2015 Colloquium Participants
Thomas O. Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Pennsylvania State University, where he has been a faculty member since 1986. From 2001 he has been the editor-in-chief of Comparative Literature Studies. His most recent books include: Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (Continuum 2011); and Transmesis: Inside Translation’s Black Box (Palgrave, 2012). His most recent book project involves German-Brazilian literary and cultural relations. Email: tob@psu.edu
“German National vs. World Literary History: Uses and Abuses”: What motivated Friedrich Nietzsche to write the first recorded critique of world literature into chapter 18 of his Geburt der Tragödie, thus: “umsonst dass man die ganze 'Weltlitteratur' zum Troste des modernen Menschen um ihn versammelt und ihn mitten unter die Kunststile und Künstler aller Zeiten hinstellt, damit er ihnen, wie Adam den Thieren, einen Namen gebe: er bleibt doch der ewig Hungernde, der 'Kritiker' ohne Lust und Kraft”? From whence did Nietzsche inherit this concept of “Weltlitteratur,” and what caused it to be of importance to him as he was composing his Birth of Tragedy? By the “Versammlung der ganzen Weltlitteratur,” did Nietzsche have in mind the philosophical attempts at a universal history of art, such as in Hegel's lectures on the philosophy of art or in Moritz Carrière’s Die Kunst im Zusammenhang der Culturentwickelung und die Ideale der Menschheit, composed in five volumes between 1863 and 1888? Finally, to what extent is the consolation missing from world literature to be supplied from German literature? The true consolation in Nietzsche’s mind would not have been a national German literary history, but a national mythology as found in the operas of Richard Wagner. Nevertheless, his critique of world literature reminds us of the peculiar leapfrogging that was taking place between German national and world literary histories. Strangely, as though in ironic defiance of the notion of development and the radiation outwards of epichoric literature into international contexts, German thought did not turn to the idea of a national literature before moving outward towards universal or world literature. Johann Gottfried Herder laid the theoretical foundations for world literature in the late 18th-century (German constituting merely one example of Volkspoesie), which Goethe then famously developed in scattered remarks during the 1820s. Johannes Scherr published the first edition of his Bildersaal der Weltliteratur in the revolutionary anno 1848, only a few years after the first recognized comprehensive history of German literature by Georg Gottfried Gervinus. Scherr’s collection would be joined by other anthologies edited by Adolf Schwarz, Hermann Hettner, and Adolf Stern. This paper will examine the relative uses and abuses of German national vs. world literary history in the German 19th century.
Mary Boldt received her B.A. from Wilson College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Brown University. For twelve years she taught in the Modern and Classical Languages Department at Hartwick College, where she co-authored the book Learning Interdependence: A Case Study of the International/Intercultural Education of First-Year College Students. She currently is Associate Professor of German at York College of Pennsylvania, teaching courses in German language, literature, and culture. Her most recent publication was the jointly authored “Text Translation: Approaching Otherness” in Language in the Real World. She has delivered talks in the United States and Austria on special-needs learners in the second-language classroom and is also engaged in research on translation of Brecht as well as of screen translation. Additionally, she maintains an ongoing interest in Foreign Language across the Curriculum. Email: mboldt@ycp.edu
“The Shape of Literature in Undergraduate German Curricula”: During one conversation at the 2014 Binghamton University German Studies Curriculum, the following question arose: “What does ‘German Studies’ mean as a program of study?” In the context of this year’s colloquium, we can focus the question more narrowly as, “What overarching vision of literature is initially conveyed to our students by the mere organization of literature course offerings within a German Studies program?” This presentation touches upon the work of professors in designing literary course offerings, and stresses empirical data gathered from an examination of the German curricula of all Pennsylvania colleges and universities offering German Studies courses. A matrix will be provided of literature course titles within undergraduate German Studies programs, with groupings according to theme and language of instruction. Special attention will be paid to the ratio of chronologically organized German literature courses compared with literature courses organized according to other criteria.
Alexis Briley is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Colgate University. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Cornell with a dissertation entitled Hölderlin and the Measure of Enthusiasm. Email: abriley@colgate.edu
“Walking/Reading/Coincidence: Kleist, Walser, Sebald”: Reflecting on his lifelong experience reading Robert Walser, W.G. Sebald observes that his image of the author has been shaped by a series of coincidences: contingent encounters, resemblances, echoes of other times, places and people. “What is the significance of these similarities, overlaps and coincidences?” he writes, “Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and of the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order underlying the chaos of human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead, which lies beyond our comprehension?” Is it possible, in other words, that such experiences, instead of being merely contingent, are an ineluctable part of the process of reading? Taking Sebald’s remarks as a point of departure, this paper examines the close connection among three authors bound together as “readers”: Kleist, Walser, and Sebald.
Carl Gelderloos received his Ph.D. in German Studies at Cornell University in 2014, and joined the department of German and Russian Studies at Binghamton University in that year. In 2011-2012 he conducted dissertation research in Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship. He is currently reworking his dissertation – which explored cultural narratives of technology in literature, photographic discourse, and Philosophical Anthropology of the Weimar Republic – into a book-length manuscript. At the heart of this project is the sometimes surprising presence of the organic, the biological, and the natural in narratives, discourses, and depictions of technology during the period. Recent and forthcoming publications focus on Alfred Döblin, New Vision photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, and the science fiction literature of East Germany. Somewhat perversely, he actually likes this upstate NY weather. Email: cgelderl@binghamton.edu
“Massenwesen and Gespensterheere: Characters as Collectives in Döblin's Wallenstein”: In foregrounding the world-historical figures of Albrecht von Wallenstein and the Emperor Ferdinand, Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein (1920) is a far cry from the broadly representative function of middling anti-heroes theorized by Georg Lukács in his foundational work on the historical novel. Yet paradoxically, it is precisely through the depiction of these historical titans that Wallenstein subverts the centrality of individual characters and portrays history as mass history. By depicting key characters as the bodily concretization of mass movements, Döblin dissolves individual figures into their broader social, historical, and linguistic contexts and thereby arrives at a representative typicality very different from the one Lukács identified in Walter Scott’s work. Drawing on close readings of scenes of characterization and the detailed depictions of individual bodies throughout the text, I will show how the genre of the historical novel allowed Döblin to rework the literary category of character and thereby intervene in a contemporary discourse about the relationship between history and narrative, novel and epic.
Moritz Hiller studied Germanistik, Media Studies, Philosophy and Visual Communication in Hamburg and Berlin. He is a doctoral student in Media Theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin where he is pursuing a dissertation project entitled Diskurs und Signal. Philologie nach den technischen Medien. In 2013 he began work as a co-editor of the edition of the collected works of Friedrich Kittler, a project for which he received a grant from the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. He is also the recipient of a two-year Elsa Neumann Scholarship from the Humboldt University. He is a member of the research network “Positionen der Medienphilologie” at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Email: moritz.hiller@gmail.com
“Signs O’ the Times. Lektüre, Leserschaft und Geschichtlichkeit digitaler Quellcodes”: Dass das Narrativ einer kontinuierlichen Literaturgeschichte in der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ihr Fundament verliert, mag nicht zuletzt damit zusammenhängen, dass sich in jener Zeit die Grenzen dessen verschieben, was unter dem Begriff der Literatur zu fassen ist. Eva Horn hat jüngst noch einmal dafür plädiert, dass spätestens nach Kittlers Aufschreibesystemen 1800/1900 – einem Text, der als paradigmatisch für diese Veränderung angesehen werden kann – "alles, was aufschreibbar ist," zum Gegenstand der Literaturwissenschaft zu geraten habe. Wo Kittlers Text in dieser Hinsicht als paradigmatisch lesbar wird, gilt das auch für dessen eigenes Aufschreibesystem selbst: Denn dieses umfasst nicht nur diskursive Texte in Alphabetschrift auf Papier, sondern auch hunderttausende Zeilen digitaler Quellcodes von Computerprogrammen, die Kittler seit spätestens 1985 verfasste. Wenn dieses mediale Phänomen heute nicht nur den Großteil dessen, was Kultur genannt wird, buchstäblich vor-schreibt, sondern seine Lektüre auch für eine fundierte Kittler-Rezeption – im Sinne seiner eigenen Diskursanalyse von Aufschreibesystemen – unerlässlich wird, dann erfordert das eine informierte (und das heißt auch: informatische) Code-Philologie. Im Zusammenhang mit den literaturwissenschaftlichen Fragen von Leserschaft, Lektüre und der Möglichkeit von Literaturgeschichte sind einer solchen Philologie digitaler Quellcodes indes neue Herausforderungen eingeschrieben. Der Vortrag möchte sich diesen Überlegungen zur Lektüre, Leserschaft und zum Begriff der Geschichtlichkeit/Zeitlichkeit von digitalen Quellcodes – als Bedingung einer Philologie nach den technischen Medien im Sinne von Kittlers Aufschreibesystemen – widmen.
Hauke Kuhlmann is a research assistant working with Professor Thomas Althaus at the University of Bremen. His dissertation, Goethes Romanprosa und das Problem narrativer Kohärenz, was funded by a Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes scholarship. He has taught since 2010 at the University of Bremen, where he participates in a research project on the drama of the Gottsched period. In 2008 he worked as a tutor at the State University of Belgorod in Russia, where he organized a workshop on the literary and cultural relationship between Russia and Germany in Modernity. Email: ha_ku@uni-bremen.de
“In Bildern leben. Theodor Storms Immensee im Kontext zeitgenössischer ‚Bildprosa'”: Theodor Storms frühe Novellen zeichnen sich durch eine Konzentration aus, die im oetologiediskurs des 19. Jahrhunderts eher der Lyrik zukommt als einer Erzählprosa, die sich, dem bekannten Diktum Hegels folgend, der ‚Prosa der Verhältnisse‘ eher durch Weitläufigkeit und epische Extension anpassen dürfte. Bei dem frühen Storm intensiviert sich die mit dem Novellengenre, wie es seit der Zeit um 1800 in der deutschen Literaturgeschichte konzipiert wird, verbundene Konzentration auf den einen Handlungsaspekt zu kleinen Handlungs-und Sinneinheiten, die eine großflächige Narration nicht zustande kommen lassen. Storms retrospektiven Bemerkungen, seine „Novellistik“ habe sich „aus der Lyrik entwickelt und lieferte zuerst nur einzelne ›Stimmungsbilder‹“ (an Eduard Alberte, 12. März 1882), ihr sei „etwas Sprunghaftes oder auch Guckkastenbilder“ zugekommen (an Erich Schmidt, 1. März 1882), entsprechen dieser Schreibstrategie. Die Begriffe „Stimmungsbilder“ und „Guckkastenbilder“ liefern dabei auch eine Verbindung zum Oberthema „Bildprosa. Lektüren bildgebender Perspektivik in der Prosa des 19. Jahrhunderts“. Dieser Spur folgend will der Vortrag die Schreibweise in Storms früher Novelle Immensee (1850), einem der erfolgreichsten Texte des literarischen Realismus, vor dem Hintergrund der ‚Bildprosa‘ neu perspektivieren.
Ari Linden received his Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University in 2013 and is currently Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas. He has published articles on Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, and Else Lasker-Schüler, and is currently working on a monograph about satire, apocalyptic thought, and the state, looking primarily at Søren Kierkegaard, Theodor Haecker, Elias Canetti, and Kraus. His research and teaching interests include early twentieth-century German and Austrian culture, and German-Jewish modernity broadly conceived. Email: ari.linden@ku.edu
“Faustnaturen in Karl Kraus and Else Lasker-Schüler”: The literary appropriation and re-contextualizing of the Faust legend — primarily Goethe’s variant — in the first half of the twentieth century is a discourse unto itself, with Thomas and Klaus Mann being arguably its most conspicuous practitioners. Parodied, questioned, or updated, Faust became a site of contention concerning questions of literary and cultural inheritance, national character, and German identity. This presentation will focus on two less frequently invoked texts that belong, in ambiguous and complicated ways, to this intertextual tradition: Karl Kraus’s Dritte Walpurgisnacht (written in 1933 but published in 1952), and Else Lasker-Schüler’s IchundIch (1940-41). Alluding in its title to the Klassische Walpurgnisnacht of Faust. Der Tragödie Zweiter Teil, Kraus’s longest essay and most sustained reading of National Socialism integrates a montage of excerpts from Goethe’s drama, the majority of which are taken from the aforementioned scene. Yet the correlation between the figures and dialogues from Faust II and the political context into which they are being inserted is anything but clear. What is certain is that the discourse on the relationship among nature, violence, and morality that features prominently in Goethe’s drama is taken up once again in Kraus’s text, as he struggles to articulate a coherent vision of the contemporary political landscape. Lasker-Schüler’s last drama, by contrast, brings Hitler and his cronies into a quasi-biblical setting, but here they serve as interlopers in an ongoing dialogue between a hardly recognizable Faust and Mephisto. The Nazis perish; the latter two are redeemed. Distinct in tone, intention, and style, these two readings of Faust and National Socialism nonetheless evince a shared resistance to seamlessly mapping the terrain of classical literature onto that of contemporary politics. Indeed, key moments of each text reveal that the more they read into—and even rewrite—Faust, the more complex does their reading of the historical moment become. Whether addressed to posterity or composed from the perspective of exile, Kraus’s and Lasker-Schüler’s selective curation of the German literary canon presents us with novel conceptions of the relationship between (inter)text and context.
Julia Ludewig is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and an adjunct instructor in the Department of German and Russian Studies. Her research interests include literature and linguistics, especially questions of genre. Lately, she has been fascinated by graphic novels and their potential in literature and language classrooms. She is working on her dissertation which looks at schools of literary criticism as types of textual practice. Email: jludewi1@binghamton.edu
“Teilung und Wiedervereinigung in der deutschsprachigen Graphic Novel: Wie wird aus Geschichte Literatur(geschichte)?”: Teilung und Mauerfall gehören zu den jüngsten Geschichtsprozessen, die einen kollektiven Ausdruck in der deutschsprachigen Literaturszene gefunden haben. Anhand dieses thematischen Leitfadens können wir untersuchen, wie SchriftstellerInnen Geschichte finden und zugleich erfinden. In Subgenres wie dem Wenderoman kristallisiert diese literarische Reaktion in traditionellem Textformat. Doch klassische rein verbale Literatur ist nicht das einzige Medium, in dem eine künstlerische Aufarbeitung von Geschichte stattfindet.
In meinem Vortrag wende ich mich Graphic Novels zu, welche die Zeit der Teilung und Wiedervereinigung thematisieren. Ich greife dabei vor allem solche Comicbücher heraus, die um das 20-jährige Jubiläum des Mauerfalls 2009 erschienen sind und trage Ideen zusammen, wie sich eine Geschichte der jüngeren Wende-inspirierten Graphic-Novel-Literatur schreiben lässt. Das Konzept der literaturgeschichtlichen Strömung als einer Bewegung mehrerer AutorInnen in eine bestimmte Richtung verfolge ich dabei entlang zweier argumentationslinien. Zum einen frage ich, wie die Thematik der Trennung und Wiedervereinigung in diesen Graphic Novels erscheint. Was gelangt in die Comicromane und was nicht? Welche Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zeigen sich in den Werken? Welche Zugänge schaffen sich die AutorInnen zu einem solch komplexen historischen Thema? Zum anderen nähere ich mich der literarischen Strömung durch eine formale Perspektive: Wie wird aus Geschichte nicht nur ein literarischer Text, sondern gerade eine Graphic Novel? Warum sind Graphic Novels oftmals erst verspätete Vehikel der literarischen Aufarbeitung, die hinter traditionellen, also monomedialen Formen wie dem Roman oder dem Essay zurückstehen? Und welche Mittel wenden diese KünstlerInnen an, um Geschichte zu schreiben beziehungsweise zu zeichnen?
Elena Mancini teaches German language and culture courses at Queens College in New York City. She received her Ph.D. in German Studies from Rutgers University. She has published a book on gay rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld (Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom. Palgrave, 2010) and is interested in the intersection of gender and politics in 20th and 21st century literature and film. She also enjoys translating fiction. Her English language translation of Carmen Francesca Banciu’s Das Lied der traurigen Mutter is forthcoming in 2015 with Palm Art Press. Email: elemancini@aol.com
“Teaching Kafka’s The Trial in the Multicultural Classroom”: The topic of this paper is inspired by a course that I designed several years ago for students of German literature in translation at Queens College. Entitled “Authority and the Individual,” the course provides students with a theoretical background on the concept of authoritarianism drawn from some of the fundamental texts of 20th century critical theory and invites them to examine representations of authority and authoritarianism in literary texts and films. Deemed “a great and terrible novel of guilt, judgment and retribution,” by contemporary novelist and critic John Banville, Kafka’s The Trial is a staple reading in this course. Teaching The Trial in a multicultural classroom poses challenges, provides many opportunities for pedagogical and cultural sensibility growth, and has prompted an ongoing and intriguing series of questions that I continue to explore as an instructor and ambassador of German culture and language. Informed by the cultural and historical context in which the novel was written and bringing my own secular-Western-culture-tinted-lens to my reading of Kafka, my approach has been biased toward steering class discussions toward a critique of the abuses of power and authority presented in the novel, as well as the cryptically dysfunctional and overreaching court system that figures in Kafka’s work. While such sentiments are frequently echoed and find a lively resonance in the classroom setting, extended classroom discussions, student journals and essays revealed alternative entry ways into the text, often rejecting, when not completely contradicting, the typical notions of abuses of power in the text that are privileged by a secular Western worldview. A further probing such views revealed a vibrant range of cultural and religious values as well as social and political backgrounds that disabuse any pedagogical tendencies toward privileging of any one reading of “justice”, “authoritarianism,” “abuses of power,” and “guilt,” and rather invite the exploration of multiple entry ways into the text, and rendering it a departure point for both a deeper understanding of a particular cultural context as presented in the literary work as well as an opportunity to interrogate it. This paper wishes to explore and prompt further discussion on the changing role of the German language and culture instructor within the context of the multicultural classroom setting.
Patrizia McBride is Associate Professor of German Studies at Cornell University. Her research interests include modernism and avant-garde studies, the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, and political theory, and visual and media studies. She is the author of The Void of Ethics. Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity and has co-edited Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950 (Palgrave 2007). She has published articles on the politics of architectural style and fashion in the essays of Austrian cultural critic Adolf Loos; the relation between formalism and political engagement in the plays of Bertolt Brecht; and the critique of new types of visual literacy driven by film and the illustrated magazine that unfolds in the modernist novels of Irmgard Keun and the collages of Hannah Höch. She recently completed a book on the interplay of text and image in the print and visual media of Weimar Germany called The Chatter of Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (forthcoming, the University of Michigan Press, 2016). By examining the work of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity the book reconstructs the broad understanding of narrative that fueled new modes of storytelling across a variety of mass-cultural and high-brow media. Email: patrizia.mcbride@cornell.edu
“Writing Time: A (Literary) History of Dadaism”: This paper focuses on the Dada Almanach, the willful anthology edited by Richard Huelsenbeck in 1920, which I treat as tool for tracing the bounds of Dada’s literary performance while simultaneously outlining and engendering the distinctive temporality that enabled Dadaist events. At stake is the endeavor to supply Eine Geschichte des Dadaismus, to quote the title of another pivotal text Huelsenbeck published in 1920, a literary history of sorts that is both history of literature and a quintessentially literary artifact. Such historical account was part of a larger strategy aimed at enabling the proliferation of Dada’s events in a print medium characterized by a comparatively rigid temporality. Maintaining that Dada (whether in Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Barcelona, or New York) spent much time worrying about literary history, or literature at all, may at first come across at outlandish. Dadaism is rightly portrayed as a willfully fluid, international network of artists committed to gleeful conceptual incongruity and the radical disavowal of any agenda or normative order. Given this complexity Dada is most easily discussed in terms of the tactical practices it deployed, which encompass its relentless defiance of traditional media and genres, the incorporation of found objects, and a reliance on iteration, parody, and chance (Dickerman, Molesworth, Foster). The ensuing conceptual and aesthetic amorphousness appears to be a fitting extension of Dada’s radical vitalism, which for some in the Zurich and Berlin groups translated into the calculatingly cynical embrace of a present marked by the brutish destruction of the Great War and the pervasive debasement of Weimar Germany (Sloterdijk). Dada’s voluntarism fashioned this embrace into a tool for disrupting the temporal continuity of bourgeois society and letting the fullness of being emerge in transfiguring presentness. Yet for all of its insistence on a radical contemporaneity realized through a Flucht aus der Zeit, to quote the title of Hugo Ball’s 1927 memoirs, Dada’s writing is curiously obsessed with chronicling, recollecting, and memorializing, indeed, with a compulsion to retrieve and give form to the movement’s presentness by documenting its genesis and provenance, thus turning the ephemerality of Dada’s radical “now” into a historical account that could be disseminated and controlled.
Brian McInnis is Assistant Professor of German at the United States Military Academy, West Point. His research interests span 1700 to the present and include the discourse of body and soul in the long eighteenth century, Lessing as a cultural critic, and the interplay of science and literature in the period. He is currently completing a manuscript on the body/soul discourse in novels and magazines around 1750. His essay “Unmasking Structures of Opposition: Treitschke, the Berlin Anti-Semitism Debates, and Scherer’s Reading of G.E. Lessing’s Play The Jews” appeared in the Lessing Yearbook in 2013. Email: mcinnis04@gmail.com
“Lotte as Reader”: Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther is known as a book about reading. Werther reads nature, his Homer, and the people surrounding him with passion. Perhaps since Werther and Wilhelm narrate most of the novel, little attention has been paid to reading by other characters. Lotte’s role as reader seems particularly underexplored. While readers learn about her as a reader of Wakefield, Klopstock, and Ossian, she also experiences Werther’s storytelling and reads his actions in the context of their friendship. She learns to read people just as she learns to read books and participates in cultural signification beyond the written word. In his history of encoding of intimacy entitled Liebe als Passion, Niklas Luhmann traces how in the West developments in the nature of intimacy go hand in hand with the development of the subject. Individuation, his thesis claims, occurs increasingly through the intimate sphere. In the 18th century he marks the shift from heroic characters with tragic contexts for the development of intimacy to an intimacy based on characters from the middle class whose lives are decidedly less interesting. Their striving for more personal relationships furthers the specialization of the communication system and leads to ruptures. He characterizes these breaks as moments of incommunicability. For Luhmann, literature and in particular the epistolary novel plays a central role in illustrating the specialization of interpersonal communication and fissures that arise in intimate relationships. I find Luhmann's structure useful to order the increasingly intimate relationship between Lotte and Werther. Whereas Luhmann hypothesizes that the incommunicability can lead to breaks in communication between partners, the triangle constellation in Werther seems to indicate its applicability to contentious relationships as well. The revaluation of Lotte’s reading in Werther provides an example of how literary interpretation can open the analysis of literary texts. Re-reading and re-interpreting a text adds to its complexity as a signifying system. In this way, new interpretations represent layers of meaning that potentially enrich the value of a text for the canon and the writing of literary history.
Sören Ohle earned a B.A. in Buchwissenschaft and Germanistik and an M.A. in Buchwissenschaft with a project on “Die Darstellung der Verlegerpersönlichkeit in Jubiläumsschriften zwischen 1814 und 1915” from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, where he is now a research associate. His current project addresses the relationship between the economic and cultural bourgeoisie in the publishing industry of the 19th century. His research and teaching interests include the history of publishing and the book market as well as book and reader history.
Email: ohle@uni-mainz.de
“Die Buch- und Zeitschriftenproduktion des Ullstein-Konzerns als Quelle der Lesergeschichte – ein transatlantischer Vergleich”: Lesergeschichte ist bei ihrer wissenschaftlich fundierten Rekonstruktion immer auf unterschiedliche, teils mehr oder weniger aussagekräftige Quellen angewiesen. Zu diesen gehören in der Buchwissenschaft weniger die literarischen Texte selbst, sondern vielmehr die verlagseigenen Dokumentationspapiere und – am Wichtigsten, aber dennoch häufig vernachlässigt – die konkreten Verlagserzeugnisse. Gestaltung, Papier, Format, Einband etc.; also all jenes, was von Gérard Genette unter dem Begriff der „Paratexte“ subsumiert wird, bilden einen ergiebigen Quellenkorpus für genuin buchwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse. Über die paratextuelle Gestaltung der Bücher und Zeitschriften eines Verlags lassen sich dementsprechend bestimmte Muster und Strategien bei der Leseransprache sowie den Rezeptionsweisen und Lektürepräferenzen nachweisen. Gerade international agierende Universalverlage bieten angesichts solch spezifischer Fragestellungen, wie sie in der Konferenz erörtert werden, ein großes Erkenntnispotential. Dies gilt für nationale Studien ebenso wie für international vergleichende Studien. Weil diese Verlage i.d.R. viele literarischen Genres und Niveaus vereinen, können sie sowohl deren Konjunkturen als auch deren Zirkulation über verschiedene Medienformate und -kanäle erkennbar machen. Dies trifft insbesondere auf den Ullstein-Verlagskonzern zu. Seine dominierende Stellung in der Verlagshistorie der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ist zwar evident, diese spiegelt sich jedoch in der Forschung bisher kaum wider. So möchte der Beitrag dessen Rolle über die breit gefächerte und rezipierte Produktion beleuchten. Eine international vergleichende Perspektive ergibt sich dabei aus der Verlagsgeschichte selbst: Im Zuge der Machtübernahme der Nationalsozialisten siedelten große Teile des Verlagshauses nach New York über. Dort angekommen wurden zahlreiche in Deutschland erfolgreiche und profitable Publikationen, insbesondere aus dem Zeitschriftenbereich, fortgeführt – jedoch angesichts der unterschiedlichen Lektürepräferenzen und Lesepraktiken teils stark umgestaltet. An diesen Bruchstellen möchte der Beitrag die Verlagserzeugnisse als unverzichtbare Grundlage für die Rekonstruktion transnationaler Perspektiven und Erkenntnisse der Lesergeschichte deutlich machen.
Christine Schott is a Ph.D. Candidate in German Studies at Cornell University. She is at work on a dissertation, “Close Contact Reading: Philological, Physical, and Poetic Encounters with Paul Celan’s Poetry,” in which she investigates pivotal examples of critical and literary interpretations, rewritings and readings of Celan’s poetry by figures such as Peter Szondi, Jacques Derrida and the poet Peter Waterhouse. In her research she examines the labeling of Celan’s postwar poetry as “hermetic” and difficult to understand as part of a larger discursive field of shifting philosophical and methodological discussions about interpretation and readerly text access in Germany. Email: cs863@cornell.edu
“Verbracht ins Gelände – The Spatial Coordinates of Szondi’s Writings on Celan and the Physicality of Versenkung”: This paper revisits two of Peter Szondi’s essays on Paul Celan’s poetry from the collection Celan Studien, “Engführung” (1972) and “Eden.” It investigates how Szondi’s interpretations rest on a treatment of the poetic text in its material presence. In "Engführung," Szondi states that the poem offers the reader a linguistically mediated, yet also physical entry into the landscape/space of the poem as textual entity and begins to pay heightened attention to the poem’s use of typography, line break and the white space as spatial markers. In "Eden," which Szondi wrote on the basis of a biographical encounter with Celan in Berlin in 1968 while Celan was writing the poem “Du liegst im großen Gelausche...”, the material presence of the reader is less a product of an engagement with text or medium, but rather with the concrete historical circumstances and actual place of the genesis and conception of the poem. While movement through the poem’s space is predominately mediated by language in "Engführung," in "Eden" the physical, bodily presence of the reader as witness to the poem threatens to dismantle the poem’s claim as solely linguistic construction. This paper offers a description of Szondi’s approach to Celan’s poetry while also interrogating the possibilities and limitations of the overlap between a reading that foregrounds the material space the poem partakes in and draws up, and Szondi’s continued investment in hermeneutic principles of reading for the immaterial, for meaning.
Taking a closer look at this tension in Szondi’s thought, his lifelong investment in the hermeneutic art of interpretation, and in a historical-materialist heritage of dialectics and critique, my analysis considers Szondi’s writings on Celan as one example in a rich tradition of philosophical writings on the poet (by Werner Hamacher, Derrida, Gadamer) that formulates and enacts a method and practice of reading as much as it performs it. Ultimately, I interrogate what value Szondi’s principle of text analysis, “immersion” (Versenkung), holds when understanding the dual task of the reader: attention to the text in its materiality, and as linguistic, meaning-making construction.
Oliver C. Speck teaches Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, School of World Studies. His 2010 book Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke explored how a political thinking manifests itself in the oeuvre of the Austrian director, suggesting that the constant shifting of frames of reference in his films is needed to open up ethical perspectives. In addition to numerous essays on German and European cinema, Speck is co-editor (with Robert von Dassanowsky) of the 2011 anthology, New Austrian Film. Speck’s edited volume, Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, appeared in 2014. Email: ocspeck@vcu.edu
“Doing Justice. The aporia of Fassbinder’s Adaptations”: The process of a filmic adaptation that does justice to the original, just as the act of creating this original text, is an impossible endeavor. The decision involved – what stays, what is cut, how is a given scene rendered in another medium? - can never be quite the right one, still, it must be made. From this perspective, a so-called “good adaptation” would be the least intrusive, the one that finds an approximate translation, thus the least violent. Given that some violence to the original is unavoidable, can we even imagine an adaptation that does justice to the prior text? Indeed, any such decision requires a leap of faith because the rewritten text can only be judged after the fact. For the filmic auteur, this means a confidence bordering on hubris – certainly no problem for Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the most megalomaniac of the German New Wave directors, and the one whose adaptations of famous works such as “Despair/Despair – Eine Reise ins Licht (1978),” “Querelle (1982),” and, of course, the much discussed “Effi Briest/Fontane – Effi Briest oder: Viele, die eine Ahnung haben von ihren Möglichkeiten und Bedürfnissen und dennoch das herrschende System in ihrem Kopf akzeptieren durch ihre Taten und es somit festigen und durchaus bestätigen (1974),” will be at the center of my contribution. In my examination of what it means to do justice to a given literary text, I will revisit Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay from 1921 “Zur Kritik der Gewalt/On the Critique of Violence” and also Jacques Derrida’s close reading of this 1990 text, “Force of Law.” I will argue that Fassbinder treats the act of reading as violent rewriting, that is, as a necessary abandonment of the prior text. In other words, the auteur replaces the author as the creator and is thus able to replace “mythical violence,” as Benjamin calls it, with “pure divine violence.” This divine violence, quite different from the “mythical violence” of the law is necessary to overcome the split of art and commerce. This split, perhaps more prevalent in cinema than in any other art form, is caused by the demands of the market – an adaptation (“now a major motion picture”) must appeal to a broader audience. It is exactly the law of the market that condemns the adaptation before the fact, because the film cannot be “as good as the book.” Fassbinder understood that the only way to do justice to an artistic truth is to avoid the utopian ideal of the Truth of a “good” adaptation and, instead, absolves yourself of any responsibility in an act of divine violence.
Harald Zils earned a Dr. phil. from the Albert-Ludwigs Universität in Freiburg and teaches in the German Studies program at Binghamton University. His research interests include anthropological perspectives on literature, the German essay and aesthetic theories of production and reception. He is currently working on a study of exoticism in West German Schlager. Email: hzils@binghamton.edu
“Faust in Ingo Schulzes Neue Leben”: Ingo Schulzes Roman Neue Leben (2005) greift in radikaler Weise auf den Faust-Mythos und die Geschichte seiner Bearbeitungen zurück: Während der „Wende“ 1989/90 schließt der Dramaturg Enrico Türmer im ostdeutschen Altenburg ein vages Bündnis mit dem mephistophelischen Unternehmensberater Clemens von Barrista. Der Vortrag erörtert die Funktionen der literarischen Anspielung im Zeitroman und beschäftigt sich dabei auch mit Fragen des Kanons und der Kanonisierung.
Moderators
Rosmarie T. Morewedge teaches German language, literature and cultural studies at Binghamton University. Intrigued by problems of narration, she works with medieval historical “minstrel” epics, but also the modern short story and Märchen. Other scholarly interests are poetry and pedagogy. She has published on Wolfram von Eschenbach, medieval poetry, medieval folktales, Märchen and on modern authors, as well as in pedagogy, including a textbook for students of German that develops integrated language/culture skills, close reading and literary interpretation. Email: rmorewed@binghamton.edu
Neil Christian Pages teaches in German and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. His research interests include Austrian, German and Scandinavian cultural productions, commemorative practices, translation and the history of criticism. Publications include essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, W.G. Sebald, Adalbert Stifter, on Rachel Whiteread’s Shoah memorial in Vienna and Michael Haneke’s film "Caché". He is co-editor (with Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey) of Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism.
Email: npages@binghamton.edu
Kerstin Petersen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and works as a Teaching Assistant for the Writing Initiative at Binghamton University. She has taught Elementary German as well as literature classes on fairy tales and detective fiction. She also works for Special Collections at the Binghamton University Library where she helps to catalogue the Max Reinhardt collection and answers research requests relating to Reinhardt. She holds an M.A. in English Literature/History/Philosophy and an M.A. in German as a Foreign Language from the Philipps-Universität Marburg. Her dissertation project deals with the portrayal of different types of villains in 18th and early 19th century British novels. Her other academic interests include concepts of identity in Victorian and Modern British fiction as well as literary theory focusing on fictional characters. Email: kpeters7@binghamton.edu