Professor, German Studies and Comparative Literature
smwei@umich.eduOffice Information:
2012 Tisch Hall
Graduate Faculty; Faculty; Germanic Languages and Literatures; German
Education/Degree:
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania; MA German Studies, The Johns Hopkins University
Books
It's Football, Not Soccer (And Vice Versa): On the History, Emotion, and Ideology Behind One of the Internet's Most Ferocious Debates
Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck
Every four years, when the World Cup rolls around, the internet yells at the US that "it's football, not soccer." This short and light-hearted book lays out the contours of the debate, delves into the history of the word “football” and the emergence of the word “soccer,” explores some 20th century data on the distribution of the two words and the surprisingly recent origin of the great schism, tells you about all the words the world actually uses to describe the game, gives you a glimpse of the convoluted fate of the word soccer in Australia, and tries to make sense of it all. ...
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Our Ancient Wars: Rethinking War through the Classics
Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, editors
Many famous texts from classical antiquity—by historians like Thucydides, tragedians like Sophocles and Euripides, the comic poet Aristophanes, the philosopher Plato, and, above all, Homer—present powerful and profound accounts of wartime experience, both on and off the battlefield. These texts also provide useful ways of thinking about the complexities and consequences of wars throughout history, and the concept of war broadly construed, providing vital new perspectives on conflict in our own era.
Our Ancient Wars features essays by top scholars from across academic disciplines—classicists...
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The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West
Silke-Maria Weineck
Winner of the 2014 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, awarded by the Modern Language Association.
Theories of power have always been intertwined with theories of fatherhood: paternity is the oldest and most persistent metaphor of benign, legitimate rule. The paternal trope gains its strength from its integration of law, body, and affect—in the affirmative model of fatherhood, the biological father, the legal father, and the father who protects and nurtures his children are one and the same, and in a complex system of mutual interdependence, the father...
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The Abyss Above: Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Holderlin, and Nietzsche
Silke-Maria Weineck
In The Abyss Above, Silke-Maria Weineck offers the first sustained discussion of the relationship between poetic madness and philosophy. Focusing on the mad poet as a key figure in what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, " Weineck explores key texts from antiquity to modernity in order to understand why we have come to associate art with irrationality. She shows that the philosophy of madness concedes to the mad a privilege that continues to haunt the Western dream of reason, and that the theory of creative madness always strains the discourse on authenticity...
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'Invisible Person': Carl Schmitt and the Master Trope of Power
Silke-Maria Weineck
forthcoming in Germanic Review
The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity
Silke-Maria Weineck
Name of Periodical: MLN
Volume Number: 131
Issue Number: 3
Year of Publication: 2016
Page Numbers: 724 - 737
The Laius Syndrome, or the Ends of Political Fatherhood
Silke-Maria Weineck
Reading Oedipus has never strayed far from the political: his story is, after all, the story of the rise and fall of a city, and even those readings that appear to disregard the polis altogether, presenting him as a figure of solitary desire, feed off and into theories of law, community, and violence. Psychoanalysis is the best example of that. Nonetheless, something changed drastically when Freud turned Oedipus Tyrannus into Oedipus Teknon, when the king becomes first and foremost the child, and the...
See MoreZuckende Verzeichnung: Alkmene und die Briefe
Silke-Maria Weineck
Name of Periodical: Beiträge zur Kleist-Forschung
Year of Publication: 2007
Heteros Autos: Freud's Fatherhood
Silke-Maria Weineck
Format: Book Chapter
Publication Title: The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, and Thomas Pepper
Pages: 97 - 114
ISBN: 9780816648009, 9780816647996, 0816647992, 081664800X
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Year of Publication: 2007
German Version in KultuRRevolution 46 (2004), 40-47.
Digesting the Nineteenth Century: Nietzsche and the Stomach of Modernity
Silke-Maria Weineck
Name of Periodical: Romanticism
Volume Number: 12
Issue Number: 1
Year of Publication: 2006
Page Numbers: 35-43
Dead Children: Ben Jonson's Epitaph on my first sonne
Silke-Maria Weineck
Format: Book Chapter
Publication Title: Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken
Pages: 128 - 142
ISBN: 978-0-472-11560-0
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Year of Publication: 2006
The Eighth Elegy
Silke-Maria Weineck transl. of Rainer Maria Rilke
Periodical Title: The American Poetry Review
Volume: 29
Issue: 6
Year of Publication: 2000
Pages: 31 - 31
Sex and History, Or Is There an Erotic Utopia in Dantons Tod?
Silke-Maria Weineck
Name of Periodical: German Quarterly
Volume Number: 73
Issue Number: 4
Year of Publication: 2000
Page Numbers: 351-365
