Funded with the generous support of Warwick's Humanities Research Centre.

This is an interdisciplinary workshop series dedicated to all areas of German cultural studies. Meeting two to three times during term in the Department of German Studies or online, the workshop hosts presentations on a Wednesday afternoon by senior national and international scholars, Warwick colleagues and doctoral students. Presentations can be delivered both as finished conference-style papers, or more informally as work-in-progress. Please contact the workshop convenor, c dot e dot achinger at warwick dot ac dot uk, if you wish to offer or attend a presentation!

Complete programme see further below - coming up next:

Symposium: Critical Theory in the Digital Age

Friday 8 March 2024, 1 pm – 5 pm, S2.77 (Cowling Room), Social Sciences Building, and on MS Teams (see emails sent out to SMLC)

Ever since its beginnings, Critical Theory has been concerned with the constitution of human subjectivity. Its proponents have understood this constitution as a process between individuals and society that changes historically. In this symposium, we will explore how social imperatives today form and deform human faculties – sensually and intellectually – and critically investigate the extent to which the work of early Frankfurt School theorists (Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and others) enables us to shed light on these contemporary processes.

 

1 – 1.50 pm	Alexandra Schauer (Institute for Social Research, Goethe University, Frankfurt): ‘Man without a World: On the Disappearance of the Idea of Social Agency’
2 – 2.50 pm	Lars Rensmann (University of Passau): ‘On the Politics of Unreason in the Digital Age: Reading Social Media and Reconfigurations of Authoritarianism with Adorno’
Break
3.10 – 4 pm	Sebastian Tränkle (Free University, Berlin): ‘Deformation or Perfection. On the Dialectic of Aesthetic Self-Formation’
4.10 – 5 pm	Antonia Hofstätter (University of Warwick): ‘Atrophied Images: Childhood as Critique in T.W. Adorno’

This event is co-organised by the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts and the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies.

Contact: Antonia Hofstätter (antonia.hofstatter@warwick.ac.uk) or Christine Achinger (c.e.achinger@warwick.ac.uk)

 

 All welcome!

WWIGS 2023-24

Please note: Days and times vary, please see below

Term 1

 

Wednesday 25 October, 4-5:30pm, FAB2.32

Justin Cammy (Smith College, MA): ‘From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg’

In cooperation with the Centre for Global Jewish Studies

 

A discussion of the ghetto memoir (1946) and testimony of Abraham Sutzkever, one of the great Yiddish poets to emerge from the Holocaust, translated into English by Justin Cammy. Why was the memoir ignored by critics and even by the author himself for so long? And why should we look anew at early post-liberation efforts to document events that established a foundation for both justice and collective memory?

 

Wednesday, 22 November, 5:00-7:00pmpm, Ramphal R1.15

Laura Demir (Duke / NYU in Berlin): ‘Where we come from. A literary perspective on post-migrant German(y)’

Hybrid - join us on Teams here

My talk will focus on three different aspects:

First, I will discuss the concepts of “Herkunft” and “Zugehörigkeit” and the importance of literature and storytelling as they are depicted in contemporary German-speaking novels written by authors with a background of forced migration (e.g. Saša Stanišić) and or a transnational background (e.g. Fatma Aydemir). How does the authors’ “Herkunft” influence their writing? How do they speak about “Herkunft” and “Zugehörigkeit”? What narratives do they engage, scrutinize and play with? Which literary devices and poetic strategies do they engage? What metaphors do authors who had to learn German as a second or foreign language use to describe the language they now have perfect command of? Reading authors who grew up with at least two languages immediately raises the question of whether and how this shapes their poetic language. Another intriguing topic are the insights readers might gain through a transnational perspective on and experience with Germany and German.

Second, I would like to scrutinize our stance as readers and scholars: Are we, by asking this kind of questions, othering “this” literature? I am afraid so. We will therefore take a closer look at different labels and terms for “this” literature that have been discussed for a long time and which still have not led to a satisfying solution as to what name would be appropriate and fitting.

Third, I would like to ponder the question of why and how the above-mentioned questions are relevant and of special interest within the context of German Studies in an international context.

Tuesday 05 December, 5:30-7pm, R0.14

Helmut Schmitz: ‘How To Have One's Cake And Eat It: Navid Kermani's Große Liebe, Sufi Mysticism, And Paradoxical Cultural Identities’

 In cooperation with the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts

Navid Kermani’s novel Große Liebe (2014, Love Writ Large) charts the development of a young teenager’s infatuation with an A-level student in the early 1980s in Germany. The love story is refracted through the adult narrator’s reflections and through readings from Sufi mysticism and Nizami’s 12^th ct. epic poem Lailï and Majnûn. This creates a narrative framework in which (Iranian and Muslim) cultural sources and (West German) cultural memory subtly comment on one another, allowing Kermani to ironically undermine both contemporary masculinity and his narrator’s former self as lover while simultaneously reflecting on the cultural and religious traditions of his own background and their relations to a Western tradition of love. The paper examines Kermani’s ironic narrative construction in the context of his construction of a paradoxical cultural identity.

Term 2

Tuesday 30 January, 5:30-7pm, Ramphal R3.41

Caroline Summers (Warwick SMLC)

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

 

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an ‘afterlife’ to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author’s work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which ‘a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. […] In [translation], the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development’. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

 

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a ‘literary invigoration’ of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience and asks what Benjamin’s reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

Friday 08 March, 1pm – 5pm, Social Sciences S2.77

Symposium: Critical Theory in the Digital Age

Ever since its beginnings, Critical Theory has been concerned with the constitution of human subjectivity. Its proponents have understood this constitution as a process between individuals and society that changes historically. In this workshop, we will explore how social imperatives today form and deform human faculties – sensually and intellectually – and critically investigate the extent to which the work of early Frankfurt School theorists (Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and others) enables us to shed light on these contemporary processes.

1 – 1.50 pm	Alexandra Schauer (Institute for Social Research, Goethe University Frankfurt): ‘Man without a World: On the Disappearance of the Idea of Social Agency’
2 – 2.50 pm	Lars Rensmann (University of Passau): ‘On the Politics of Unreason in the Digital Age: Reading Social Media and Reconfigurations of Authoritarianism with Adorno’
Break
3.10 – 4 pm	Sebastian Tränkle (Free University Berlin): ‘Deformation or Perfection. On the Dialectic of Aesthetic Self-Formation’
4.10 – 5 pm	Antonia Hofstätter (University of Warwick): ‘Atrophied Images: Childhood as Critique in T.W. Adorno’

Please join us in person or on MS Teams (use this link).