Faculty and Staff

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Gail Finney

Chair, German and Russian
Professor of Comparative Literature & German
Ph.D., UC Berkeley 1980

Email: gefinney@ucdavis.edu
Phone: (530) 752-1125
Office: 909 Sproul Hall
Research Interests

  • Psychoanalysis and literature/film, especially trauma theory
  • Turn-of-the-century culture
  • Modern drama
  • 19th-century European fiction
  • Feminism
  • Postwar German women writers

Current Projects

  • "Female Victimization and Hauptmann's Stylistic Eclecticism," chapter in Gerhart Hauptmann and the Naturalist Drama, ed. Raleigh Whitinger.
  • Book entitled: The Dark Side of the Screen: Family Trauma in Contemporary American Cinema

Education

  • M.A. and Ph.D. UC Berkeley, 1975, 1980, Comparative Literature
  • A.B. Princeton University, 1973, German (summa cum laude)

Academic Positions

  • Harvard University, Assistant and Associate Professor of German, 1980-88
  • University of California Davis, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, 1988-present
  • Harvard University, Visiting Professor of German, Spring 1997

Major Publications

     Books
  • The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984.
  • Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989, 1991 (nominated for the American Comparative Literature Association's Harry Levin Prize).
  • Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy (ed.). New York: Gordon and Breach, 1994.
  • Christa Wolf. New York: Twayne/Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1999.
  • Visual Culture in Twentieth-Century Germany: Text as Spectacle (ed.). Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2006.

     Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

  • "Revolution, Resignation, Realism: 1830-1890." The Cambridge History of German Literature. Ed. Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997; in paper 2000. 272-326.
  • "Komödie und Obszönität: Der sexuelle Witz bei Jelinek und Freud." The German Quarterly, 70 (Winter 1997): 499-510.
  • "The Berlin Wall: Six Years After." Schreiben im heutigen Deutschland: Die literarische Szene nach der Wende. Ed. U.E. Beitter. New York: P. Lang, 1997. 25-34.
  • "Of Walls and Windows: What German Studies and Comparative Literature Can Offer Each Other." Comparative Literature, 49 (Summer 1997): 259-66.
  • "The Merging of German Unifications: Liminality in Günter Grass's Ein weites Feld." Schwellen: Germanistische Erkundungen einer Metapher. Ed. Nicholas Saul, Daniel Steuer, Frank Möbus, and Birgit Illner. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999. 127-36.
  • "True Lies in the Ex-GDR: The Intersection of History and Fiction in the Career of Christa Wolf." History and Literature: Essays in Honor of Karl S. Guthke. Ed. William C. Donahue and Scott Denham. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001.133-44.
  • "Women's Comedy and Its Intellectual Fathers: Marx as the Answer to Freud." Literary Friendship, Literary Paternity: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold. Ed. Gerhard Richter. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002. 233-51.
  • "Die Schaubühne als oralische Anstalt: Das postmoderne Theater von Ginka Steinwachs." Vol. 59 of Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000: Gegenwartsliteratur. Ed. Peter Wiesinger. Bern: P. Lang, 2002. 95-100.
  • "Queering the Stage: Critical Displacement in the Theater of Else Lasker-Schüler and Mae West." Comparative Literature Studies, 40.1 (2003): 54-71.
  • "Poetic Realism, Naturalism, and the Rise of the Novella." The Camden House History of German Literature, Volume Nine: The Nineteenth Century: 1830-1899. Ed. Eric Downing and Clayton Koelb. New York: Camden House, 2005. 117-36.
  • "Modern Theater and the Tragic in Europe." A Companion to Tragedy. Ed. Rebecca Bushnell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 471-87.
  • "Performing Vienna: Theatricality in Jelinek's Burgtheater and Bernhard's Heldenplatz." Special issue of German Politics and Society, 23 (Spring 2005): 24-38.
  • "What's Happened to Feminism?" Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (ACLA Report 2004). Ed. Haun Saussy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 114-26.
  • "The Tectonics of Trauma: 'Father-Daughter Incest in Film." Unfitting Stories: Narrative Approaches to Disease, Disability, and Trauma. Ed. Valerie Raoul et al. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007. 89-96.

Honors and Awards

  • National Endowment for the Humanities Grant for Independent Study and Research, 1983-84
  • American Council of Learned Societies Grant awarded but declined for 1983-84
  • Faculty Research Grants, UC Davis, 1988-90, 1991-94, 2000-01, 2003-07
  • Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, Berlin, 1989-90
  • Faculty Development Awards, UC Davis, Spring 1995, Spring 2002
  • Research Fellowship from Davis Humanities Institute, Fall 1999
  • DAAD Study Visit Research Grant (declined), 2002
  • Distinguished Graduate/Professional Teaching Award, UC Davis, 2007

Teaching Fields/Courses Taught

A wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses in 19th- and 20th-century German and comparative literature, including graduate seminars in German on:

  • Poetic Realism in the Light of Modern Literary Theory
  • Anti-Aristotelian Drama
  • Gender and Comedy
  • Turn-of-the-Century Culture
  • Narrative and Narrative Theory
  • 20th-century Women Writers

Graduate seminars in comparative literature and Critical Theory on:

  • Comedy from Aristophanes to the Present
  • Nietzsche and the 20th Century
  • Introduction to the Graduate Study of Comparative Literature
  • Theories of Comedy and Laughter
  • Modernism and Postmodernism
  • Trauma: Its Representation in Theory, Literature, and Film