Robert Blankenship, PhD

Robert Blankenship, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of GermanBlankenship_Robert
California State University, Long Beach
1250 Bellflower Blvd.
Long Beach, CA 90840
Robert.Blankenship@csulb.edu | Office: AS-322

 

Research Interests

Robert Blankenship’s scholarship is concerned with nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century German literature and cinema, and he is especially interested in East German literature. He is the author of the book “Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage.” Dr. Blankenship sees teaching as a war against apathy, and students in his classes may find themselves discussing, collaborating, writing, translating, staging dramatic productions, performing close readings, fruitfully disagreeing, and generally flexing their imagination.

Education

PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2011)

MA Bowling Green State University (2005)

BA University of Southern Mississippi (2003)

Select Publications

  • “Subjective Authenticity as Realism: Christa Wolf and Georg Lukács.” What Remains: Responses to the Legacy of Christa Wolf. Patricia Herminghouse and Gerald Fetz (Eds.). Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2022. 
  • “Christa Wolf’s Richard Neutra: Architecture, Psychoanalysis, and Southern California in Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, vol. 95, no. 1, January 2020, pp. 55-64.
  • (with Jill Twark) “’Berliner Sonderschule’: Facing German History in the Post-Wall Berlin Present in Jan Ole Gerster’s Oh Boy (A Coffee in Berlin).” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53.4 (November 2017). (Forthcoming)
  • Suicide in East German Literature: Fiction, Rhetoric, and the Self-Destruction of Literary Heritage. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2017.
  • “’Erzählt ist erzählt’: The Ethics of Narration in Christa Wolf’s Stadt der Engel oder the Overcoat of Dr. Freud.” Envisioning Social Justice in Contemporary German Culture. Jill Twark and Axel Hildebrandt (Eds.). Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015.
  • “The Imperative to Remember: Hamlet as Unmarked Intertext in Christoph Hein’s Horn’s End.” The Hamlet Zone: Reworking Hamlet in European Cultures. Ruth J. Owen (Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.
  • “The One-Armed Carpenter: Forced Migration, Labor, and Humor in Christoph Hein’s Landnahme.” Strategies of Humor in Post-Unification German Literature, Film, and Other Media. Jill Twark (Ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.

Full Curriculum Vitae