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Warwick German Studies Workshop - past workshops

Workshop Programme 2022-23

All talks at 5pm unless otherwise indicated.

Term 1

20 October 2022

Clara Verri (Gießen/Helsinki): Satisfaction and consumption in Houellebecq’s Submission: an imposing mode of narration

FAB 3.25

02 November 2022

Yuliia Lysanets (Poltava State Medical University): Metaphors and Metonymies in Medical Discourse as a Challenge for Cross-Cultural Communication

In cooperation with TTS

FAB 2.32

23 November 2022

Nora Michaelis (Warwick): A linguist’s fascination, an interpreter’s pain, a language teacher’s headache: English as a Lingua Franca and the concept’s implications for Foreign Language Teaching

FAB 3.30

07 December 2022

Research Roundtable with colleagues from the German Department

FAB 4.73

Term 2

25 January 2023

Nicholas Lawrence (Warwick): 'Everything Changes': Brecht, Benjamin, Adorno

FAB 3.30

8 February 2023

Marlene Gallner (University of Vienna): The Leftist Self-Betrayal: Jean Améry's essays on Antisemitism, Anti-Zionism, and the Left

FAB 3.31

23 February 2023

Christine Kirchhoff (International Psychoanalytic University, Berlin): The 'Non-Identical and the 'Leftover'. Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and Ideology

H2.44

25 February 2023

Symposium on ‘Adorno’s Sexual Taboos and Law Today” – Sixty Years On’

10 am – 6 pm S0.20 and on Zoom

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/news/conference/adorno/

In cooperation with the Department of Philosophy

15 March 2023

Katie Stone (Warwick): “Slaves and Objects of Amusement: West German Women under the Yoke of the American Colonizers”: Sexual Violence, Moral Outrage, and Propaganda in Cold War East Germany.

Postponed due to industrial action

FAB 3.30

Term 3

3 May 2022

Lydia Goehr (Columbia University): On working-through—durcharbeiten—with musical notes: Adorno, Fanon, Freud

In cooperation with the CRPLA

Abstract:

My talk discusses the many uses of the term “durch” in the thought of Adorno, Fanon, and Freud. But it focuses on two sentences of almost compulsive repetition. In the first, Adorno exposes the dissonance in the way of teaching music in a verwalteten (topsy-turvy) world: “Only through the [form of the] process, through the experience of the works, and not through self-sufficient, blind music-making, […] can music education fulfill its function. [….] [O]nly through specialization, not through its denial, does music save the part in the human that seems to have been dismembered by specialization.” There is one notion of work that belongs to music’s production and another to a broader scheme of social formation and labor. In introducing his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon noted the “juxtaposition of the white and black races” that had “created a massive psychoexistential complex,” after which he wrote that by “analyzing it,” he hoped to “destroy it.” Performed as a deconstruction, the analysis left the question strategically hanging as to what happens after the work has been done. What is involved in this work by way of a working through? When does analysis become only an analytic breakdown?

S0.18

17 May 2022

Yara Staets (Warwick): Presentation of PhD project on ‘Coming to Terms with the Present: Non-Realist Representations of War in early post-1945 German Literature’

 

Workshop Programme 2018-19


Term 1:

Wednesday 31 October 2018, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44

Elisabeth Herrmann (Warwick): When Anti-World Literature Turns into World Literature: Franz Kafka’s Archives of Resistance

This paper investigates how Kafka developed a very distinct form of ‘anti-world literature’ through the fictional creation of different world systems. In most of his short stories as well as in the three novel fragments America. The Missing Person, The Trial, and The Castle the protagonists are exposed to abstract forms of social domination and a feeling of universal guilt, non-belonging and isolation. In many aspects, the social systems the protagonists encounter feature the alienating experience of living in a depersonalized modern (capitalist) world. In opposition to the established notion that Kafka’s protagonists suffer from the inability to act independently, not succeeding in pursuing their individual goals, this paper argues that there lies a subliminal, but very powerful social and political revolutionary potential in Kafka’s text. It is the unremitting search for a message that is yet to be conveyed and the refusal to integrate into a world in which the rules are not transparent, that create a symbolic repository and counter-archive to a world system in which indifference, impersonality and passivity are identified as the foundation of our ‘relationship to the world’ (Rosa 2016). There is no vision, no utopian world view, but a hidden message in Kafka’s texts, conveyed through an ever-resistant melancholy with which the individual fights the impersonal system he is exposed to without knowing its rules. The analysis of a sample of texts will show that Kafka’s literary examples of individual resistance have been able to circulate globally because they translate universally – that is across political systems.

Wednesday 14 November, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44

Ina Linge (Exeter): The Potency of the Butterfly: Sexual Nature in German Sexology and Performance Art after 1900

This talk explores how ideas about ‘sexual nature’ were co-constructed by German sexological discourses and artistic productions after 1900. Drawing on literature and science studies and queer and feminist theoretical approaches to nature and non-human animals, the talk investigates the work of the German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and his interest in butterflies, both as model organisms for scientific study and as artistic representations in the form of the Butterfly Dance, pioneered by the American dancer Loïe Fuller (1862 – 1928) and adapted by the Welsh aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget (1875 – 1905), the 5th Marquis of Anglesey. Following Fuller’s and Paget’s performances of the Butterfly Dance, this talk investigates how both performances explore concepts of sexual nature through the figure of the butterfly (or moth). I argue that both performances express a version of sexual nature that does not offer a pastoral vision of naturalised sexuality, but instead show an alternative vision of sexual nature, one that is transgressive, disturbing and perverse. Finally, I argue that this competing vision of sexual nature influences Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexological work, which turns towards butterfly experiment to understand natural sexual variation.

Wednesday 21 November, 3-5pm, Humanities Building H0.51 (Please note different time and venue!)

Writer in residence Olga Grjasnowa reads from her novel Gott ist nicht schüchternLink opens in a new window

Wednesday 28 November, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44

Chantal Wright (Warwick): Revisiting the re-translation hypothesis: Antoine Berman reading Walter Benjamin

The re-translation hypothesis – the idea that there is teleological improvement from one translation of a source text to the next – has been largely discredited since it was first put forward by Antoine Berman and Paul Bensimon in 1990. But Berman’s own translational practice and reflection in L’Âge de la Traduction, his 180-page commentary on Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, may allow the hypothesis to be recast. Berman’s commentary reflects upon Benjamin’s German text and on Maurice de Gandillac’s French translation thereof. Berman thinks and re-translates Benjamin, to a significant degree, through Gandillac. He acknowledges longstanding criticisms of Gandillac’s translation (then the only existing translation) but argues that French readers should nonetheless acknowledge the ‘gift’ that Gandillac made them in the sixties when he introduced Benjamin’s texts into France. The many revisions to Gandillac’s translation that were made both by the translator himself and by subsequent editors point to the complexity of Benjamin’s text and the humility of the translator in the face of this complexity. It is against this background that Berman’s introduction of the concept of the translational défaillance should be understood, his rendering of the term Versagung, borrowed from Freud, a term that I will render as “default”. Defaults are not errors or failings but point to nodes of textual resistance; they are an inevitable part of the translation process. I will show, via my own English translation of L’Âge de la Traduction, how the concept of the “default”, coupled with Berman’s reflections on textual time and kairos, may help us re-think the re-translation hypothesis, situating re-translation as a dialogic, collaborative process of mothering – in the sense of birthing – a text.

Chantal Wright is Associate Professor of Translation as a Literary Practice in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Warwick. Her English translation of Antoine Berman’s The Age of Translation was published by Routledge in July.

Wednesday 5 December 2018, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Susanne Luhmann (Alberta): Representing Familial Legacies of Nazi Perpetration: Postmemory and/or a ‘Move to Innocence’?

Term 2:

Wednesday 16 January 2019, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Elizabeth Boa (Nottingham): Feminism, Ecocriticism, Identity Politics: Texts, Theories, and Historical Contexts

Tuesday 29 January, 5-7pm, Ramphal Building R3.41 - Please note different date and venue!
Holger Schulze (Copenhagen): What are Sound Studies? A Journey into Historical, Anthropological and Political Aspects of Listening and Sounding

Wednesday 20 February, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Thomas Martinec (Regensburg): ‘Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu’. Poetischer Sinn als musikalisches Verfahren in Lautgedichten der Avantgarde

Term 3:

Wednesday 1 May, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Kate Rigby (Bath Spa): Rereading Herder in the Horizon of the Environmental Humanities

Previous years

Workshop 2018-19Link opens in a new window

Workshop 2017-18Link opens in a new window

Workshop 2016-17Link opens in a new window

Workshop 2014-15

Workshop 2013-14

Workshop 2012-13

Workshop 2011-12

Workshop 2010-11

Workshop 2007-10

Workshop recordings