About

Thomas Gurke is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic, and Dutch, where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies. His interdisciplinary academic background includes a master's degree in English Literature from Heinrich-Heine-Universität and Musicology from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, as well as a PhD in Modern English Literature from Heinrich-Heine-Universität. His research focuses on the intersections between media and culture, particularly the impact of media combinations on the sphere of the popular. Gurke has worked and researched at universities and archives in Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the US, with teaching experience spanning English and German Literature as well as Cultural Studies. He has published extensively on phenomena of intermediality, convergence, and remix cultures in both modern and contemporary literature. Additionally, he is the co-editor of the book "Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations" and is the Special Issue Editor of "Emotions and Affect in Words and Music." His scholarly work explores themes such as intermediality, popular culture, music aesthetics, and modern literature, contributing to the understanding of media's influence on cultural and literary expressions.

Research topics

• Art
• Literature
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy
• History
• Physics
• Linguistics
• Mechanics
• Acoustics

Selected publications

• The Idea of Notational Ekphrasis in Words and Music

  Humanities · 2025-06-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter will focus on the presence of musical notation in literary texts, their aesthetic, (inter-)medial presence and potentialities, in paradigmatic Modern short stories such as Katherine Mansfield’s “The Wind Blows” (1915), Virginia Woolf’s “The String Quartet” (1921) and Vladimir Nabokov’s “Music” (1932). What these stories share is a perception of music as sonorous moving forms, symbolic imagery or seemingly ‘dancing’ musical notation on the page. In introducing the term notational ekphrasis, I wish to differentiate these phenomena as overt and covert for the larger theory of intermediality. In doing so, I will show how these narratives negotiate musical notation, writing and iconicity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Kafka and Cats? Feline Transitions of Franz Kafka’s Works

  Studia Litteraria · 2025-11-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Animals feature prominently in Kafka’s fiction, yet cats make just two significant appearances in his works, in two stories written between 1917 and 1920. In “A Little Fable” (1931/1971), a cat is presented as the master of a very small universe, while in the short story “A Crossbreed” (1931/1971), a cat becomes part of a hybrid mashup of sorts, a strange Cat- Lamb that emerges out of – and affirms – the Kafkaesque Oedipal triangle. However, contemporary connections between Kafka’s work and cats are manifold and continue to infiltrate the sphere of popular fiction, as seen in the Japanese novel Kafka on the Shore (2002) by Haruki Murakami, the Hungarian novel Kafka’s Cats by Gábor T. Szántó (2014) and a recent Philippian short story, “I am Kafka, a Cat” by Roy Vadíl Aragon (2021), all of which attest to a global, cross-cultural cat-attraction. What, then, is at stake in the seemingly ‘amusing’ idea of ‘modding’ Franz Kafka’s work with #catcontent? And why did Kafka only rarely write about cats? This article will highlight the transitional potentials of Kafka adaptations – their ‘metamorphing’ affordances, so to speak – by using a particularly fascinating example: Coleridge Cook’s mashup novel The Meowmorphosis (2011).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “that Rarefied Amalgam of Time” – Tracing the Temporal in Mike McCormack’s <i>Solar Bones</i>

  English Studies · 2023-03-16

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones entails various time-discourses which the following will trace: (I) The Temporal Trace as Form and Imprint by which the text itself leaves an iconic mark of the configuration of space into the novel’s narrative time. (II) The Temporal Trace as Content and Stream through which the text accounts for the fact that it is not bound to any human notion of time. And, finally, (III) The Temporal Trace as Experience which aims at elucidating the experiential time of the reading process. Utilising Paul Ricœur’s thoughts in Time and Narrative (Vol. 1–3, 1988), I will analyse and read these notions of time with and against Ricœur’s integration of phenomenological time, the interplay of trace as well as the various forms of mimesis introduced in his work. Solar Bones traces multiple temporalities that make it necessary to partially reconceptualise the visceral nature of experiencing time in literary texts.

  PublisherDOI

• Remix Aesthetics and the Musicalization of Sound in Matthew Herbert’s The Music (2018)1

  2022-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Music: A Novel Through Sound (2018) by the artist and composer Matthew Herbert contributes to an ongoing musico-literary tradition and within it presents a new and rare example: Herbert’s text uses the acoustic connection between noise, sound and music in order to challenge our preconceived notions of the latter. At the same time, The Music offers a renegotiation of modern and contemporary music aesthetics. Thus, this novel not only presents a challenge to the reader but also to the field of intermediality itself: how can Herbert’s work be categorised using the typology of intermediality? What affordances of form – musical and literary – are experimented with and explored in and through this novel?

  PublisherDOI

• Coherence and Counterpoint

  2022-04-08 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter will focus on the aesthetic and structural presence of music in paradigmatic Modern short stories such as James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Wind Blows’ (1920), Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’ (1921), Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Music’ (1932) and Langston Hughes’s ‘The Blues I’m Playing’ (1934). It is striking that this perspective has received little to no critical attention so far because the way that the short story engages with music differs from the way it engages with the novel by offering a more intense and complex object of analysis: music can be used to allusively outline character constellations and plot structures or place emphasis on the aspect of live performance in a changing media ecology during the beginning of the twentieth century. Moreover, it can make use of the short story’s occasionally contradictory formal features, such as the simultaneous presence of openendedness and a unity of impression.

  PublisherDOI

• Words, Music, and the Popular

  Palgrave studies in music and literature · 2021 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Literature
  PublisherDOI

• Words, Music, and the Popular

  Palgrave studies in music and literature · 2021-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• ‘Popularity Is a Game’

  2021-11-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Tom Cho’s Look Who’s Morphing (2009/2014) is an excellent example of a postmodern exhaustion of (meta-) references to the popular. The collection of short stories resembles fragmentation and a unified whole at the same time. Since Cho constantly reaffirms authenticity and his authorial self – by claiming that he inserted himself into the text – the question remains of how this re-contextualization of popular material impacts the claim of the popular as a supplier of particulate roles or identities in the first place. What processes and negotiations of identity-construction are taking place? What is at stake for popular culture and – indeed – literature? Which function does music fulfil in Cho’s ‘morphings’?

  PublisherDOI

• Sound Art? Trying to Make ‘Soundsense’ of the ‘Sensesound’ in Finnegans Wake

  BRILL eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Literature
  • Art

  This chapter wishes to chart the negotiations of ‘sound concepts’ as a ‘work in progress’ itself which James Joyce theorizes – I claim – from his early writings through Finnegans Wake. His texts often emphasize and even try to recapture ‘original’ sound-events in the face of a changing media-landscape and pre-recorded music: from the chilling rendition of the Lass of Aughrim in “The Dead”, along the “throbbing” and “buzzing” sound waves of the “Sirens” in Ulysses (U 11.315) and, finally, to the ‘ensounding’ frequencies of Finnegans Wake. A theory of sound thus emerges which oscillates between 19th-century ideas of ‘emotion’ and 20th-century concepts of ‘affect’.

  PublisherDOI

• Summer School "Political Masculinities in Europe: New Definitions, Methods and Approaches"

  2018-01-01

  article
  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Winnett

  Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

  4 shared

• Heribert Lafferton

  1 shared

• Kathleen Starck

  University of Koblenz and Landau

  1 shared

• Hard times

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, English and American Studies

  Heinrich-Heine-Universitat Düsseldorf

  2014

• M.A., English and American Studies

  Heinrich-Heine-Universitat Düsseldorf

  2006

• M.A., Musicology

  Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf

  2006

Awards & honors

• Award for Excellence in Academic Unit Service, University of…
• HeRA Research Fellowship: Archival Research in the William S…
• Best PhD-Dissertation of 2014: Faculty of Arts at Heinrich-H…
• UB-Special Collections Scholarship: State University of New…
• Scholarship at the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich, Switzer…