Silke-Maria Weineck

Professor Weineck's second book The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West, which received the MLA's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, is available from Amazon.  Her first book The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche is available from SUNY Press. 

Silke thinks of herself as a metaphorologist; she is especially interested in the relationship between philosophy, literature, and figuration from the 18thto the 20th century. She serves on the steering committee of "Context for Classics," a faculty initiative devoted to exploring the presence of antiquity in the modern world. Together with Victor Caston, she edited Our Ancient Wars: Rethinking War Through the Classics, Recently, she collaborated with sports economist Stefan Szymanski on It's Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa). 

Silke is currently working on a short book on The Irony Monster: Ungod, and also thinking about Stockholm Syndrome. 

Selected Publications

• "The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin, and Nietzsche." Buffalo: State University of New York Press, (2002) .
• "Invisible Person': Carl Schmitt and the Master Trope of Power," forthcoming in Germanic Review.
• "The Laius Syndrome, or The Ends of Political Fatherhood," forthcoming in Cultural Critique, special issue on "Classical Reception and the Political."
• "Heteros Autos: Freud's Fatherhood," in: Dreams of Interpretation/The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, and Thomas Pepper, University of Minnesota Press, 2007. German Version in KultuRRevolution 46 (2004), 40-47.
• "Dead Children: Ben Jonson Epitaph on my first sonne," in: Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan Press, 2007.
• "The Eighth Elegy," transl. of Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien VIII, American Poetry Review, Nov/Dec 2000.

Affiliations

• Comparative Literature
• Germanic Languages and Literature

Awards

• Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellowship

Fields of Study

• Areas of research: Figurality, 18-20th Century German and French Theory,  Long 18th Century German Literature, Classical Reception Languages: German, Latin, French