gunten in order to theorize the genre of the orphan novel. The orphan emerges in the nineteenth‐century European novel as a self‐referential literary figure, a metaphor for the lone individual facing a modernizing industrial society. Unlike his fictional predecessors, Walser's Jakob is a self‐procl…
The Forces of Form in German Modernism
Malika Maskarinec’s book The Forces of Form ambitiously seeks to reorient our understanding of modernism as a narrative of uprightness and construction rather than fallenness and crisis. With unusu
Dinge, Sachen, Gegenstände
Kaum ein Autor, der im Diskurs über die Ding-Literatur der Moderne so unbeachtet ist wie Robert Walser – und doch ist sein Werk mit „Gegenständlichkeiten“ überfüllt. Dass es aus dem Blick fiel, liegt in der Natur seiner Sachen: Walsers Dinge sind nicht aufständisch und eigensinnig, wie die „tückischen Objekte“ der Zeitgenossen, sondern unauffällig, einsatzbereit und auf ihre Weise nützlich.Die Studie beleuchtet, nach einer Klärung der Begriffe au…
Between Hysteria and ‘Heimweh’
In his 1688 dissertation, which first coined the word ‘nostalgia’, the physician Johannes Hofer noted that this ‘Swiss’ sickness (‘Schweizerkrankheit’) is often triggered in soldiers by sounds such as the ringing of cowbells. During her stay in Frankfurt nearly two hundred years later, Johanna Spyri's Heidi is similarly stricken by homesickness, brought on by her acoustic hallucinations about her Swiss Heimat. Heidi's ‘Heimweh’ is treated by her …
A Collector in a Collectivist State
Rather than establishing literary relations with Russian intellectuals or securing the affections of his Latvian love interest, Walter Benjamin spends most of his 1926–27 Soviet sojourn shopping for toys. Benjamin’s habits present an interesting counterpoint to his communist surroundings; he is collecting while Russians are collectivizing. Through the lens of his toys, this article examines the conflicted practice of collecting, locating a tensio…
No prominent works on this page.
A Collector in a Collectivist State
Rather than establishing literary relations with Russian intellectuals or securing the affections of his Latvian love interest, Walter Benjamin spends most of his 1926–27 Soviet sojourn shopping for toys. Benjamin’s habits present an interesting counterpoint to his communist surroundings; he is collecting while Russians are collectivizing. Through the lens of his toys, this article examines the conflicted practice of collecting, locating a tensio…
Dinge, Sachen, Gegenstände
Kaum ein Autor, der im Diskurs über die Ding-Literatur der Moderne so unbeachtet ist wie Robert Walser – und doch ist sein Werk mit „Gegenständlichkeiten“ überfüllt. Dass es aus dem Blick fiel, liegt in der Natur seiner Sachen: Walsers Dinge sind nicht aufständisch und eigensinnig, wie die „tückischen Objekte“ der Zeitgenossen, sondern unauffällig, einsatzbereit und auf ihre Weise nützlich.Die Studie beleuchtet, nach einer Klärung der Begriffe au…
Between Hysteria and ‘Heimweh’
In his 1688 dissertation, which first coined the word ‘nostalgia’, the physician Johannes Hofer noted that this ‘Swiss’ sickness (‘Schweizerkrankheit’) is often triggered in soldiers by sounds such as the ringing of cowbells. During her stay in Frankfurt nearly two hundred years later, Johanna Spyri's Heidi is similarly stricken by homesickness, brought on by her acoustic hallucinations about her Swiss Heimat. Heidi's ‘Heimweh’ is treated by her …
The Forces of Form in German Modernism
Malika Maskarinec’s book The Forces of Form ambitiously seeks to reorient our understanding of modernism as a narrative of uprightness and construction rather than fallenness and crisis. With unusu
Orphans with Parents
Most scholarship has treated Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten (1909) as a variation of the Bildungsroman. By contrast, this article examines Jakob von Gunten in order to theorize the genre of the orphan novel. The orphan emerges in the nineteenth‐century European novel as a self‐referential literary figure, a metaphor for the lone individual facing a modernizing industrial society. Unlike his fictional predecessors, Walser's Jakob is a self‐procl…
Mis)communication in the Age of (Mis)information
As the philosopher Jason Stanley notes, "A puzzle arises in our current moment: in a time in which there is more information available than ever before, there also seems to be an upsurge in willful ignorance." Some have connected this paradox to the polarization of American politics, which has been exploited by different parties and causes for political gain. From the Trump administration's deployment of "alternative facts" and "fake news" to the…
Nothing to Lose but Their Borrowing Privileges
Veiling and Unveiling
As fascism was taking over Europe, the queer Swiss-German journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled throughout the Middle East and Central Asia between 1933 and 1939. Schwarzenbach spends considerable time photographing and reflecting on the veil, namely the hijab and the chador, a full-length cloak that covers the hair, body, and frequently the face. Her travels coincide with seismic shifts in dress codes in Iran and Afghanist…
Kafka’s Children
This article examines the elusive status of the child in Franz Kafka’s work as a way of looking back at the future. Unlike Kafka’s bachelorhood, his childlessness has received less critical attention. In Kafka’s oeuvre, the closest we get to paternity is the mysterious, childlike specters that haunt the apartments of lonely bachelors, staging not only the problem of what Lee Edelman terms “reproductive futurism” but also the collision between lit…
Art (6 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · History (4 works) · Sociology (4 works) · German Literature and Culture Studies (3 works) · Law (3 works) · Literature and Cultural Memory (3 works) · Political science (3 works)