Laura Marwood

Laura Marwood

Miss

Personal profile

Research interests

Research interests:

  • Existentialist philosophy 
  • Neo-Kantianism
  • Post-1945 German language writing
  • 20th century French thought
  • Literary theory

 

Thesis title:

‘Der Mensch ist nicht der Herr des Seienden.’ Existentialism and Postwar German-language Writing

Thesis summary:


My doctoral research offers an extensive examination of five existentialist themes that can be located in post-1945 German speaking writing. These topoi constitute what I am calling the unwritten existentialist manifesto, and include das Ich, freedom,nihilism, Grenzsituation, and angst. Within this theoretical framework, my research concerns itself with the atheistic existentialist writing of Max Frisch and Arno Schmidt, as well as the theistic existentialist works of Heinrich Böll and Elisabeth Langgässer. My thesis seeks to document how these existentialist themes and concerns ‘infiltrated’ postwar novels written in German, proving how the calamitous events of the mid-twentieth century – the Second World War, the Holocaust, the widespread destruction and upheaval caused by the Nazi regime – made writers particularly susceptible to existentialist thought. Each of these writers’ works exhibit strands and strains of existentialist thinking, even where these authors might not be considered full-fledged existentialists per se. It is these strands and strains that my dissertation hopes to uncover, in the process showing how existentialist thought gradually filtered down into societal awareness in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Biographical details: 

I completed an undergraduate degree at Durham University in German and Italian, where I also wrote my Master’s dissertation under the supervision of Professor Jonathan Long. I am currently working on my PhD at King’s College London under the supervision of Professor Robert Weninger (KCL) and Professor Sandra Richter (Stuttgart), although I am currently based at the University of Stuttgart, where I also hold a teaching position. My research is fully funded by King’s College London.

Education/Academic qualification

Master of Arts, ‘Religion and Canon-Formation in 1950s West German Writing’, supervised by Professor J. Long , Durham University

Award Date: 1 Jan 2012

Bachelor of Arts, Durham University

Award Date: 1 Jan 2011

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