Bärbel Westphal

My field for research and lecturing is German literature. I completed my doctoral thesis about the German author Martin Walser’s novel Runaway Horse (Ein fliehendes Pferd). I performed a narratological analysis of the speech and discourse patterns of the characters from a gender perspective. Since then I investigated a number of areas: Søren Kierkegaard’s influence on Walser’s novel, the teaching of literature in an investigation of university entrants, the theme of travel in German literature, and a more in-depth study of narratology concerning unreliable narration from a gender perspective. Special areas of interest are literature after the re-unification of Germany and German pop literature. One projekt deals with poverty in pop literature, especially Sibylle Berg's novel "Amerika" and Joachim Lottman's "Der Geldkomplex". I wrote the first swedish introduction to german popliterature in an anthology about chic-lit 2013 (Liber). Time being I am the Head of the School of Language at Linnaeus University.