The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures is delighted to announce the publication of Katra Byram’s new book, Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature. This monograph appeared last month in Ohio State University Press.

This innovative study examines narratives in which a narrator tells a story about another individual in order to come to terms with his/her own past. The dynamic observer narrator is an especially fruitful narrative strategy for postwar German writers dealing with the war and the Holocaust, but it has broad application for literature of the nineteenth century as well.

Among the authors treated in his monograph are Friedrich Ludwig Textor, Theodor Storm, Wilhelm Raabe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and Günter Grass, Peter Handke, and W.G. Sebald in the twentieth century. Byram breaks new ground in establishing a new category for narrative theory and showing how this category illuminates some of the important prose writings of the tradition.

Byram received her PhD from the University of California in 2008 and has been in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures since 2008. Previous publications have dealt with seminal texts in the German literary tradition and issues in foreign language acquisition. She currently serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in GLL.