Research Colloquium
Research Colloquium 2011/12:
CALL FOR PAPERS
Dear All,
I would like to invite papers for the Germanic Studies Research Colloquium for the coming year. If you wish to propose a paper related to any field of Germanic Studies, please send me a 150 word abstract. Final papers should last approximately 45mins. Postgraduate students are warmly invited and encouraged to use this as an opportunity to showcase and refine their research.
This academic year in addition to papers relating directly to participants’ current research, an interdisciplinary theme of 'The Wrong(ed) Body' is proposed. Papers related to this theme are particularly welcomed, including ones which might be more experimental or constitute a new direction of research for the proposer. The topic is deliberately broad and not at all contextualised so as to permit a range of creative approaches encompassing diverse eras and aspects of German Studies. The aim is to explore this theme collaboratively throughout the academic year. Some possible research questions and topics are provided below:
The Wrong(ed) Body
- What does it mean to speak of wrong(ed) bodies and right(ed) bodies?
- What can German literature tell us about righting and wronging the body?
- What kinds of healing do literary texts represent or enact?
- What does the relationship between body and text look like?
- To what extent are biological and organic rhythms represented in particular texts?
- How might literature be inscribed upon the body?
- How is the body wronged and righted by literature itself?
Topics might include (in no particular order!): Institutionalisation, torture, violence, illness, overwork, gendering, modern medical advances, alternative healing, cyborgs.
If you wish to propose a paper for this semester, please send me your abstract by the end of October.
Kind regards,
Helen O'Sullivan hosulliv@tcd.ie
Professor Jürgen Barkhoff, Trinity College Dublin,
Arts Building, Rm 5086, May 16th, 7.30pm
“Der Ironiker in der Südsee. Georg Forsters Reise um die Welt als literarische Anthropologie”
Georg Forster nahm als knapp 20jähriger an Capitain Cooks zweiter Weltumsegelung 1772 und 1775 teil und verfasste danach einen 1000seitigen Reisebericht, in dem er vor allem den Kulturkontakt mit den Bewohnern der Südsee eindrucksvoll und vielschichtig schilderte. Sein Werk gilt heute vor allem aufgrund seiner behutsamen und hochreflektierten Annäherung an das ‘wilde’ Andere der europäischen Zivilisation als anthropologischer Klassiker und als einer der Gründungstexte der modernen Ethnologie. Dabei sind es genuin literarische Verfahren, mit denen Forster die Alterität der exotischen Wilden markiert, die Projektionsmechanismen des europäischen Blicks thematisiert und seine zivilisationskritischen Textfiguren inszeniert. Seine ‚Poetik des Wilden‘, die sich ihrem Gegenüber mit Respekt nähert, sich aber auch des latenten Gewaltmomentes dieser Begegnung und ihrer textuellen Repräsentation bewusst ist und poetologische Verfahren nutzt, um sie auf dieses hin transparent zu machen, soll Gegenstand des Vortrags sein.
Thomas Meinecke (German author, musician, DJ)
Wednesday, 4th April 2012, 6pm in Trinity's Neill/Hoey Lecture theatre in the Long Room Hub
Reading in German and English from his newly published translation of Tomboy .
Prof. Clemens Ruthner (Trinity College Dublin)
Monday, 12th March 2012, 7.30pm in room 5086,
Da ich mich der literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Imagologie schon einmal via Homi Bhabha und sein Stereotypen-Konzept gewidmet habe, möchte ich mich diesmal quasi in einer Parallelaktion von Alteritätskonzepten her der Figur des Fremden phänomenologisch nähern. Aus Zeitgründen ist mir freilich eine intensive Auseinandersetzung mit der inzwischen umfangreichen xenologischen Theorie verwehrt: zu nennen seien nur kurz die Namen von Julia Kristeva, Bernhard Waldenfels und Rudolf Stichweh, die mich gleichsam in die Fremde begleitet haben.
Ich muss mich also theoretisch auf einige Kernthesen beschränken, die auf die Problematik einer literarischen Repräsentation des Fremden hinführen sollen. In einem zweiten Schritt werde ich zu Beispielen aus einer mir vertrauten literarischen Formation greifen, nämlich österreichischen Texten über das 1878 okkupierte Bosnien-Herzegowina. Dies ist eine Auskoppelung aus meinem aktuellen Buchprojekt, das analysieren soll, wie die österreichische Kultur im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert – und parallel zu ihr die reichsdeutsche – die bosnische Fremde und die dort lebenden Fremden konstruierte bzw. formatierte, und so der kolonialen Zurichtung des Landes durch die Habsburger Monarchie – ihrer sog. zivilisatorischen Mission - Vorschub leistete, zuarbeitete oder ihr in wenigen Fällen auch opponierte. Erste Textbausteine zu diesem Buch sind bereits erschienen und z.B. auf der Internetplattform Kakanien revisited (www.kakanien.ac.at <http://www.kakanien.ac.at/> ) allgemein zugänglich.
Professor Stefan Neuhaus, Universität Innsbruck
Monday 23rd January, 7.00pm, Arts Building, Room 5086
Paarbildungen. Figurationen der Liebe in Gegenwartsliteratur und -film
Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Durham University
6th December, 7.30pm in room 5086
From Vita to Corpus: Missing Bodies in Biography
Dr Cilliers van den Berg of the University of the Free State, South Africa
22nd November, 7.30pm in room 5086
Literary Discourse and Collective Trauma Narratives
This lecture proposes to give some introductory notes to a new research project at the University of the Free State. Collective trauma, or, the "empire of trauma" has become a major topic in the humanities. Within this context there seem to be interesting structural correlations in the way in which Germany (with regards to the Holocaust) and some sections of South African society (with regards to Apartheid) deal with a "traumatic" past. Within a strict trauma construct Afrikaners are often seen as perpetrators, much like the Germans after WWII. The question is how Afrikaans literature has responded to this issue and to what extent literary discourse has any real effect on the construction of collective trauma narratives. Using such a comparative approach, much can be said about the dynamics of these narratives.
Professor Desmond O'Neill (National Centre for Arts and Health at Tallaght Hospital and TCD)
Tuesday, 1st November, 6.30pm (Room 5086)
"Procrustes' Axe or Occam's Razor? Ageing, Illness and Creativity through a "Germanistik" Lens"
Narrative medicine is an evolving area of healthcare whose aim is to improve our understanding of the patient's journey through illness and health, and the multiple dialogues occurring in a physician-patient consultation, including dialogues with self, peers and society.
Great art can assist in conveying the complexity of such interactions through the force and subtlety of its metaphors, although new ways of interdisciplinary working are required to pursue these with academic rigour. Using some examples from Austro-Germanic culture, this talk will explore the opportunities and challenges of this new field, drawing on Goethe, Nolde, Grass, Lenz, Suter, Corinth, Klee, Bach, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Schubert (with passing reference to Kant, Habermas and Gadamer, and straying as far as at least one Volga German!). Some consideration of the possibilities afforded can be gleaned from the following blogs in the British Medical Journal: Death and transfiguration, First night of the Proms, So, when do you become old?, A bloomsday brush with brilliance
Prof Desmond O’Neill is a geriatrician and stroke physician at Trinity College Dublin. His research centres on gerontology and the neurosciences, with a strong emphasis on the humanities. He is the Director of the Centre for Ageing, Neurosciences and the Humanities www.ageandknowledge.ie, and has worked with a number of cultural agencies and institutions to develop the concepts of arts, ageing and health, including the National Gallery of Ireland, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Irish Film Institute and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dublin. He helped develop the first course for artists in health care in Ireland, has broadcast on Lyric FM (Ireland’s classical music station), and is an active contributor to the BMJ’s Medical Classics Section.
He is also currently President of the European Union Geriatric Medicine Society.
Dr Andrew Cusack (TCD)
Tuesday 31st May at 7.30pm in room 5086, Arts Building
"Karl Gutzkow and Karl von Holtei: An Unlikely Friendship in a Theatrical Age"
Paper given in commemoration of the bicentenary of Gutzkow's birth in March 1811.
The theatre occupies a distinct position in the German literary field in the period 1815-1848, as a field of experimentation where such new genres as the Liederspiel are being tried out, and as a sort of surrogate public sphere where literature is enacted before an audience rather than being consumed in solitude. At this time the theatre is struggling to expand its audience, to become a Volkstheater, a development that the forces of Restoration are largely successful in containing by censorship and other curbs on authors. In this paper I view the complex field of pre-1848 German theatre history with its bewildering array of figures through the prism of an unlikely friendship between two very different men: Karl Gutzkow (1811-1878) and Karl von Holtei (1798-1880). I examine the vagaries of the relationship between these two dramaturges in an attempt to answer the question: how useful is the critical term “theatricality” as developed by Erika Fischer-Lichte and others as a key to the 1815-1848 era?
Drs. Emmeline Besamusca (Universiteit Utrecht / Universität Wien)
Monday, 4th April, 7.30pm, Room 4053, Arts Building
"Dutch tolerance? Debating women’s voting rights in the 21st century"
Dutch tolerance may sometimes show an unexpected face. Although suffrage was extended to all women in 1919, one of the political parties in Dutch parliament continued to politically exclude women by denying them full party membership and presenting only male candidates for election. Obviously, the party’s views have been challenged repeatedly and several discrimination cases have been presented in court. But only in 2005 a court decision ruled against the party, for the first time. Why not before? And why now? Has Dutch tolerance reached its limits, as has been suggested after the political murders on Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van Gogh (2004), and the current rise of Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party? I will discuss the case of the women’s paragraph of this political party in the context of the current political climate in the Netherlands.
Emmeline Besamusca & Jaap Verheul (eds.), Discovering the Dutch. On Culture and Society of the Netherlands. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.
Dr Nicola Creighton
Monday, 21st March, 7.30pm, Rm 5086, Arts Building
"Contingency: the great challenge of Weimar"
As Foucault observes, two discourses from the same era are more similar to one another than the same discourse in two different eras. This is because of the particular knowledge paradigm, or assumptions about the possibilities of knowledge, operating in a given era. With this observation in mind and with a focus on the discourse of art history and political theory in the Weimar Republic, I would like to present an approach to Weimar that would surpass its reductive treatment as an age of ‘glitter and doom’ or ‘utopia and despair’.
Weimar was an age of exceptional spirit of experiment: in aesthetic, ethical, political and practical ideas and in practice/action. Experiment requires openness to contingency, which is ultimately an aesthetic stance, but equally judgment, which is a political/ethical matter, on the issue of what is open for experimentation. Departing from a number of studies on modernism and on modernist and avant-garde aesthetics including Michael Makropoulos’s Modernität und Kontingenz (Munich 1997) and Inge Baxmann’s Mythos: Gemeinschaft. Körper- und Tanzkulturen in der Moderne (Munich 2000), I wish to propose, in place of the relatively neat dichotomies of older histories, a spectrum based on degrees of openness or closure to contingency. This theoretical approach can be applied to political as well as cultural material (I take aspects of Carl Schmitt’s political theory and of Carl Einstein’s art historiography as my examples). This approach allows a nuanced analysis of the discourses of the Weimar Republic and can deal reflexively with Left-Right schemas apparent in less recent scholarship.