People - Faculty - Kaup
Monika Kaup
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Degrees: M.A., Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, 1988 Ph.D., Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany, 1991 Habilitation, American Studies, Osnabrueck University, Osnabrueck, Germany, 1998
Areas of Study: U.S. Latino/a Studies, Transamerican Literary and Cultural Studies, Literature of the Americas
I have completed a study of Chicano and Chicana narrative as border narrative, investigating the ways in which Mexican American literature is situated at the intersections of the national (the U.S. American), the American ethnic, and the transnational (routes to Mexico). I am also working in transamerican studies, which explores the substantial common ground that exists across the diversity of cultures and traditions that have developed in the Americas. Transamerican studies is a transnational optic drawing north-south connections between North America, Latin America, and the Caribbean and employs the methods of comparative literary and cultural studies to establish unrealized conversations among diverse New World literatures and cultures. I am presently working on two related projects on the New World Baroque and the Neobaroque (a category that refers to the recuperation of the expressive forms and themes of the historical Baroque by 20th-century intellectuals and artists): one is a collection that traces the evolution of the Baroque in the Americas from its origins to the present, Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (co-edited with Lois Parkinson Zamora). The other is a book ms. entitled Neobarroco: Transamerican Fictions of Modernity and Counterconquest. These projects investigate the ways in which the Baroque presents itself as both a transgressive formalism and as a cultural ideology; in addition, they describe how, in its transmission from Europe to the Americas, the Baroque is transculturated and transformed into a de-colonizing mode. While the collection traces the evolution of the Baroque in (mainly) Spanish and Portuguese America from its origins to the present time, examining transatlantic as well as transamerican transmissions, the book focuses in Neobaroque theory and literature in the Americas.
Selected Publications
- Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues. co-editor with Debra Rosenthal. Austin: U of Texas P. 2002.
- Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative. New York: Peter Lang. 2001.
- "The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature." American Literature 69.2 (1997).
- Mad Intertextuality: Madness in Twentieth-Century Women’s Writing. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. 1993.