14.09.2023 A Centenary of Life and Work! Congratulations!

Prof. Franz Karl Stanzel (Mitte) erhält 2015 die Ehrendoktorwürde der Philipps-Universität Marburg. Mit ihm freuen sich Fachbereichsdekan Prof. Dr. Christoph Werner und Fachbereichsprodekanin Prof. Dr. Carmen Birkle.

On behalf of the Department of Foreign Literatures, Languages, and Cultures, I am happy to announce that Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Franz Karl Stanzel has just celebrated his 100th birthday! His long connections to Philipps-Universität and to the Institute of English and American Studies and the impact of his work on many generations of students in both English, American, and Canadian Studies as well as other philologies make us proud to see him affiliated with our Department and to be able to congratulate him on this extraordinary event!
Prof. Stanzel received an honorary doctoral degree from our Department of Foreign Literatures, Languages, and Cultures in 2015 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of his seminal study Die typischen Erzählformen im Roman: Dargestellt an Tom Jones, Moby-Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses u.a., published in 1955 in Vienna and republished and partially revised twelve times by now, with a first translation into English in 1971. With Typische Formen des Romans (1964), Stanzel continued his studies of narrative theory and, by now, has certainly become the best-known and a world-renowned narrative theorist, above all then with his Theorie des Erzählens (1979; A Theory of Narrative [1984]). Numerous translations of several of his publications into languages such as Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Czech, Greek, and English, of course, testify to the prominence and importance of his ideas and work.
He has published numerous monographs, essays collections, and essays, including his autobiography of the war years, Verlust einer Jugend: Rückschau eines Neunzigjährigen auf Krieg und Gefangenschaft (2013). Apart from many revised editions of his books on narrative theory, Stanzel has published monographs, among others on Europäer: Ein imagologischer Essay (1997), Telegonie – Fernzeugung: Macht und Magie der Imagination (2008), Welt als Text: Grundbegriffe der Interpretation (2011), Die typischen Erzählsituationen 1955-2015 (2015), James Joyce in Kakanien 1904-1915 (2019) und Gratwanderung zwischen Facta und Ficta (2022). Both the theoretical and practical ideas of imagology have led to his explorations of the national and ethnic stereotypes of the eighteenth-century “Völkertafel” and its genesis and dissemination.
But Stanzel is much more than a scholar of literature and literary theory. He is not only an eyewitness and survivor of World War II, as described in his autobiographical works; he is also a chronicler of the history of Anglistik in the German-speaking countries because the field is so intimately connected to his own coming of age in academia.

 Dear Professor Stanzel, happy birthday!