Judith Ryan

Judith Ryan is the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her main focus is the period from about 1890 to the present, which special emphases on early twentieth-century modernism and literature of the present day. Recent publications include a book, The Novel After Theory (Columbia University Press, 2012), and articles on “Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus,” in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., 1922: Literature, Culture, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and “The Ransmayr-Sebald Connection: History, Intertextuality, and Critical Theory,” in Gegenwartsliteratur, Fall 2016). She has published some half a dozen articles on W.G. Sebald. Certainly his work, with its complex and often problematic relationship to previous authors and texts, its exploration of power and territory, its challenging notions of history, and its skeptical handling of narrative conventions, can be expected to continue as an important point of reference in her thinking.