Zoom Reading Group: Joseph Roth, Radetzky March
Date and Time
Location
NOVEL THEORY
SPEAKER: Katie Trumpener, Yale University
Joseph Roth’s Radetzky March is a pathbreaking historical novel of the recent past; a memorable depiction of life in a dying Austro-Hungary, on the eve of World War I, it focuses on the fate of army officers, caught in a dialectic of ethnicity and empire. Roth himself was born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the outskirts of empire; led a literary and journalistic life first in postwar Vienna and then in Berlin, before fleeing in 1933 to Paris, where he died in 1939 of alcoholism. In the German-speaking world, he is prized at once as a modernist and a classical stylist, a realist and an allegorist. The literary peer of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil, he chronicled not only life in modernist Vienna but Central European Jewish life, the rise of European fascism, the upheavals of modernity, and the rise of emigration, displacement, and deracination as quotidian fates (or as the title of his 1927 novel puts it, Flight without End). Radetsky March is widely considered his masterpiece. Please join us for one or both of our zoom discussions, which will be led by Professor Katie Trumpener.
About the Speaker
Professor Katie Trumpener, who will be leading the discussion on both Feb. 4th and Feb. 11th, teaches Comparative Literature, English, and Film and Media Studies at Yale. Her work on the history of the novel includes Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire; a Cambridge Companion to Fiction in the Romantic Period (co-edited with Richard Maxwell), an edition of John Galt’s 1831 Bogle Corbet: Or the Emigrants, and articles on Austen, Defoe, and The Persian Letters. She also works on the history of children’s literature, and with art historian Tim Barringer co-edited a volume on nineteenth-century panoramas, and their twentieth-century, multi-media afterlives. She began her teaching career as a Germanist, still teaches courses on East German literature and film, and is currently finishing a book on Third Reich cinema and the Nazi occupation of Europe.
A second zoom meeting will be held on Feb. 11, 2026 at 6:00 pm ET. Participants only need to register once, as the link will be the same.
If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.