German Culture News, Vol XXIV, Fall 2015.Pdf

1 German Culture News Cornell University Institute for German Cultural Studies Fall 2015 Vol XXIV

IN THIS ISSUE: The Poet and the University

IGCS Conference: Sept. 26-27, 2014 proper place of poetry became in- cluded with a central insight from The Poet and the University creasingly contested. George of- Kantorowicz that also applied Stefan George among the The two-day conference, “The fered an answer to the question of to the relation of members of Scholars Poet and the University: Stefan the relationship between poetry the George Circle to their Meis- George among the Scholars,” and thought: a scholarship born ter: “sometimes the only way to Word from the Director organized by Peter Uwe of the spirit of poetry. The deep save the king is to kill the king.” Hohendahl and Paul Fleming impression that this idea made IGCS Workshop: (Cornell), and sponsored by the on several fi elds of study can be Robert Norton (University of Critical Theory and Institute for German Cultural traced through publications of Notre Dame), in his presentation (post)Colonialism II Studies, the College of Arts and members of the George circle. “Plato and the George Circle,” Sciences, the Society for the Fleming discussed works by Max elaborated on the uniquely impor- IGCS Artist in Residence Humanities, and the Departments Kommerell (1902-1944) and tant role of Plato for the Circle, Ulrich Peltzer/ Spring 2015 of German Studies, Philosophy, Ernst Kantorowicz (1895-1963), and also traced the rise of a pe- and Comparative Literature at and argued that the best output of culiar vision of Plato concurrent On Seriality / Cornell, examined the infl uence of the George Circle scholars was in with the vision of the Circle it- German Studies German poet Stefan George (1868- fact produced after they had bro- self. Plato served as a motivating Graduate Student 1933) on the scholarly work of ken with and distanced themselves force for George’s desire to fash- Conference his disciples in the George Circle. from George. In taking this posi- ion a new mode of existence for In his introductory remarks, Peter tion, Fleming asked two primary poetry and to transform the world Derrida’s Jewish Specters

Retrospective: Fall 2014 and Spring 2015 Colloquium Series

Hohendahl Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory

The Antisocial Turn: The Age of Riots Uwe Hohendahl sketched the questions: “What has to be left according to the Circle’s vision. central role of the George Circle behind?” and “What remains?” Norton juxtaposed George’s and Lectures and Events in German high culture in the Before examining Kommerell’s other members of the Circle’s ap- fi rst half of the twentieth century, books Der Dichter als Führer preciation for Plato with their aim Posters of this Semester’s and stressed that the activities (1928) and Jean Paul (1933), of creating a new state. In their Conferences of the movement in fi elds such Fleming fi rst sketched George’s conception, the precondition for a as literary theory, sociology, own account of Jean Paul. He ob- new state was the renewal of the political science, and philosophy served the resemblance of the fi g- people inhabiting it. Yet it was the can be seen as a last general effort ure of the poet in Kommerell’s in- work of Kurt Hildebrandt (1881- of German conservatism before terpretations to George, as well as 1966) that served as the founda- German Culture News the NSDAP’s rise to power. subversive tendencies in the later tion for an interpretation of Plato Cornell University IGCS book on Jean Paul. In Fleming’s that made the philosopher’s ideas 726 University Avenue In his talk entitled “Reading with reading of Kantorowicz’s Kaiser compatible with a eugenic per- Ithaca, NY 14850 the Poet: George’s Incursion into Friedrich der Zweite (1928), he spective. His 1933 book Platon. phone: 607-255-8408 the Humanities,” Paul Fleming showed how the modes of histori- Der Kampf des Geistes um die email: [email protected] focused on dynamics among the ography and prophecy converge, Macht (“Plato. The Struggle of poet, his followers, and scholar- yielding to the latter, although Spirit for Power”) depicts Plato Paul Fleming: Director ship in the university. Fleming this methodological constellation as the founder of a theory of eu- Olga Petrova: Editor claimed that whereas for a long is absent in Kantorowicz’s bet- genics. In his talk, Norton there- Miyako Hayakawa:Copy Editor time the importance of poetry for ter-known and much more sober fore argued for a reconsidera- Hannah Mueller: Photographer thought had been beyond dispute work, The King’s Two Bodies: tion of the apparently apolitical on both sides of the political spec- A Study in Medieval Political & Student Coordinator continued on page 3 trum, the controversy over the Theology (1957). Fleming con- Word from the Director It has been another productive, relaxed evening of discussing literature Keynote lecture: Sept. 18, 4pm, collaborative year at the Institute and good food, please be in touch with Eric Downing (University of North for German Cultural Studies, with IGCS. Carolina), Fontane & the Future Ends of many exciting events and several Realism new programs to report – and much Please mark your calendars for the more to come in 2015-16. In addition upcoming Fall 2015 IGCS sponsored Sept. 19: presentations by Sean Franzel, to the writer-in-residence, colloquia, and co-sponsored events – for more Ulrike Vedder, Anette Schwarz, Peter workshops, conferences, and concerts information and up-to-the-minute Hohendahl, Elisabeth Strowick, Sam documented in this issue of German reports, visit the IGCS website (igcs Frederick Cultural News and on the IGCS website, cornell.edu): I would also like to highlight the Organized by Peter Hohendahl; following from 2014-15: Colloquia Sponsored by Cornell University’s IGCS, College of Arts & Sciences, and The graduate student exchange with Unless otherwise indicated, colloquia the Departments of German Studies, the University of Cologne, begun in take place at 3pm in 156 Goldwin Smith History, and Comparative Literature fall 2014, is now in full swing. Last Hall. An advance copy of each paper year, Matteo Calla, PhD candidate in can be obtained in the Department of Oct. 23-24, 2015, 401 Physical Sciences German, was awarded the fi rst stipend German Studies, 183 Goldwin Smith Building to Cologne for 2014-15; this academic Hall. Mapping the Medieval / Conference in year 2015-16, Matthew Stoltz and Leigh honor of Arthur Groos Organized by the Sept. 4, 2015 Nur über seine York will each spend a semester at our German Studies Department Leiche: Literaturgeschichte der exchange partner, Cologne University’s Männerfreundschaft (Andreas Lectures & Other Events Humanities graduate school, a.r.t.e.s. Kraß, Institut für deutsche Literatur, Applications for the exchange are open Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Sept. 8-10, 2015 A Yiddish Theater to all Humanities graduate students Festival Organized by Cornell Jewish with a knowledge of German who Sept. 25, 2015 Genealogy Trouble: Studies Program with Ithaca College could benefi t from a semester or a Secularization in Löwith, Blumenberg, Jewish Studies and Cornell Council for year researching in Cologne. Please Schmitt and Agamben (Kirk Wetters, the Arts For more information, please encourage students to apply. As German, Yale University) visit jewishstudies.cornell.edu part of the exchange, Cornell students receive 1,000 euros per month for up Oct. 16, 2015 Before Truth: Walter Sept. 15, 2015, 4:45pm, Toboggan to 10 months: every year we can send Benjamin’s “Erkenntniskritische Lodge Martin Heidegger Saved either one 1 graduate student for the Vorrede” (Kristina Mendicino, German, My Life (Grant Farred, Cornell) Co- full 10 months, or 2 graduate students Brown University) sponsored with African Studies for 5 months each (it can be the same semester). Applications are generally Nov. 6, 2015 Mosenthal’s Deborah and Sept. 24, 2015, 4:30pm, 366 McGraw due mid February. the Politics of Compassion: Anatomy of Hall Through storms of steel: The a Tearjerker (Jonathan Hess, Germanic path to the marble cliffs. Ernst Jünger Congratulations to Alina Carrillo, Languages & Literatures, UNC at dealing with Thucydides (Christian Cornell undergraduate majoring Chapel Hill) *co-sponsored by the Wendt, Free University, Berlin) Co- in “Environmental Science and Jewish Studies Program sponsored by History, Classics, IGCS, Sustainability,” for being awarded a full and Program on Freedom and Free tuition and accommodation scholarship Nov. 20, 2015 Clouded Visions: Societies to the six-week “Cologne Summer Particulate Matter in F. W. School 2015 on Environmental Murnau’s Faust and Hartmut Nov. 16, 2015, 4:30pm, place TBA, Studies: Sustainable Cities.” Every Bitomsky’s Dust (Paul Dobryden, Wrong Sex and the City: Polish Work year, Cologne offers up to 2 stipends German, Cornell University) Migration and Subaltern Masculinity to Cornell undergraduates. The topics (Dirk Uffelmann, University of Passau) change every year; please keep an eye Dec. 4, 2015 Co-sponsored with FGSS open for the announcement in spring Klopstock’s Darstellung and the Cult (application usually due end of March). of Aesthetic Experience (Matteo Calla, More co-sponsored events for Fall 2015 German, Cornell University) will be added soon; please browse the The Contemporary German IGCS website (igcs.cornell.edu) for all Literature Reading Group will Conferences & Workshops that is taking place this year. continue its monthly meetings dedicated to the discussion of the most recent The Challenge of Realism: Theodor --Paul Fleming works of German literature (texts Fontane appearing in the last 5-10 years). If Sept. 18-19, 2015, 258 Goldwin you are interested in participating for a Smith Hall 3 continued from page 1 George Circle, as portrayed in recent biog- by observing that the reception of Nietzsche Max Kommerell’s 1928 study, Der Dichter raphies, by underlining the shift in George’s in the George Circle resists a simple reading, als Führer in der Deutschen Klassik, and position toward politics. As Norton demon- insofar as the members were both attracted to the relation of these fi gurations to the role strated, this changing notion is evident in and repulsed by the philosopher and his work. of friendship in the Circle itself. In his George’s conversations with Berthold Val- book, Kommerell “allows the poets therein lentin (1877-1933), in which George’s shows Ernst Osterkamp (Humboldt-Universität to come on to the scene as role models deep interest in the fi gure of the leader. Con- zu Berlin) presented a conference paper of a community as active people (als sidering George’s profound infl uence on titled “The Poet as Cultural Savior: Friedrich Vorbilder einer Gemeinschaft als wirkende Hildebrandt’s Plato book, Norton argued for Gundolf’s Goethe,” in which he argued that Personen),” a move that endows the poet a reassessment of the relationship between Gundolf’s work represents three signifi cant with a signifi cant political force, for which eugenics (Rassenpolitik) and Geistpolitik, historical breaks: a break from the history friendship plays a crucial role. For Siegel, as pursued with the publication of the poet’s of German Studies, a break from the history two models of the poet-as-friend emerge series of Geistbücher. (Matthias Müller) of German philology, and a break from as particularly important in Kommerell’s the scholarly history of the George Circle. Classicism: the neo-Hellenic conception Co-organizer Peter Uwe Hohendahl’s Osterkamp pointed out how the legacy of found in Klopstock’s writing, and the friend presentation, titled “Critic or Prophet? The Gundolf’s Goethe could not be separated as co-conspirator depicted both in Schiller’s George Circle and Friedrich Nietzsche,” from the political-historical situation in which Don Carlos, as well as in his relationship to identifi ed Nietzsche as one of the most it was written. The 1916 publication of the Goethe. Klopstock’s model treats the circle of problematic fi gures that the George Circle book epitomized German culture at the time, friends as a “grounds of life” (Lebensgrund), had attempted to come to terms with. and enabled soldiers in WWI to imagine what albeit a narrow one, in which the poet Hohendahl found that the group’s main they were fi ghting for. In the Weimar Republic, enables a lacking “völkische Reife” to grow. challenge in confronting Nietzsche was that the work essentialized cultural aspirations In this poetic, völkisch “state,” the poet’s its members were unable to reach an easy and assured Germans of their national occupation is revealed to be a “priestly” one consensus with respect to how they would identity. However, Osterkamp expressed that connects Germany to Greek antiquity integrate and interpret his work. On the one concern with regards to the methodological and helps establish it as a “wieder erstehende hand, the group found Nietzsche’s critique implications of the text. For instance, German Hellas.” Kommerell’s reading of conspiracy of his age to be of value to them; on the scholars had criticized the book because it in Schiller’s Don Carlos, however, reveals other hand, Nietzsche came dangerously was considered to be the product of an artist a darker notion of friendship as a means to close to a certain kind of modernity that they (Wissenschaftskünstler). Yet, the work also an end. Caught in a tension between the top- rejected. George acknowledged Nietzsche’s represented Geisteswissenschaft, a new form down structure of the Verschwörerstaat and importance, yet made his disciples aware of of scholarship that was beginning to gain a the mutuality of Verschwörerfreundschaft, specifi c limitations of the philosopher’s work. foothold over the older paradigm of philology. the conspiracy-friendship leads to a state in Hohendahl argued that these limitations were After discussing the book in this larger which friendship is no longer needed once an emphasized in order to ensure that George, context, Osterkamp spoke of its reception intended “deed” has been carried out. This as opposed to Nietzsche, would be regarded within the George Circle. He explained that reading, Siegel observes, eerily resonates both as the prophet of a new age. Hohendahl then George initially had no words of praise for with Kommerell’s departure from the George focused on a work by Ernst Bertram (1884- Gundolf’s work. George’s objection was Circle and with the suicide of his friend and 1957), Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie that Gundolf over-emphasized the notion fellow member Johann Anton, to whom (1918), in order to illustrate how divided of spiritual becoming and failed to see how Der Dichter als Führer is dedicated, after Nietzsche reception was within the group Goethe’s language embodied both being and the Circle’s dissolution. Siegel concluded itself. Kurt Hildebrandt and Friedrich becoming. For George, Goethe’s work was a with Walter Benjamin’s refutation of the Gundolf (1880-1931), two prominent group living thing: a Gestalt or a being. According idea of the literary community as a “secret members, privately contested Bertram’s to Osterkamp, those who claimed Goethe Germany,” particularly in its iterations in work, even though George himself publicly as a totality of being and becoming did so Kommerell’s book and in the Circle, in approved it. Bertram’s Nietzsche was by historicizing him, that is, by presenting favor of another kind of secret Germany to defi ned by the present, which turned him Goethe as a living force in the present be found in the letters of German language into a prophetic fi gure poised to lead a new moment. The greatest challenge for Gundolf authors, including but more importantly generation of Germans out of the chaotic mob was to conjoin his “science” with George’s moving beyond the paradigms of Classicism. of modern society and towards a new future conception of Gestalt. In other words, Gundolf society. Hohendahl argued that Gundolf, by sought to revise his judgments of Goethe Carsten Strathausen (University of Mis- contrast, did not see any fruit in the future so that the notion of being and becoming souri) in his presentation, “The George Circle that Nietzsche offered. He felt that Nietzsche constituted the kind of unity that George and Biopolitics,” addressed the relationship failed to create original poetry and that the desired. At the end of his talk, Osterkamp between biological discourse and the politics concept of the Übermensch led to an inhuman stressed how Gundolf’s methodological of the Circle, drawing special attention to its creature instead of to a new man. In this way, decisions had enormous consequences for legacy, which remains haunted by the specter Nietzsche in fact served to promote George as his judgments on Goethe. (Matthew Stolz) of fascism. Arguing against Georg Lukács’s the true prophet of the future. Hildebrandt was famous characterization of the Circle as “pro- also dissatisfi ed with Nietzsche’s critique of In her talk, “Poetry, Politics, and Friendship tofascist,” Strathausen distanced the biologi- Socrates as a corruptor of society, and found in Kommerell’s Classicism,” Elke Siegel cal metaphors and interpersonal politics of that Nietzsche’s life and thought fell short of (Cornell) presented a reading of the George’s collective from the biopolitics as- exemplarity. Hohendahl concluded his talk fi gurations of the friend in Circle member sociated with National Socialist ideology and its deployment of Social Darwinism, hygienic Russell Berman (Stanford University) shifted remnant of his time in the George Circle. In discourse, and eugenics. Far from the immu- the attention of the conference towards the Salin’s advocacy of a social market economy nitarian regulation of a fascist state’s Völk- manner in which George’s ideas “incubated (soziale Marktwissenschaft), the business skörper, Strathausen argued that the Circle’s and metamorphosed beyond the life of the owner approaches the George-ian fi gure of aesthetic politics—here considered in Klaus Circle,” as exemplifi ed by the writing and the poet as both creator and Führer. Berman Landfried’s terms of a Politik des Unpoli- political activity of economist and former furthermore suggested that the manner tischen—were based on a notion of poetic Circle member Edgar Salin (1892-1974). in which Salin adopted and transformed transubstantiation, directed against the sterile Following the trajectory of Salin’s pre- George’s rejection of the scientifi c Abgrund of bourgeois society. Through this WWII economic writing, and emphasizing rationalization of knowledge is of lasting notion, George ascribed to the poet a life-cre- a comparison of the territorial unifi cation of relevance for the study of political economy. ating potential, in his ability to unify the mate- Europe to his postwar appeals to the Athenian Salin’s attempt to synthesize Wissenschaft rial body of the letter with spirit, using paper legacy of the Swiss democratic city-state, and artistic consciousness, thus resisting as the fertile Grund for incarnation. Strathau- Berman isolated two particular remnants a disciplinary move towards quantitative sen was careful to point out, however, that of the George Circle in Salin’s scholarship analysis, therefore provides a valuable model this fi guration of the poet is decidedly and and activism. First, Berman suggested that for a reexamination of the contemporary exclusively masculine, and thus symptom- Salin’s “transition to the middle”—his social sciences. (William Krieger) atic of the anti-feminist politics of the Circle. criticism both of the state-run monopolies of Joseph Schumpeter’s socialism and of In his talk, “Political Thought in the George liberalism’s privileging the market over Circle: Edgar Salin and Political Economy,” the state—could be considered a positive 5 Critical Theory and (post)Colonialism II

December 6, 2014 the individual postcolonial will to the general count of the Haitian revolution for a perspec- will. The term “mugging” did the linguistic tive that understood the problem of slavery as In the second daylong workshop co-orga- work – discourse is crucial to the regime of it erupted on the island of San Domingue and nized by Paul Fleming and Natalie Melas biopolitics – of “racing” postcolonial subjects issued in world historical revolution as in fact on behalf of The Institute for German Cul- in the metropolis without mobilizing a rheto- the radical node of the inception of the demo- tural Studies and The Institute for Com- ric that is more obviously racist. Following cratic initiative that has been understood as parative Modernities (Cornell University), Farred’s presentation, the discussion largely the French Revolution. In his 1971 lecture, presenters and participants brought Critical focused on the questions about the “non- James recognizes Du Bois’s account of the Theory and Postcolonial Theory to bear on /retrieval” of theories and of understanding sensibility of Negro American slaves in the one another. The workshop format consisted race as a singularity while resisting the turn 1860s as a distinct and powerful historio- of short presentations, followed by exten- to essentialism or a reductive nationalism. graphical perspective that allowed Du Bois to sive discussion. Readings were circulated bring attention to that sensibility as initiating among participants prior to the event, in- Nahum Chandler (University of California a radicalization of the democratic impulse in cluding works by Marxist, postcolonial, and Irvine) built his intervention on a re-engage- the whole debacle of the American Civil War anticolonial thinkers including: Theodor W. ment with “the problem of the color line,” as and its aftermath. James thus declared, in his Adorno, John Akomfrah, Walter Benjamin, formulated by W.E.B. Du Bois. Reading with 1971 lecture that Du Bois had properly rec- W.E.B. Du Bois, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Du Bois, Chandler argued, offers the possi- ognized those slaves as the fi rst instance of a C.L.R. James David Lloyd, Georg Lukács, bility of “a re-narrativization of modernity.” true general strike (the slaves’ initiative pre- Karl Marx, and Mao Tse-Tung. Representa- Taking, Du Bois’s promulgation of the year dating those instances given such status, such tive publications from workshop presenters 1441, the year in which the apocryphal “thirty as initiatives in Europe in the 1890s and the were also included in the reading selection. Africans” were captured off the coast of West fi rst decade of the twentieth century. This led Africa, transported, and then sold in Lisbon, James to place Du Bois’s work at the highest Using Jacques Derrida’s critique of Giorgio makring the inception of the modern Atlan- level of historical accomplishment. Discus- Agamben’s work on biopolitics as his point tic slave trade as also inception of modern sants raised questions about whether or not of entree, Grant Farred (Cornell Univer- imperialism and the incipient emergence of in 1441 the slaves conscripted thus could be sity) offered a philosophical reconsideration capitalism, Chandler proposed that Du Bois in all truth recognized as subjects. Chandler of Policing the Crisis, a 1978 work edited by in fact offered an original conception of mod- responded that in its historicity one had to Stuart Hall et al. Policing the Crisis analyzes ern historicity. Du Bois’s refl ections allow for recognize that “Portuguese” “Europe” too the disproportionate prosecution of young criticizing sovereign power at its point of in- are produced out of that encounter. Thus, in postcolonial subjects in cases of so-called ception, rather than at later moments of re- its eventuality, both are confi gured out of this mugging in the Hand- inception. Too, apparently one sworth neighborhood aspect of this line of question- of Birmingham (UK) ing can be understood to won- in the early 1970s. As der if Du Bois’s interpretation much as Hall et al’s of slaves’ work stoppages as a Gramscian account of “general strike” is compelling “mugging” is prop- enough to decenter modernity erly structured around as a European construct, since concepts of hegemony slaves participated in that strike and culture, Farred as objects rather than subjects. suggested that there Chandler engaged with this line might be something of questioning by indicating to be gained – learned that Du Bois’s whole point was – from Michel Fou- to show that “fugitive” slaves cault’s thinking, es- forced the issue of slavery to the pecially Foucault’s fore, even as the Union sought understanding of biopolitics as “an effi cient sistance to its exertion. Chandler triangulated to disregard it, compelling Lincoln to issue the management of every individual world.” the 1960s virtual dialogue between Du Bois Emancipation Proclamation and eventually Farred raised the possibility that the Brit- and C.L.R. James (vitual, in that Chandler to declare the legality of arming the slaves as ish state understood the biopolitical nature has reconstructed it historiographically, post- soldiers for the Union Army, without which of the “mugging crisis,” a mode of thinking humous to both fi gures), as well as the rela- Du Bois argues, the Union could not have that was not apprehended by Hall and his tive concurrent publication of their respec- succeeded agains the South. In this whole line colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary tive books Black Reconstruction (1935) and of thought, Chandler argued the necessity to Cultural Studies. If biopolitics is, Farred ar- Black Jacobins (1938) in the 1930s, utilizing “show the production of Europe” by drawing gued, distinguished from sovereignty (for both Du Bois’s 1961 essay “Africa and the on Du Bois’s focus on the production of “ the Foucault) because of its “effi ciency,” then French Revolution,” In which he references problem of the color line,” given distinctive the Handsworth case offers itself as an ex- James 1930s study and James’s 1971 lecture meaning in Du Bois’s discourse, as shown emplary instance of the state’s capacity to proposing a reading of Du Bois’s 1930s study. for example in his trenchant 1915 essay manage crises for its own political ends. The In Chandler’s account, Du Bois’s 1935 study “The African Roots of War,” in addition to Handsworth “muggings” became an opportu- offered a broad and general renarrativization his major work across more than six decades. nity to make a specifi c case exemplary for all of modern historicity, from the fi fteenth cen- transgressors. This is how disproportionate tury to the twentieth In his 1961 essay, Du Gary Wilder (Graduate Center at City sentences can do political work: they subject Bois insisted on the pertinence of James’s ac- University New York) intervened against two dominant scholarly narratives: that ity again started to gain, until the present ability” and “ability” by choreographing any kind of universal thinking only comes day, when it has returned essentially to pre- performances with ‘special artists’ (as they from the white metropolis, and that all writ- 20th century levels. Relating Piketty’s book call themselves) who are hearing-impaired ing from the periphery is not universal, but to contemporary Chilean politics, Kaufman (“A Thousand-Hand Bodhisattva”), sight- preoccupied with place, ethnicity, and local noted that Piketty had been invited to Chile impaired (“Let’s Go See The Spring”), or consciousness. As the complement to “pro- for discussion by Chilean President Michelle variably “impaired” (“Green Seedlings”). vincialize Europe,” Wilder proposed depro- Bachelet’s Minister of Finance; and that Yan concentrated particularly on the re-em- vincializing our readings of “non-Western” President Bachelet and the Nueva Mayoria bodiments of China specifi c “visions and authors, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold coalition government’s increased taxes on imaginaries” in these performances that are Senghor. Wilder not only linked Césaire and wealth (as well as its strengthening of laws also resonating with viewers worldwide. In Senghor to surrealism and Bergson, but also establishing minimum wages and creating “Let’s Go See the Spring,” sight-impaired acknowledged their contributions to Marxist other protections for those facing “precarious dancers, according to Yan, “lead us with their humanism and Christian personalism, cri- labor”) were very much in line with Piketty’s trans-embodiments of the ‘spring’ to another tiques of instrumental reason and reifi cation, policy recommendations. Returning to the realm of seeing or the possibilities of seeing and the limits of Soviet communism. Césaire literary connection, Kaufman noted that Pik- differently,” and this creates “a radical open- and Senghor formulated their critique not pri- etty – in a way that echoes famous comments ing to rethink the question of human sight it- marily against civilization, but conceived of by Engels – highlights how great 19th cen- self.” While there is an immanently personal decolonization in terms of “human emanci- tury novelists (Balzac, Austen) had presented dimension to the liveness of these perfor- pation” and “existential disalienation” from remarkably accurate pictures of the return on mances, their mobile imagery and reconfi gu- the antinomies of modern capitalism, impe- wealth and capital, and its constant outstrip- ration of historical dance traditions provoked rialism, and race. Wilder sought to mobilize ping of overall economic growth without broader questions: Yan explores the ways in Césaire and Senghor’s critique in order to having had “data” for their showings. This which the “dream” of My Dream evokes an rethink formulations of romantic anticapital- praise of the novel’s ability to illuminate so- impetus for human transformation which is ism, as exemplifi ed in Georg Lukács’s es- cioeconomic dynamics led Kaufman to ask simultaneously and constitutively national say “The Old Culture and the New Culture” if modern lyric poetry has any contributions and transnational, historical and transtem- (1919). Discussants engaged with this latter of its own to make in helping us understand poral in its implications and aspirations. point in relation to Benjamin’s proposition the experiences and meanings of economic that the relationship between present and inequality. Kaufman’s argued that the de- Xudong Zhang (New York University) future must always be mediated by the past. velopments in poetry and poetics that have confronted three critiques of power: Walter emerged from the debates about the “bar- Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” (1921), Robert Kaufman (University of California barism of poetry after Auschwitz” held the Mao Tse-Tung’s Critique of Soviet Econom- Berkeley) gave a paper titled “Piketty et la key. Zurita’s “Auschwitz” poems were seen ics (1958/59), and Carl Schmitt’s Theory of poésie” that connected Thomas Piketty’s as his most explicit engagements with the the Partisan (1963). Zhang read Benjamin Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013; “poetry after Auschwitz” histories (in poetry against the backdrop of the NYPD’s recent English trans. 2014), a 2009 triptych of po- and the other arts, as well as in philosophy, unprosecuted killing of Eric Garner, giv- ems titled “Auschwitz” by Chilean poet Raúl critical theory, and criticism) most famously ing a new actuality to Benjamin’s category Zurita, and recent developments in Chilean taken up by Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Celan, of “law-preserving” violence. Zhang argued politics and economics following from the Ingeborg Bachmann, and a number of other that in Benjamin’s essay police violence is a post-2008 international fi nancial crisis (in fi gures. Kaufman noted that Zurita’s poetry liminal case that indicates the point at which particular, the 2011-12 Chilean students’ had already been working through the vari- power breaks down: what we construe to be strike that led to a reinvigoration of the ous meanings of the “barbarism” of “poetry a liberal-democratic police force is lawless- Chilean Left and the election of a progres- after...” in his country (and continent), which ness in the name of the law. Zhang then inter- sive/left majority in the Chilean parliament, involved not so much literally “after Aus- preted Benjamin’s third category of “divine” the “Nueva Mayoría”). Kaufman began by chwitz” as “after the regime of the disappear- or “pure” violence not in a mythological contextualizing the ways Piketty’s book ap- ances” inaugurated by the Pinochet dictator- sense but as a force that ruptures the exist- proaches “neo-classical” political economy ship with his Sept 11, 1973, U.S.-supported ing system. For Mao, such “pure violence” theory (e.g., Ricardo) and its most famous military overthrow of the democratically is no longer utopian but, rather, in the form critics (e.g., Marx), as well as post-1945 elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende of a revolutionary seizure of power serves economists whose work had been crucial in In his “Auschwitz” triptych, Zurita risked as the precondition for developing forces of theorizing that capitalism had entered a stage even further the “barbarism” question by more production beyond capitalist ownership of of what appeared to be sustainable and rela- explicitly than ever bringing poetry’s histo- property. While Schmitt’s notion of the ex- tively continuous growth (above all, Simon ries of taking up the aftermath of the National ception designates such seizure as the extra- Kuznets). Piketty and his colleagues show Socialist genocide, and Latin Americans’ own legal location of the sovereign, his Theory of – with vastly richer data-sets than any other refl ections on their 1970s-and-after relation the Partisan paints Mao as “the greatest prac- economists had ever assembled for the rel- to the Holocaust’s aftermath, with a matter titioner of revolutionary war” in a concrete evant periods – that since capitalism’s 18th that had always been “off-limits”: making an situation and a Grossraum. Zhang located century rise, rates of growth had always been overly simple equivalence between economic Mao’s real and particular enmity in a Schmit- relatively low and outstripped, with conse- exploitation and genocidal intention/effect. tian sense: fi rst, as directed at the enemies of quent severe societal inequality, by the return the revolution, and later against the regenera- on wealth/capital (Piketty’s formula is r > Haiping Yan (Tsinghua University, Beijing) tion of bourgeois elements within the party g). Piketty goes on to show that the differ- presented a project entitled “My Dream: The itself. In the conversation following Zhang’s ence in much of the 20th century (until about Intermedial Turn in Contemporary Chinese deliberately provocative presentation, the the mid-1970s) was almost entirely due to Performing Arts.” Focusing on the tensions participants discussed the role of Islam (a the massive government stimulus spending between personal and historical experience, road taken by Malcolm X and some Black required in response to two world wars and Yan analyzed performances by the Chinese Radicals) as a missing piece in Left think- global depression between them; this spend- performing arts troupe My Dream. In three ing about postcolonialism and revolutionary ing had made huge inroads in decreasing in- separate instances, My Dream questions possibility. (Alex Brown & Jette Gindner) equality until the mid-1970s, when inequal- the specifi cally modern categories of “dis- 7 Derrida’s Jewish Specters

September 16, 2014 ligation, debt, and the “injunction to reaf- nas as successful, precisely in his exploitation fi rm and choose an inheritance,” which are of the metaphoric entanglement that he was In a one-day symposium, presented by the also central to Jewish thought and Judaic attempting to evade. Hammerschlag empha- Jewish Studies Program and co-sponsored theology. The interlocutors further contem- sized that Derrida interpreted Levinas’ text by the IGCS, participants discussed the plated how Derrida’s statements concern- explicitly against Levinas’ own intentions, legacy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) for ing the relationship between Marxism and positioning Levinas as both an infl uence and humanistic studies broadly conceived, and Stalinism might contribute to a performative a foil to his own work. Hammerschlag con- for Jewish Studies in particular. Organizer practice of Marxism that could also inform tinued her analysis with Derrida’s reception Jonathan Boyarin (Anthropology, Cornell a performative Jewishness. In their collab- of the Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912- University) presented opening remarks, in orative analysis, the two presenters posited 1991), arguing that Derrida engages Jabès which he pointed out the ambiguous pres- the presence of Jewish “ghosts” in Derrida’s in such a way that their signatures merge, or ence and signifi cant absence of references text, which are signifi cant in their silence; the form of the philosopher’s essay acts as a to Jewishness in Derrida’s oeuvre, as well likewise, they considered how specters and countersignature that validates the work of as their increasing frequency and urgency spectrality might play a role in conceptual- the poet. With the choice of the Jewish poet, in the philosopher’s later work. The catalyz- izing Jewishness. Land also noted the impor- Hammerschlag averred that Derrida desig- ing text for the program, invoked in the title tance of themes related to the fi elds of phys- nates Judaism as a site where religion and of the day’s proceedings, Specters of Marx: ics, mathematics, and analytic philosophy in literature can be differentiated, and Jabès as The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourn- Derrida’s text. If the absence of Jewish refer- the writer who exemplifi es literature’s ability ing and the New International (1993), con- ences in Derrida’s work assumes a ghost-like to free religious themes from the frozen time siders the practicability of Marxism in rela- spectrality, then the ghosts of Kurt Gödel’s of the book. Finally, in Derrida’s encounter tion to Modernity; Boyarin posed questions incompleteness theorem and of mathematical with Levinas in Violence and Metaphysics, as to whether or not Specters of Marx also set theory might also be recalled in relation he questions the possibility of the survival develops an understanding of Jewishness and to the text and its temporality. Thus, Boyarin of the text, of humanity, and of Judaism. Ac- Jewish texts, and if it should be seen as ex- and Land considered how deconstruction, un- cording to Derrida, Levinas had not fully emplary or representative of Derrida’s work. decidability, and the overcoming of language confronted Judaism, and thus, had missed an and logical, axiomatic determinism might fa- opportunity to use the Jew’s split identifi ca- The fi rst presentation, delivered by Boyarin cilitate a conception of time that calls for re- tion and alterity to explore the structure of along with Martin Land (Hadassah College newed commitment to the past for the sake of contingency itself. In bringing Derrida’s in- Jerusalem), simulated a series of email ex- the future and temporality without progress. terest in Levinas to the fore, Hammerschlag changes between the two scholars that began thus proposed that, from the beginning of roughly ten years ago and resulted in co-au- The morning session continued with a presen- his career, Derrida was grappling with the thored publications including an article in the tation by Sarah Hammerschlag (University relationship between religion and literature. Cardozo Law Review in 2005, and a book, of Chicago Divinity School), titled “Between Time and Human Language Now (2008). the Jew and Writing.” Hammerschlag turned Michael Levine (Rutgers University), be- Boyarin recalled how, at the beginning of the her attention to Derrida’s early collection of gan the afternoon session with a presentation project, he had been struggling to fi nd a way essays, Writing and Difference (1967), spe- titled “Speaking in Starts: Freud’s Moses and to think about the future and responsibility cifi cally to three sections: “Force and Signi- Archive Fever.” Levine performed an analy- for the future in the wake of Walter Benja- fi cation”; “Edmond Jabès and The Question sis of Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian min’s abandonment of the illusion of prog- of the Book”; and “Violence and Metaphys- Impression (1995), which features a reception ress. Having read Specters of Marx, Boyarin ics: An Essay on the Thoughts of Emmanuel of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s monograph, wrote to Land, a theoretical physicist, who at Levinas.” Hammerschlag argued that these Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and In- the time was researching temporal symme- essays should be read as a tripartite response terminable (1991). With particular attention tries and relativistic dynamics. Land discov- to the work of Levinas, in particular to his to Yerushalmi’s last chapter, “Monologue ered that his work bore a surprising resem- 1961 publication, Totality and Infi nity: An with Freud,” Levine brought Derrida, Yerush- blance to the conceptual challenges presented Essay on Exteriority. This confrontation, she almi, Sigmund Freud, and Freud’s father, Ja- by Derrida’s text. Thus, the two friends began emphasized, informed Derrida’s early consid- kob, into shifting paternal and fi lial relations. their conversation on Specters of Marx, think- erations of the relationship between religion The philosopher, religious scholar, and father ing of the present as a product of contingent and literature, as well as the concept of writ- of psychoanalysis along with his own father, intersubjective communication rather than as ing that he develops Writing and Difference. encounter each other in scenes of reading, fi g- a point in a linear and teleological progres- ured by Derrida as coups de théâtre: instanta- sion of time. Adopting the Talmudic form of Hammerschlag explained that if considered neous moments that disrupt linear time. In his commentary, Boyarin and Land envisioned along with “Violence and Metaphysics,” in book, Yerushalmi stages a conversation with an ongoing project of annotation centered on which Derrida examines the role of form and the absent Sigmund Freud, concerning the Derrida’s text, including contemporary forms writing in Levinas’ attempt to free language psychoanalyst’s relationship with Judaism. of hypertextuality enabled by digital media. from totality, the section “Force and Signifi - Derrida observes that Yerushalmi’s address is The reader of their planned text would be cation,” which does not reference Levinas as on the one hand fi lial and respectful, but on invited to imagine a page encased by two explicitly, should also be read as part of Der- the other hand paternal, in that it repeats the hands as parallel margins of commentary. rida’s rejoinder. In Derrida’s view, although message inscribed by Jakob Freud in a Bible Levinas attempts to escape from totality and that he gifted to his son twice: once on the Without intending to cast Derrida’s work force, he ultimately falls into metaphysical occasion of his circumcision, and once again as inherently Jewish, both presenters em- binaries and a heliotropic metaphor, and in as an adult. Levine drew attention to gestures phasized that Specters of Marx focuses on fact fails to accomplish what his essay claims of interruption and stuttering: when Yerush- themes such as emancipation, justice, ob- to advance. Nevertheless, Derrida casts Levi- almi allows the absent father, Jakob, to speak through him to an absent son, Sigmund, spec- tral voices are superimposed onto one other, creating interference. Additionally, Derrida characterizes Jewish temporality as a hyphen (a trait d’union), which interrupts time but also functions as a tie to the future and en- ables repetition, which in turn facilitates a re- curring injunction to remember. Derrida con- cludes that if the essence of “being-Jewish” is a receptive stance towards the future, then “to be open to the future would be to be Jew- ish. And vice versa.” Depicting a temporal- ity dilated by oppositional forces of past and future, Levine remarked on ways in which speech becomes “open to another future,” and to otherwise unarticulated possibilities.

Further attempting to conceptualize Jewishness, Yerushalmi concludes his Deleuze and Guatarri (D&G), which identi- inspired by the preceding presentations. address to Freud by asking whether or not fi es geocentrism in the work of the two col- psychoanalysis is a “Jewish science.” While leagues and friends. While Gasché, along Saccamano linked Specters of Marx to Yerushalmi urgently seeks an answer with with D&G, explores the Grecian origins Derrida’s texts on religion and Judaism, regards to the nature of psychoanalysis, of philosophy, Dolgopolski included ways singling out Gift of Death (1995) and the Derrida, with Freud, turns to another in which Rabbinical customs and thought essay, “Above All, No Journalists” (2001). example of scholarly struggle, depicted might correlate to the described phenomena. Based on these texts, he suggested that in Wilhelm Jensen’s novel from 1902-03, For instance, the fractalization of Greece, for Derrida, the critique of religion is also Gradiva. The protagonist of Jensen’s book, or colonial societal structures founded upon a critique of information and media. He Norbert Hanold, reaches an impasse while friendship and rivalry, bears similarities with pointed out that Derrida did not consider visiting Pompeii, in that he fi nds that the Rabbinic communities in which rules of de- being Jewish to be a religion, and that he fi eld of archaeology is no longer tenable. bate and participation also include fi gures of therefore positioned Judaism in opposition Hanold then suffers from what Derrida an inside and outside, and a multiplicity of to Catholicism and Christian Hegelianism. diagnoses as “archive fever,” and sleeps, to perspectives. Gasché also examines the pur- Saccamano proposed that Specters of Marx be awakened by a dream of that which he has ported privilege of philosophy, as opposed to functions as a kind of manifesto in favor of never experienced before, “of reliving. But of other forms of thought such as science and art, a lack of communication, that nevertheless reliving the other.” At the limit of archaeology, due to its inherent immanence and indepen- promotes “community and communicability.” the archive is a tangent, a dimensionless dence from reference. He further explicates He concluded by wondering what kind of point of contact of which the archaeologist D&G’s concept of “earth” as an absolute de- community Derrida had imagined. Jonathan can only dream. Gradiva’s iconic step thus territorialization without reterritorialization; Boyarin replied with a reference to Derrida’s recalls an openness to alternate futures and however, in his reading, D&G have not es- concept of “the new international,” which repetition, much like the gesture of stuttering caped Heidegger’s notions of earth and land. for the philosopher was a reaction to the in Derrida’s reception of Yerushalmi. In order to think concepts such as the earth, threat of globalization. However, Boyarin the world, the cosmos, nature, and memory, also conceded that no one has yet been able The fi nal presentation was contributed by Dolgopolski returned to the irreducibility to satisfactorily model Derrida’s envisioned Sergey Dolgopolski (University at Buffalo, of distinctions in the logic of the Talmud. community. Jonathan Culler answered with SUNY), and titled “Earth, Memory, Rabbis: Whereas the ultimate result of continuous de- a reminder that Derrida had seen, after the A Derridean Reading of Deleuze.” Dolgop- and reterritorialization would be loneliness, fall of socialism, an increased necessity to olski hypothesized that Rodolphe Gasché’s Dolgopolski argued that refutation is never read Marx. Likewise, the messianic, once reading of Deleuze and Guattari in his study, lonely in the Talmud. If the concept of terri- liberated from messianism, was supposed Geophilosophy: On Gilles Deleuze and Fé- tory necessarily inhabits the domain of refer- to produce new, effective ways of action. lix Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (2013), ence and solutions, then aporia is inevitable; is highly infl uenced by Derrida’s work; thus, however, in Talmudic thought, the political Camille Robcis referenced Benoît Peeters’ Dolgopolski situated himself in dialogue is directed towards a world beyond the text, recent biography of Derrida (2012), in order with Gasché, who in turn is in conversation signifi cation, and geophilosophy. In conceiv- to reframe his relationship with religion as with Derrida, on the subject of Deleuze and ing of the world, one would have to reach a movement between text and context, and Guattari’s last collaborative publication. Dol- past absolute deterritorialization, to a “point between communism and Christian social gopolski further sought to intervene in dis- with no coordinates,” and towards a world democracy. In light of such scholarship, she course on the mutual engagement of art and to be remembered. (Miyako Hayakawa) questioned how to think about Derrida’s philosophy, by proposing the Talmud as an Jewishness in the context of a biographical intellectual and political form that prompts In the concluding round-table discussion, development in which a “Christian Derrida” reading that is persistently open to the future Neil Saccamano (English and Comparative later gave way to a “Jewish Derrida.” and occupied with an unfi nished task. Talmu- Literature, Cornell University), Jonathan dic philosophical and political engagement Culler (English and Comparative Literature, Max Pensky noted that it was Francis entails irreducible distinctions, the task of Cornell University), Max Pensky (Philosophy, Fukuyama who kindled Derrida’s opposition remembering, and action informed by para- Binghamton University, SUNY), and Camille to neo-conservatism, which in turn infl uenced doxical impossibilities of decision-making. Robcis (History, Cornell University) posed his work and political involvement. Pensky questions and provided insight into debates recalled that very late in Derrida’s life, he and Dolgopolski plotted out Gasché’s critique of 9 Jürgen Habermas had reached a rapprochement that for Derrida, what was important was not literature, speculating that literature might on political issues, and revealed that so much the arrival of a “new international,” have been the domain of the incommunicable Habermas and Derrida had meant to rally but rather the act of waiting for its formation, for Derrida, and thus a way to communicate intellectuals together to publish a statement and that this stance was in fact what Derrida without communication. (Hannah Müller) protesting against the invasion of Iraq and had tried to derive from Judaism. The group the Second Gulf War. He went on to suggest concluded with a discussion of the status of

On Seriality

May 1-2, 2015 discussed a number of cinematic and ways in which the character of Dunyazad has televisual depictions of serial killers in an been taken out of Scheherazade’s narrative The German Studies Graduate Student effort to understand the role such fi gures vacuum by twentieth-century writers. Conference “On Seriality” (organized play in the social imaginary. Following the by Hannah Müller, Leigh York, and Will work of Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson Sarah Seidel’s (Konstanz University) Krieger) explored the concept of seriality as on utopianism, Cash suggested that serial presentation “On the Relation of Seriality a common ground for multiple disciplines killers fulfi ll a utopian function, of however and Case Studies” focused on Karl Philipp and discourses, in which seriality can be perverse a kind, as individuals able to carry Moritz and August Gottlieb Meißner and understood as, among other things, an out free, creative, and non-alienated labor. He their engagement with the textual genre aesthetic form, a practice or common logic of also proposed that the parallels often drawn of the literary case study, prompted by an production above all in mass media, and as within these narratives between serial killers awakened interest in serial publications a mode of connecting and organizing objects and the obsessive investigators that pursue in the late eighteenth century. Whereas considered similar or related, but still distinct. them have to do with these fi gures’ common Moritz’ Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde expressions of a collective utopian wish. distributed anthropologic and medical cases The fi rst panel focused on “Serial Killers Cash positioned these narratives in relation to collected by the publishers or readers of the and Spies: Genre and Seriality in Crime the notion of seriality developed in Sartre’s magazine, Meißner’s case studies focused on Narratives.” Bryan Klausmeyer (Johns Critique of Dialectical Reason, as well as the aspects of criminality. In her presentation, Hopkins) delivered his presentation with Nietzschean concept of the ‘overman.’ The Seidel investigated two features of seriality: the title “‘I’ll see you again in twenty-fi ve serial killer, he suggested, provides in place fi rst, the relationship between seriality and years’: On Seriality in Twin Peaks.” In of the formation of a Sartrean ‘fused group’ case studies, and second, the meaning of the wake of David Lynch’s announcement an individual, apolitical, and Nietzschean contextual relativity. The publication of regarding an upcoming sequel to Twin Peaks overcoming of the divided world of seriality. “revisions” and “revisions of revisions” in (1990-1991, ABC), Klausmeyer analyzed Moritz’ Magazin implies both an idea of the groundbreaking television series, which The following panel revolved around seriality and a conception of textual dialogue. has often been considered the forerunner to “Episodes, Cases, Anecdotes: Modes of While the model of serial publication helps today’s serialized cable dramas. He briefl y Seriality in Narration.” Pelin Kivrak (Yale), to enlighten the reader by comparing considered how the upcoming sequel might in her presentation titled “‘How sweet is exemplary cases, Seidel demonstrated how retroactively affect spectators’ understanding thy story, O Sister Mine:’ Refl ections on the same text can obtain other meanings in and viewing of the original series, Seriality and Abandonment in One Thousand different contexts, and how serial publication before focusing primarily on the show’s and One Nights,” discussed the role of produces very different contexts, from epistemology of serialized narration. At the Scheherazade’s sister Dunyazad and her Aesopian fables to philosophical treaties. The center of his presentation was the claim that ambiguous role as reader and partner in concept of seriality consequently impacts Twin Peaks incorporates elements from two the original text, as well as in more recent both individual literary case studies and seemingly incompatible serialized genres: adaptations of the folkloric material. Kivrak the conception of the case study in general. that of the soap opera or melodrama, whose proposed that within the framework of the episodes relate to one another in a more or nightly copulation rituals inside the King’s The panel continued with a presentation by less contingent and contiguous fashion, and chamber, Dunyazad continuously abandons Will Krieger (Cornell), titled “Anecdote and that of the detective series, whose narrative both her voice and her sexuality only to regain Series in Kleist’s ‘Improbable Veracities’.” structure depends on patterns of inference them later, outside of this confi ned space. Krieger examined the serial logic of and deduction. Klausmeyer argued that by Furthermore, Dunyazad acts out a similarly Heinrich von Kleist’s “Unwahrscheinliche combining elements of suspicion and doubt purposeful abandonment of Scheherazade’s Wahrhaftigkeiten,” published in an 1811 with a perpetual suspension of disbelief, tales in order to confi ne the King to the edition of the Berliner Abendblätter. In the Twin Peaks develops its own heterogeneous experience of willing suspension of disbelief text, an old offi cer of the Prussian Army form(s) of serialized narration, active at an every night. Kivrak’s paper contrasted the relates three stories to a critical audience. The intersection of linear and nonlinear plots indefi nitely extendible story-telling in One offi cer begins by posing a “fi rst condition of or series while also using clues and cliff- Thousand and One Nights with the potential truth”: while general expectations are that hangers, thus employing a logic that is expandability of the character of Dunyazad truths appear probable, experience teaches predominantly contingent and associative, by focusing on a number of retellings of the us that this is not always the case. Ostensibly as opposed to deductive and inferential. text from around the world, such as John in order to prove this proposition, the offi cer Barth’s “Dunyazadiad” in Chimera (1972), proceeds to tell his stories, reconstructing Conall Cash (Cornell) then presented a Naguib Mahfouz’s Arabian Nights and contingent events as chains of causality paper on “Sartrean Seriality and Nietzschean Days (1979), and Assia Djebar’s A Sister to while emphasizing the veracity of his Heroism in Serial Killer Narratives.” He Scheherazade (1987), and looked into the accounts. Krieger observed that the offi cer’s audience expresses increasing disbelief at Anastasia Klimchynskaya (University of offered presentations on the visual artists the offi cer’s stories, and argued that rather Pennsylvania) spoke on the topic of “Genre Roni Horn and Joseph Beuys. Zachary than the content of the stories, it is primarily and Seriality: From 19th-Century Fiction to Rottman’s (UCLA) paper “Two Objects That the offi cer’s narration — its modes of 21st-Century Television.” Klimchynskaya Are One Object: Roni Horn’s Androgynous reconstructing the course of events and the discussed two forms of serialized fi ction and Seriality” discussed Horn’s work with serial nature of the stories’ delivery — that their relationships to conventions of genre. reference to the style of Minimalism. Rottman pose an epistemological problem and cause First, she described serialized fi ction that posited that seriality appears to characterize the offi cer’s audience to laugh and discredit hinges on cliffhangers, unresolved questions, the predominant sculptural paradigm of him entirely by the end of the text. Krieger and deferred narrative closure — stylistic Minimalism. Minimalist works are often compared the offi cer’s use of examples devices of the nineteenth-century novel, industrially fabricated, and this serial mode of with the mode of persuasion described in which eventually developed into melodrama production often expresses itself in gridded or Aristotle’s Rhetoric, by which examples and soap operas. In contrast, Klymchynskaya otherwise repetitive compositions. Therefore, are strung together based on analogy. In presented A.C. Doyle’s approach to serial to speak of an “original” in the context Aristotle’s elaboration, anecdotal examples narratives, which create a “(pre)virtual of Minimalist seriality is inaccurate. In from the past are deployed in order to predict reality” through a collection of linked yet consideration of this claim, Rottman analyzed outcomes of present situations that have not standalone stories. Such literary virtual Roni Horn’s Pair Object VII: (For a Here and yet been resolved. Therefore, persuasion reality, which led to the emergence of genre a There), an installation that consists of two by example is caught in a precarious shows in the twentieth century and transmedia solid copper volumes — compact but plainly temporality of belatedness, in which proof storytelling in the twenty-fi rst, won viewer massive truncated cones — which have been must wait until events have run their course. loyalty by developing fi ctional worlds machined to identical specifi cations. Rottman In contrast, Kleist’s offi cer applies the same over many segments. Klimchynskaya tied proposed that seriality is clearly at stake in a frustrating temporal logic of belatedness to together genre and seriality, demonstrating work premised on such a precise repetition, historical events, reading factual events as the infl uence of the two aforementioned whose roman numeral “VII” in its title improbable. Krieger argued that the stories approaches to serialization on genre, asserts its belonging to a larger series. Yet the are situated on an interstitial threshold and argued that the combination of these main question, he suggested, is how to think between necessity and impossibility, and approaches to serialization is responsible of a pair object as serial. In his presentation, concluded that the narrative’s seriality opens for the unprecedented mixing of genres in Rottman argued that the logic of the pair up a space in which a spectrum of probability recent television. Focusing on the long- pervading Horn’s work critiques Minimalist and improbability can be explored. running TV show Supernatural (2005- seriality. While repetition in the Minimalist present, CW), she demonstrated how today’s sculptures of Donald Judd is concerned with The third panel of the conference was cult shows blend the narrative deferment of fi xing a work’s identity, Horn’s serialized concerned with “Continuity and Deferment: soap operas with the virtual realities of genre pairs call into question the very notion TV Series and Lowbrow Genres.” Kriszta fi ction and thus allow for the innovations of a stable identity. Horn’s pair, though Pozsonyi (Cornell) presented a paper with the of contemporary television storytelling. presented as an exact repetition, proposes title “Serialized by the Running Gag: Ellen’s that its constituent parts are not the same but Coming-out Season,” which discussed the Ilana Emmett’s (Northwestern) presentation different — that they are far from representing coming out of Ellen Morgan, the title character with the title “Seriality and the Afterlife of a condition of “multiples without originals.” of the sitcom Ellen (1994-1998, ABC), played Reality TV” drew attention to binge-watching Because Horn’s pairs prefi gure a logic of by Ellen DeGeneres. The constantly deferred practices of reality TV shows. Emmett androgyny that the artist would explore in coming out of the character was meticulously explained that serial drama is not the only type later works, Rottman ultimately argued that synchronized with the public coming out of of television programming that has an afterlife the pair offers an androgynous conception DeGeneres as lesbian, resulting in a series of on a variety of platforms, including network of seriality: one premised not on sameness media events, all confronting the expectation websites, streaming sites, and DVD. Just as but on difference, no longer consolidating that the fi ctional and the real Ellen would one can fi nd fi ctional television programming identity but opening it to plurality. fi nally come out of the closet. Instead of on DVD or online, so too can one access prioritizing the actual moment of Morgan’s various types of reality television, including Andrea Gyorody’s (UCLA) presentation or DeGeneres’ coming out, Pozsonyi focused docusoaps, competition shows, and makeover focused on “Repetition and Difference in on the build-up of viewers’ expectations. programming. Emmett’s presentation Joseph Beuys’s Multiples.” Although best She discussed how the fi gurative closet and focused on the question of how to explain the known for his myth-infused performances the coming-out narrative as running gags fortitude of these programs, despite the fact and sculptural installations in the 1960s and work to create a coherent arc for the fourth that this kind of television is often thought 70s, German artist Joseph Beuys also created season, thus pushing the structure of the of in both popular culture and scholarship nearly six hundred so-called “multiples” sitcom in the direction of a serial. While as disposable. She argued that, like dramas, — small, three-dimensional objects that were situation comedies generically consist of these texts also gain staying power through replicated or reproduced in other media, self-contained episodes, the running joke, seriality, though in their cases seriality exists such as prints or photographs. Considered especially the “in-joke,” contributes features not through continuing narratives but through revolutionary for their “democratically” low of repetition and continuity. Poszonyi showed continuities of space, character, and familiar prices and their challenge to the singularity, how the running gag on Ellen pulls together images. By looking at the text and afterlives unity, and uniqueness of the art object, the episodes of the fourth season, and pointed of TLC’s makeover/fashion program Say multiples have nevertheless been largely out that the expression “running gag” does Yes to the Dress (2007-present), and Food neglected by art-historical scholarship, often in fact reference the repeated silencing of Network’s competition reality show Cupcake seen as mere by-products of monumental the coming out, which forms the butt of Wars (2010-2013), Emmett explored the works or as moneymaking souvenirs. the jokes. In order for the jokes to work, ways in which seriality is developed through Drawing on archival research and interviews the viewer must recognize the coming-out themes and images, through spaces and with Beuys’s colleagues, Gyorody argued, on narrative in scenarios that paradoxically turn faces, and through repetition and structure. the contrary, that Beuys’s multiples perform out to not be about coming out. Meaning an important function that his other projects in the season is therefore based on a On Saturday, May 2, the fi rst panel, “Without do not: in addition to embodying social recurring choreography of misrecognition. Original: The Multiple in the Visual Arts” principles Beuys espoused, the multiples also 11 two installments: “What do Lists Know? Thinking Serially I” on Friday, and “Classify, Collect, Enumerate: Thinking Serially II” on Saturday. Laying the groundwork for a poetics of the list, Frey’s and Martyn’s lectures explored lists as an alternative to “subsumptive” forms of knowledge that identify a thing by subordinating it under a class. If literary theory has often valued lists for their disarticulating or deconstructive potential, Frey and Martyn emphasized the capacity of lists to articulate things differently: techniques of sequentially arranging, combining, and ordering words and things not only subvert categorical hierarchies, but they also positively generate new orderings of knowledge. As predecessors who investigated such an epistemic potential of lists, Frey and Martyn cited (among inadvertently index aspects Martyn & Frey The others) methodological refl ections of the of their own production second speaker of the panel, early-modern philosopher Francis Bacon and their imbrication in Ross Etherton (University and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s natural- an art world dominated by market forces. of Colorado, Boulder) presented his paper scientifi c writings. Bacon’s groundwork for For example, the multiple Ich kenne kein “Reading against the Gun: Seriality and a new scientifi c methodology recommends Weekend (I Know No Weekend, 1971-72) Ernst Jünger’s Sturm.” Etherton considered techniques of collecting observations in includes a text by Kant and a bottle of Maggi both Ernst Jünger’s novel and the machine lists and tables as an antidote against false seasoning; however, a later edition of 1995, gun as manifestations of a confl ict between generalizations, and Goethe similarly which was only produced to meet demand, two orders of martial technology: one bound endorses a practice of recording “observations contains a bottle with a different label, to rotation, continuity, and the incalculability without concepts” that can be ordered and re- refl ecting a Maggi re-branding campaign. of chance operations, and another bound ordered in various ways, revealing the multi- Another set of multiples consisting of a green to calculability, precision, and productive dimensional connectedness of things in nature. violin and a tin can telephone, initially sold interruption. Both the novel and the gun Echoing Hans Blumenberg’s ‘absolute together in a wooden crate, were separated were produced serially, as Jünger’s novel metaphor,’ Martyn and Frey then introduced by the dealer after numerous customers fi rst appeared as a serial publication in 1923 the phrase “absolute series” in their second expressed disdain over the unsightly crate. and the MG 08/15 model was the fi rst mass- lecture, to designate enumerations whose Gyorody argued that the porousness of these produced machine gun. However, they also unifying principle can itself only be objects blurs the line between high art and produced seriality: the MG in its ballistic represented in serial form. Absolute lists thus commercial mass production, furthering projection, and the novel in its disruptions and do not exemplify an external principle or the challenge that multiples as a medium continuously attempted restorations of linear concept, but engender ordering principles tied pose to traditional conceptions of high art. progression. Thus, the case of war as refl ected to a specifi c serial articulation. The kinds of Moreover, the multiples stand to disrupt the in the nature of the machine gun and in Sturm patterns registered by such ordering principles standard narrative around Beuys’s oeuvre shows a non-progressive form of seriality. are, in contrast to related taxonomical by placing the artist’s reliance on myth in techniques for knowledge generation, open- tension with his strong material ties to his Kasia Kieca (Binghamton University) ended; they include not only ‘type-of’ own historical moment. (Hannah Müller) concluded the panel with her paper “Industrial Visions: The Politics of Assemblage in Lewis relations, but also multiple and various kinds The last panel of the conference, “Work and Hine’s Men at Work (1932).” In her reading of of relationships between members. Mindful War: Industrialization and Serial Techniques,” Lewis Wickes Hine’s 1932 photo story Men of the irreducibly list-like articulation of was opened by Josh Alvizu (Yale) with a at Work: Photographic Studies of Modern this form of knowledge, Frey and Martyn paper entitled “Let’s Make it Work: Montage, Men and Machines, Kieca discussed to what advanced their discussion by closely reading Series, Raccourcis.” Whereas montage is end seriality, layout, and design function a number of lists in literature and philosophy. predominantly considered as a form (either to create, subdue, or contest meaning in Examples included: a passage from George as a genre or as a technique), Alvizu argued the book. In Hine’s work, she claimed, Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual that describes in serial form unsatisfactory attempts to put for a reconsideration of the montage as meaning is created through fragmentation of two kinds: through temporal dislocation hotel stickers in order; Johann Gottfried an activity, thereby stressing the montage Herder’s interpretation of the sequence of praxis of cutting, colliding, connecting, and and recontextualization of photographs, as well as through the interruption of logical the seven days of Genesis as a ‘hieroglyph’ assembling. In his discussion of Soviet theater for the structure of creation; Jacob Grimm’s director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s (1874-1940) sequences. In a continuous deferment of closure emblematized by the absence of speculations that the arrangement of letters constructivist method of actor training known in the Latin alphabet follow an underlying as “biomechanics,” Alvizu showed how fi nished industrial products and panoramic pictures, the book functions as an opaque and structuring principle; and an aphorism Meyerhold’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898- in which Friedrich Nietzsche lists things 1948) notion of the raccourci — a “utilitarian cryptic commentary on the conditions of the working class of his time. (Matthias Müller) with regard to which he persistently and point of break between two moments” — can hopefully develops “Brief Habits” that seem be read as a montage praxis that overcomes Christiane Frey (New York University) to promise lasting satisfaction: areas of life the older notion of the pose and sheds new and David Martyn (Macalester College) including “dishes, thoughts, people, cities, light on our concept of montage in general. delivered a collaborative keynote lecture in poems, music, doctrines, daily schedules, and ways of living.” (Johannes Wankhammer) Artist in Residence: Ulrich Peltzer

April 1-19, 2015 the author, highlighting Peltzer’s important role as a Poeta doctus From April 1-19, 2015, German who questions the possibilities and author Ulrich Peltzer visited Cornell obligations of literature in a world of University as Writer in Residence at the media and global capitalism. Peltzer Institute for German Cultural Studies. then took the podium to provide Author of fi ve novels and a book on insight into personal experiences, poetics, and co-author of several the texts and writers that infl uenced fi lm scripts with the Berlin school him, and the relationship between fi lmmaker Christoph Hochhäusler, theory and praxis that has shaped his Peltzer has been recognized with perceptions of history, the present numerous distinguished literary time, and himself as an author. awards and is the director of the literature section of the “Academy of Peltzer spoke about his early years the Arts” in Berlin. During his stay as a student of psychology and at Cornell, he held a literary reading, philosophy in Berlin, during which conducted a compact seminar with he wrote forensic reports to make students and faculty, presented fi lms legible. With these encounters, Peltzer’s money, and learned how to examine he had co-written, and delivered the Cornell novel opens an additional space for contact the reality around him while also gaining Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics. between historical events of the twentieth familiarity with individual case histories of century, especially those concerning the social outsiders and misfi ts, later recurring On April 6, Peltzer read from his newest oppositional and revolutionary left and the themes in his oeuvre. He described his studies novel titled Das Bessere Leben (2015). The intricate cartographies of contemporary under Klaus Holzkamp, who took a central novel, set in 2006, follows three protagonists fi nance capitalism. These fi elds of contacts, role in the critical psychology movement whose professional endeavors trace the encounters, and crossings converge to with a Marxist approach, and explained geographies of globalized capitalism as well shape the stakes of the novel: how thinking that this shaped his understanding of socio- as recall past protests and uprisings against it: a “better life” and satisfying a “longing for political structures in his surroundings. Apart a German sales manager Jochen Brockmann, justice” (Verlangen nach Gerechtigkeit) can from his own political standpoint, Peltzer who works for an Italian industrial fi rm; be possible in the present. (William Krieger) realized early in his writing career that literary Angelika Volkhart, an employee of a Dutch texts from Samuel Beckett, Mark Twain, shipping company who was born in the GDR On Tuesday, April 14, Peltzer met with James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and Fyodor and speaks Russian fl uently; and an “older” faculty and graduate students from Cornell’s Dostoevsky seemed to him most convincing American named Sylvester Lee Fleming. Department of German Studies and adjacent in pointing out the insuffi cient status of For his reading, Peltzer selected a scene in literature departments for a compact seminar reality because they create a new syntax that which Fleming — a shadowy fi gure, both on the topic “Die Ästhetik des Politischen.” triggers epistemological insights, affects, and biographically and professionally — awakens In his opening remarks, Peltzer mapped emotions on a level beyond any political or in a cold sweat in a Sao Paolo hotel room, out ways of thinking the relationship of ideological program. Peltzer explained that where he is staying on unnamed business. aesthetics and politics in contemporary he sees his own role as an author as that of Sipping a half-drunk beer left over from the literature, in particular in the novel, based a catalyst, altering the reality around him night before, Fleming recounts his dream, on Theodor Adorno’s Notes to Literature, with his own perceptions. At the same time, which moves between an uprising in the streets the work of Gilles Deleuze, and Peter Weiss’ these perceptions are highly formed and of Sao Paolo and episodes on the American dictum “aesthetic matters are always also infl uenced by certain intellectual traditions college campus Kent State with a friend and political matters.” Peltzer raised several key and cannot been thought without them. possible love interest named Allison (Krause, questions for discussion: What is resistant or who was one of the four students killed), as incommensurable about art? Does the political In turn, Peltzer described how reality also the two pass through campus demonstrations novel necessarily have to be a realist novel? intrudes into these traditions, interrupting against the Vietnam War and the Nixon And how much socio-economic analysis does and suspending them. While he was writing administration. As Peltzer suggested in the a literary author have to undertake in order his second novel Stefan Martinez (1995), the introduction to his reading, Das Bessere to write at all? Discussion among seminar Berlin Wall fell, along with the established Leben addresses problems of contingency and participants ensued concerning the meaning order of life with which he had been familiar. necessity in the forms of contact that shape and usefulness of realism as a central aesthetic In the process of writing Bryant Park (2002), its “plot,” a critical aesthetic point of interest category for political literature today. Close- his fourth novel, which is set in New York for the author. Through the intersection of readings of passages from E.L. Doctorow’s City, the September 11th attacks occurred. the three protagonists’ biographies, Peltzer 1971 novel The Book of Daniel provoked a Both events questioned the status of his own provokes his readers to consider to what debate about the concept of the political in light work and challenged Peltzer to fi nd a new way extent the history/story [Geschichte] these of the feminist and Civil Rights movements, to narrate his stories, and a new syntax that three fi gures inhabit is mere accident, or if and about the politics of representation, quotes certain traditions while breaking with Geschichte perhaps unfolds in accord with a narrative perspective, and form for the them at the same time. (Annekatrin Sommer) larger logic that approaches that of a Marxist contemporary political novel. (Jette Gindner) historical materialism —if the course of history is not utterly contingent, the lives of To conclude the series of events during his Fleming, Brockmann, and Volkhardt map stay, Peltzer delivered his Cornell Lecture out the political and economic relations on Contemporary Aesthetics, titled “Lesend that structure the present and make history Schreiben.” Peter Gilgen (Cornell) introduced 13 the fox’s misnomer the journals Gartenlaube and Über Land und Retrospective: Fall 2014 for its own self- Meer, which both began publication in the defi nition. At the 1850’s. However, the content of these pho- same time, the fox tographs remained entirely indecipherable Colloquium Series depends on the rec- to the largely lay audience of these journals; ognition of its fl at- only through captions accompanying printed Fabelhafte Macht: tery for its own self- images could the reader know what was be- Louis Marin liest Jean de La Fontaine sustenance. The fable form’s depiction of the ing represented in the microphotographs. The operations of sovereignty thus reveals the usefulness of photography was thus found September 5, 2014 minor genre’s conceptual power as a sec- not only in conveying the content of images, ond-order image that represents the mecha- but also in the implications of the medium: In her paper, “Fabelhafte Macht: Louis Marin nisms constituting sovereignty in the political as photography was understood to be an ob- liest Jean de La Fontaine,” Ethel Matala de imaginary. Matala de Mazza then analyzed jective representation of reality, micropho- images of “fabelhaften Machteffekten” il- tography served to index the real existence luminated in Marin’s readings of the two of intangible yet omnipresent microbes. By other fables to speak more broadly to the making the invisible visible through the pur- power of the narrator (Erzähler), conclud- portedly objective, positivistic medium of ing that Bildbegehren binds sovereign and photography, family journals participated in subordinate in an unwritten fi ctional pact re- a form of medial hygiene. Arndt argued that sembling a social contract. (Katrina Nousek) microphotography thereby served as a strat- egy for control: fi rst, in that the process of preparing microbes for photography by treat- ing and staining literally killed the photo- Seeing the Invisible: Hygiene and graphed microbes themselves; additionally, Contagion in 19th Century Popular and more importantly, because the popular- Media and Narrative ization of microphotography served as an at- tempt to curb the spread of microbes through Mazza (Institut für Deutsche Literatur, Hum- October 24, 2014 public education on issues of hygiene. boldt-Universität zu Berlin) elaborated upon twentieth-century philosopher Louis Marin’s For the IGCS colloquium series, Christiane Arndt also highlighted a contrasting aspect readings of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables in Arndt (Queen’s University) presented a pa- of the popularization of microphotography: order to investigate how power circulates in despite its use as a means of control and con- political imaginaries. According to Matala tainment, popular media (, including photo- de Mazza, Louis Marin’s Le portrait du roi graphs and information concerning public (1981) is a poetic refl ection on the power health), can spread from person-to-person of images, as well as an investigation of the and thus escape the supervision of its origi- mutual implication of sovereign and subject nal producers, or, in today’s nomenclature, through a type of doubled desire that Matala “go viral.” Furthermore, the language that de Mazza calls Bildbegehren. Marin, adapt- family journals used to explain microbes ing Port-Royal political logic, asserts a no- and promote health did not necessarily ex- tion of sovereignty in which power depends emplify contemporary ideals of scientifi c more on subjects’ recognition of a king’s control and objectivity. Instead, microbial power than the physical body of the king or contagion was described in hyperbolic rheto- attributes accruing to it; as Marin pointedly ric that exploited the uncanny nature of the states, the image of the king makes the king. invisible world of microbes. Far from being Matala de Mazza argued that this formula- a straightforward means of visualizing and tion demonstrates both the semiotic and per- per entitled “Seeing the Invisible – Hygiene controlling microbes, the claim of “making formative aspects of sovereignty. For Marin, and Contagion in 19th Century Popular Me- the invisible visible” also served to represent the image or representation of the king does dia and Narrative.” Arndt observed that the an uncanny and threatening aspect of every- not only replace his physical body, but also development of microbiological research and day life. Arndt further referenced two liter- constitutes the real presence of his power. the discovery of a multiplicity of microbes ary examples that connect scientifi c writing at the end of the nineteenth century were ac- and microbiology with uncanny or frighten- Matala de Mazza focused on the interludes companied by a push for public education on ing effects: Jeremias Gotthelf’s Die schwarze in Marin’s Le portrait du roi, which is struc- health and hygiene. Several German family Spinne (1843-44), and Edgar Allen Poe’s tured like the courtly ballets of Ludwig journals participated in this popularization The Sphinx (1846), both of which, Arndt XIV, as well as Marin’s essay, “Le pouvoir of medical knowledge, in part by publishing claimed, use the uncanny effect of small- du récit,” published in the 1978 collection, microphotography: photographs of microbes ness and invisibility to refl ect on phenomena Le récit est un piège. These works engage accompanied by explanatory captions and of contagion and the media. (Leigh York) Jean de La Fontaine’s versions of the fables, articles. Arndt explicated this publication “The Fox and the Crow,” “The Cat, the Wea- practice with examples drawn primarily from sel and the Young Rabbit,” and “The Power of Fables.” Matala de Mazza showed how Marin’s Newsletter summaries of Institute-sponsored events are generously provided by graduate students in reading of sovereignty through various stages of doctoral study in the interdisciplinary fi eld of German Studies at Cornell University. “The Fox and the Crow” posits These summaries are customarily written by students with a general audience in mind and highlight a model of power in which the selected aspects of complex presentations by specialists. crow, fl attered to be compared to a phoenix by the fox, relies on Fiction, Figment, Fabrication: Artifi ce of salient features corresponding to nominal make the world otherwise than it is.” Phrased and Evidence in J.J. Breitinger’s or logical defi nitions.” Wankhammer argued differently, Breitinger endows the poet with Poetics that Breitinger's poetics at fi rst follows, but the ability to “make things appear differ- eventually opposes Wolff’s principle of re- ently than they are according to common or November 21, 2014 duction, which is a neutral model for the philosophical understanding,” by using rhe- progressive reconstruction of objects in the torical and formal techniques external to the world through the elimination of the contin- supposed natural order. Thus, temporary ar- gencies of presentation. In Wolff's model, the tifi ce in Wolff’s model becomes instead the mode of presentation to the inner eye is arti- “proper activity” of poetry for Breitinger. fi ce: a supportive device that later disappears, in accordance with the project of Aufklärung, Rather than representing a mere inconsistency taken literally as “the gradual ‘clearing up’ of in Breitinger's work, Wankhammer suggest- concepts until they correspond … to the true ed that the tension between these currents in order of things.” While Breitinger largely Critische Dichtkunst “responds to a fi ssure in concurs with Wolff, he does so with a move- the order of words and things.” The force of ment counter to that of the principle of reduc- this tension culminates perhaps in the fi gure tion, assigning poetry the role of restoring an of the marvelous, which Breitinger defi nes as “excess multiplicity” to truth that is lost in a “defamiliarization of truth” beyond recog- the distillation of a “logical essence” from a nition, and which allows for two approaches “manifold representation.” Such restoration to poetic truth: one of degree and another of adds to essentialized truth a pleasant “taste”– kind. In the former, a subset of the category as that of a sugar coating – that eases its con- of the new, defamiliarization interrupts the Johannes Wankhammer (Cornell Univer- sumption by “the great majority of people, mechanized translative activity of the mind sity) concluded the Fall 2014 IGCS collo- who are guided by phantasmatic images and lends it the appearance of novelty, while quium series with the presentation of his pa- produced by the passions and the senses.” allowing truth to be restored without alter- per, “Fiction, Figment, Fabrication: Artifi ce ing its essential qualities. The marvelous can and Evidence in J.J. Breitinger’s Poetics.” Wankhammer argued that while Breitinger's also reveal the possibility of another kind of Wankhammer examined Breitinger’s 1740 poetics of evidentia may imply a “necessary false or improper evidence, in which poetic poetic treatise Critische Dichtkunst in light order of truth,” his interpretation of Leibniz' truth—considered by means of the paradoxi- of the author’s engagement with and differ- notion of the world as contingent – the pos- cal metaphor of an at once “wholly foreign” entiation from the philosophies of Christian sibility of “countless worlds qua compossible and yet “transparent” mask—is no longer Wolff and Gottfried Leibniz, as well as his things” – undermines precisely the determi- simply “(re)constructed” according to a concurrent anticipation of certain problems nate order to which Breitinger's poetics alleg- given practice, or what is left after “artifi cial that would later become central to the aes- edly points. According to Wankhammer, Leib- additions” have been removed, but rather the thetics of Alexander Baumgarten. As a “po- niz' account takes on a concessive aspect that very function of presentational techniques. etics of evidentia,” Breitinger delineates Breitinger forgoes. For the former, the world As Wankhammer argued, such “metaphysi- the capacity of language to “present things is derivatively necessary, being the result of cal fi ssures” rendered legible in Breitinger's before the ‘eye(s) of the mind’ by vivid or the creator's decision to make actual the best poetics both anticipate and shed light on detailed description.” The eye then processes of all possible worlds. In Breitinger's poetics, the concerns of the subsequently emer- these representations through an operation the same notion not only becomes proof of gent fi eld of aesthetics. (William Krieger) of “active inspection,” a translation of the the world's infi nite changeability, but also be- empirical “manifold of an object” into “a set comes the grounds for the poet's “license to

online communities. Specifi cally targeting Retrospective: Spring 2015 online fan-based journals, Müller argued that the increased emergence of political discourse within these communities indicates a need to Colloquium Series reconceptualize the notion of fandom (and the public sphere) so as to include their al- From Secretive Subculture to ternate forms of social and political activism. Alternative Public Sphere: Journal- Based Fandom and Political After noting signifi cant controversies con- Discourse cerning the status of “community” in online settings, Müller defi ned community as a February 6, 2015 description of the common practices, expe- riences, vocabularies, histories, and shared The Spring 2015 IGCS colloquium series affective commitments of any social group, opened with the presentation of a paper by stressing that an individual can be invested Hannah Müller (Cornell University), titled in multiple communities at once with each “From Secretive Subculture to Alternative contributing to an aspect of their self-con- Public Sphere: Journal-Based Fandom and ception. She then elaborated upon how trans- Political Discourse.” Müller explored the formative fandom in particular has been the potential advantages and disadvantages subject of much scholarly work, insofar as of linking Jürgen Habermas’ notion of the its practices bind fans together in communi- public sphere with discursive practices of ties even more so than the objects of inter- est themselves. The key to understanding 15 transformative fandom is, according to Mül- and the space program in the Soviet Union. Baroque Colors: ler, the fact that the fans involved do more A Concept in Transition than simply consume cultural objects and Against the backdrop of this regional texts; rather, they revise and rework content constellation, Fritzsche analyzed Kurt March 13, 2015 in an expression of fandom. These appropria- Maetzig’s fi lm Der Schweigende Stern (1960) tions, which are generally referred to as “fan- as part of the ‘cosmic’ or ‘space culture’ in Margrit Vogt (Max Kade Distinguished Vis- works,” often contain subversive impulses 1950s/1960s Eastern Europe. She suggested iting Professor, Michigan State University / that challenge concepts of authorship and that the success of early GDR science originality by treating works as open archives fi ction fi lms owed much to public interest that can be expanded upon indefi nitely. In in the Soviet space program and the use of such a way, transformative fandom starts the theme of space exploration as a way to to constitute an alternative public sphere. engage and educate children and youth.

Müller used several examples to illustrate the For Fritzsche, Der Schweigende Stern is political potential of transformative fandom. an example of the ‘utopian realism’ that One striking instance involved fans of the developed as an aesthetic approach in East Hunger Games franchise, who used the fi lms’ German post-war speculative fi ction out of narratives to underscore parallels between the tension between ideological restrictions the social inequalities depicted in the novel- and the genre of fantastical literature. The based fi lms and those that actually exist, focus on technological advancement that or that they themselves had experienced. functioned as an important aspect of East Müller also cited the debates of the 2009 German Marxism allowed science fi ction to online controversy dubbed RaceFail ‘09, reach beyond a strict adherence to the rules as an important moment in the discourse of government-prescribed socialist realism. surrounding transformative fandom. RaceFail Featuring settings positioned in a near ‘09 was a controversy in the science-fi ction future and futuristic speculation supported community between mostly white authors by ‘scientifi c’ explanations, science fi ction of science fi ction and their transformative could be legitimized as scientifi c prediction fans of color. Fans criticized the widespread rather than fantastical imagination. ethnocentrism and cultural appropriation in speculative fi ction, while some authors Fritzsche further suggested that contrary to Universität Flensburg) presented her paper attempted to regulate fans’ criticism by general assumption, the anti-nuclear message “Baroque Colors: A Concept in Transition” insisting on adherence to the rules of conveyed by Maetzig’s fi lm and the role of for the IGCS Colloquium Series on March 13, academic discourse. Müller concluded that the its American protagonist were not only an 2015. Vogt’s paper was introduced as part of RaceFail ‘09 debates may not have resulted engagement with the history of the American a larger project that investigates the manner in a universal consensus among participants, physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer and the in which color concepts are formed and por- yet they do indicate how transformative development of the nuclear bomb. Instead, she trayed in literature across disparate historical fandom can compel a dominant or hegemonic perceives this plot also as a reference to the and cultural contexts. Color concepts, Vogt community to repeatedly confront its controversial German rocket scientist Werner argued, are not universal and invariant, but own discursive rules, opening up a space von Braun, whose story was integrated appar- rather are socially and culturally conditioned for productive critique. (Matthew Stoltz) ently seamlessly into the US-American and and come to be determined in connection with the means of producing and reproducing colors that are available to any given society.

Dreams of ‘Cosmic Culture’ in Within this framework, Vogt presented the Der schweigende Stern [The Silent Baroque period as a time in which a transi- Star, 1960] tional understanding of color was negotiated. In contrast to the preceding Medieval period February 20, 2015 in which colors were fully associated with and inextricable from the objects that instan- Sonja Fritzsche (Illinois Wesleyan tiated them, in the Baroque period, colors University) was the second speaker of were increasingly seen as detachable from the IGCS Colloquium Series in spring of the objects in which they were observed. 2015. She presented her paper with the Colors, Vogt argued, come to be understood, title “Dreams of ‘Cosmic Culture’ in Der as René Descartes and John Locke posit, as schweigende Stern [The Silent Star, 1960],” secondary properties that are not essentially which explored the production of science attached to objects, but are rather separate fi ction movies in the GDR in the 1950s and and secondary phenomena. Vogt asserted that 1960s. Fritzsche proposed that in order to this epistemological shift in the way in which fully understand the conditions that shaped colors are conceived is rooted in the chang- science fi ction cinema in East Germany, West German cultural memory. In contrast, ing means of production and reproduction of it is necessary to consider fi lms within Fritzsche proposed that through the fi gure of color on a societal level. As opposed to the a framework of inter- and transnational a scientist who defi es political pressure in fa- Medieval period, during which certain colors relations. Not only is it important to take into vor of his desire for scientifi c exploration, the could not be produced at all and other col- account the rivalry between Eastern European movie Der schweigende Stern was intended ors could only be inconsistently reproduced, countries and the West during the Cold War to disengage East German space culture in the Baroque period, improved means of era, but East German cinema also needs to be from Germany’s history of rocket produc- production and wider access to common seen in its connection to cultural production tion during the Third Reich. (Hannah Müller) resources enabled more consistent color production and reproduction. This, in turn, text to be media that relate to the verbal narra- trace the sutures of a human skull with the prompted the conceptual distancing of col- tive but do not themselves produce or commu- needle of a phonograph. Although Rilke ors from the objects that instantiated them. nicate meaning. In contrast, a multimodal un- speculates that the experiment would pro- derstanding of narrative conceptualizes each duce a “primal sound,” Bachner observed Vogt illustrated this ongoing process of dis- non-verbal mode as its own distinct system that the sound Rilke imagines would not in sociating the understanding of color from of communication and meaning-production. fact be primal, but rather a sonic mediation perceived objects with examples drawn of natural contours with an inscriptive trace. from Baroque poetry, in which colors are Focusing on textual examples such as Mar- Paradoxically, sound is only considered “pri- described not as inhering within objects, but lene Streeruwitz’s novel Lisa’s Liebe (2005) mal” once it has been mediated; at the same rather as separate from objects. Vogt con- and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Hallet time, the concept of mediation is what gives cluded her paper by arguing that this process posited that the multimodal novel neces- rise to the very concept of something un-me- of understanding colors as detached from sitates a number of signifi cant shifts in the diated. Bachner, thus, understands Rilke’s their objects continued in subsequent cen- conceptualization of narrativity in the novel, essay to be exploring a concurrent excess turies until it reached its pinnacle in expres- namely: writing becomes designing; nar- and lack of mediation in sound recording. sionist art, in which colors are experienced ration becomes a function of collecting, ar- as entirely independent from objects, an un- chiving, and presenting; theories of narrative Bachner then read Friedrich Kittler’s inter- derstanding that likewise refl ects contempo- expand to include non-verbal, non-linguis- pretation of Rilke’s essay, presented in his rary social experiences. (Stephen Klemm) tic semiotic systems; the act of reading as- highly infl uential work for German media sumes an non-linear, hypertextual character; studies, Grammophon – Film – Typewriter and the reader can be understood as a “user” (1986). She argued that Kittler appropriates who takes an active role in ordering and con- Rilke’s experiment for his own theory of The Multimodal Novel: Generic structing meaning across multiple verbal and media-specifi city and progression, under- Change and its Narratological non-verbal semiotic systems. Hallet con- standing sound recording as surpassing the Implicaitons cluded by proposing that concepts of multi- capabilities of graphic writing in its media- modality might throw new light on historical tion of reality. In contrast, Bachner argued April 10, 2015 precursors of the contemporary multimodal that by focusing on inscription, Rilke de- novel, such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram velops a concept of mediated sound that On April 10, the IGCS colloquium series Shandy, an early novel in the history of the retroactively informs, rather than dismisses continued with a presentation by Wolfgang genre that famously incorporates non-verbal the possibilities of writing. With reference Hallet (Justus- and non-novelistic elements. (Leigh York) to media historian Lisa Gitelman, Bachner Liebig-Univer- maintained that written and sonic media are sität Giessen). mutually infl uenced; furthermore, notions Hallet’s paper, of mediation and the un-mediated are con- “The Multimodal Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and tinually revised as new mediums develop. Novel: Generic the Mediation of Sound Change and its The paper concluded with two literary ex- Narratological April 24, 2015 cerpts from works written in the 1990s that Implications,” allude to Rilke’s essay: Dürs Grünbein’s es- refl ected on The IGCS Spring 2015 colloquium series say “Three Letters” (“Drei Briefe,” 1991) the emergence concluded with the presentation of a paper by and Marcel Beyer’s novel The Karnau Tapes and increas- Andrea Bachner (Cornell) titled “Out of the (Flughunde, 1996). Grünbein’s text ascribes ing prevalence Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of to X-ray imaging an invasiveness similar to of multimodal novels since the 1990s. Hal- the acoustic inscription imagined in Rilke’s let defi ned the multimodal novel as a novel essay. Grünbein’s poetics more broadly, as that integrates multiple semiotic systems demonstrated in his aphoristic essay, “Neun into its narrative discourse, often including Variationen zur Fontanelle” (1993) and the non-verbal elements such as images, maps, collection of poems titled Falten und Fallen or diagrams. These artifacts are not external (1994), is concerned with a human corporeal- to the narration, but instead are intrinsic to ity that cannot be thought separately from lan- the fi ctional world of the novel and are cre- guage. In Beyer’s novel the protagonist Kar- ated, used, and produced within that world. nau, a sound technician who had performed Verbal narratives also often comment on and experiments on prisoners held in concentra- refer to co-present, non-verbal modalities ac- tion camps during the Holocaust, narrates the tive in a text. In consideration of these phe- Sound.” For her paper, Bachner excerpted se- very experiment that Rilke suggested, as Kar- nomena, Hallet argued that prominent nar- lections from her current project, titled Inscrip- nau’s former SS colleagues carry it out on his ratological paradigms must be reconceived tive Passions, Poststructuralist Prehistories, own person. Karnau experiences the sound in order to accommodate the presence and which seeks to construct a “theoretical gene- that he hears during the procedure as penetra- function of these textual features. Accord- alogy” of metaphors of inscription in contem- tion; thus, inscription on the body is translated ing to Hallet, language is only one among porary theory and postructuralism. By exam- into sound, which in turn inscribes itself onto many possible ways of producing and com- ining depictions and theoretizations of sound the body in a mediated feedback loop. For municating meaning, and the multimodal recording from the nineteenth and twentieth Bachner, the conceptual quandary of inscrip- novel combines a variety of semiotic modes centuries, Bachner asserted that poststruc- tion and mediation laid out in Rilke’s essay, to produce a unifi ed “transmodal” meaning. turalism requires an “inscriptive imaginary” and the imagined experiment that illustrates for its foundational concepts of mediation. the paradoxes inherent in concepts of materi- Hallet distinguished multimodality from inter- ality and originality, draw attention to a nec- medial analysis, asserting that theories of in- Bachner’s point of departure was Rainer Ma- essary but often overlooked precondition for termediality consider non-verbal elements in a ria Rilke’s 1919 essay, “Ur-Geräusch,” in poststructuralist thought and literature in the which an experiment is proposed that would later twentieth century. (Miyako Hayakawa) 17 Lectures and Events Turkish Nationalism and German German colonialism. First, source materials cratic colonialism was Ambassador Adolf Colonialism: are composed of disparate autobiographical Marschall von Bieberstein, who helped Ger- A Joint Venture During WWI writings and personal correspondences of man industry make inroads into the Otto- both Ottoman and German dignitaries, mili- man Empire. Finally, Fuhrmann identifi ed November 19, 2014 tary leaders, and intellectuals. Furthermore, as representatives of the third stage Colmar there was no unifi ed and state-sanctioned Freiherr von der Goltz, who was a military As part of the series, “WWI in the Ottoman scheme to implement German colonialism leader and writer, Ernst Jäckh, a journalist Empire,” hosted by the Ottoman and Turk- in the Ottoman Empire. Instead, German and promoter of a German-Ottoman alli- ish Studies Initiative (OTSI) at Cornell Uni- colonialism or imperialism was a continu- ance during WWI, and Ismail Enver Pasha, versity, Malte Fuhrmann (Ruhr-Universität ously regenerated process fueled by rival- an Ottoman military leader. The attention Bochum) presented a lecture entitled “Turk- ries between different groups in Germany. of this latter phase of German colonialism ish Nationalism and German Colonialism: was primarily on the Ottoman educational A Joint Venture During WWI.” Fuhrmann In the latter part of his lecture, Fuhrmann system, as well as on forging a military al- began by observing that traces of postcolo- identifi ed three stages in the development of liance between Germany and the Ottoman nial conditions can be seen in German so- German colonialism in ciety today. For example: Turks currently the Ottoman Empire: comprise the largest immigrant population romantic colonialism in Germany; Germany has been Turkey’s (with reference to the most important trade partner since the 1920s; work of Hannah Ar- and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, which endt), technocratic co- is the most visited museum in the country, lonialism, and a gen- has a collection of archeological fi nds from eration of purportedly the Ottoman Empire. However, Germany liberal or peaceful co- has never directly colonized any part of the lonialists. Furhmann Ottoman Empire. Fuhrmann suggested that turned to the fi gure an explanation for these postcolonial phe- of Carl Humann as a nomena in German society can be found by representative for the looking at German-Ottoman entangled histo- fi rst of these stages. ries from the nineteenth and early twentieth Humann, a road con- centuries, during a period of activity that he struction engineer by referred to as German colonialism. These en- training, is credited tangled histories have only recently received with the so-called dis- scholarly attention, most notably from his- covery of the Pergamon Altar, and inspired Empire. Thus, Fuhrmann introduced themes torical scholars such as Mustafa Gencer and a streak of grand-scale German archeologi- and events of cultural, industrial, and military Klaus Kreiser. Fuhrmann identifi ed two ma- cal explorations in the Ottoman Empire. The signifi cance that supported his conception jor challenges in reconstructing a history of focal fi gure of the second phase of techno- of German colonialism. (Andreea Mascan)

The Jewish Question Case primarily explored what a closer look quo and demanding sweep- in the Era of Questions at the “Jewish question” can reveal about the ing changes in domestic and “era of questions” more generally. She fi rst international policy. In the March 16, 2015 argued that in the nineteenth century a new nineteenth century, questions kind of ‘question’ emerged, and outlined were readily internationalized As part of the Jewish Studies Program some of the concept’s main features. Ques- and universalized and one of- Spring 2015 Event Series, Holly Case (His- tions in the nineteenth century consistently ten drew parallels between tory, Cornell) presented a paper titled “The deployed rhetorical modes that obscured the disparate or unrelated ques- Jewish Question in the Era of Questions.” realities of situations under discussion. Al- tions, suggesting for instance Case began by emphasizing that the “Jew- though the origins of some of the questions that the “Jewish question” could be solved the ish question” was just one of many focuses could not be found earlier than the beginning way other questions had or would be solved. of the nineteenth-century “era of questions.” of the nineteenth century, their proponents Questions such as the Corn, Bullion, and tended to endow them with a rich tradition, After outlining the features shared by the Population question, the Polish and Eastern making them seem older than they actually “Jewish question” and many other nine- questions, the Slavery question, the Woman were. In the case of the “Jewish question,” teenth-century questions, Case argued that question, and the Jewish question were all the earliest mention that Case was able to it was not until after WWII that commenta- prominent in public debates of the time. locate occurred in the1820s, yet many nine- tors of the “Jewish question” began to iso- These discourses demonstrate a common teenth-century commentators traced it back late it from other perceived questions. Case application of the term “question,” which to the origins of Judaism itself. Such an in- concluded by noting a post-WWII shift in was understood as a problem that requires vented long and rich tradition, Case argued, global political discourse that entailed a a solution rather than an answer or opinion. gave rise to a sense of urgency. Built on this move away from the question, towards more Based on this commonality, Case argued sense of urgency, discussions around ques- temporally limited terms such as “issue,” for a re-consideration of the “Jewish ques- tions were characterized by a mood of agita- “situation,” or “crisis.” (Andreea Mascan) tion” in the context of the multitude of ques- tion, expressing dissent from across the entire tions circulating in the nineteenth century. political spectrum with regards to the status Schiller and Carl August until the 1915 publication of as Censors of Goethe the ‘Weimar Edition,’ in which much of his erotic poetry fi rst October 20, 2014 appeared. Wilson stressed that by that time, Goethe’s repu- W. Daniel Wilson (Royal Holloway, Univer- tation as an Olympian moral sity of London) delivered a lecture entitled teacher and moral paradigm “Schiller and Carl August as ‘Friendly’ Cen- had already been set in stone in sors of Goethe.” Wilson investigated what he such a way as to not take into called Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “ex- account Goethe’s erotic poetry. periment,” a test as to what extent a writer August and Schiller foresaw that any charge in eighteenth century German lands could According to Wilson, the main motivation of libertinism directed towards Goethe would succeed in publishing erotic literature. Fol- for this censorship was that Goethe’s editors negatively infl uence the reputation of the lowing his sojourns to Italy in 1786-88 and feared that the publication of such suggestive Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, which was already 1790, Goethe’s unsuccessful attempts to pub- works would give the poet the appearance of known its liberal moral and intellectual po- lish parts of his two major efforts at erotic po- a libertine, a fi gure in which sexual license is sitions. Second, Wilson argued that Goethe’s etry, the “Roman Elegies” and the “Venetian combined with religious heterodoxy. Goethe’s editors were concerned that the poems Epigrams,” proves for Wilson that the experi- erotic poetry, in other words, was not solely would be damning to Goethe’s reputation ment had failed. Goethe was forced to admit censored because of its content, but more itself, and that it was in the public fi gure’s that a poet of his time, in his literary sphere, specifi cally, because much of it combined own interest to allow his poetry to be cen- could not go very far with the publication of sexual license with scathing religious cri- sored so as to protect his self-constructed erotic poetry; rather, such poetry could be cir- tique in a seemingly autobiographical style. reputation as an Olympian moral teacher. culated only in small, private groups. How- Goethe’s friends and editors feared that this ever, Goethe’s efforts were originally cen- would leave the writer vulnerable to personal In conclusion, Wilson explained that Goethe’s sored by two of his closest friends, Friedrich attacks, as well as to accusations that he was, poetry was, both during and after his death, Schiller and the Duke Carl August of Saxe- in fact, a libertine, even if the works in ques- carefully safeguarded by editors who were act- Weimar. This regulation, Wilson argued, was tion were penned in an experimental spirit. the beginning of close to three-quarters of ing to a greater or lesser extent with Goethe’s approval, in order to create and secure a spe- a century of censorship of Goethe’s works, Wilson presented two main reasons why an cifi c image of him as a moral teacher. Largely as the poet’s raciest compositions were sup- accusation of libertinism was particularly as a result of such censorship, this image has pressed and omitted from collections dur- worrisome to Goethe’s editors both during dominated the poet’s reception and reputa- ing his life and after his death in 1832, up his life and after his death. First, both Carl tion up to the present day. (Stephen Klemm)

“Priester-Schriftsteller”? Politische Wolf’s lectures on poetics and Grass’ com- Autorschaft und Religion in der mentaries on his work, Sieg suggested that deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur the two authors display a belief in the power of the word to transcend individual authors March 23, 2015 and make the text a medium of truth. Con- veying this through structural features, both Christian Sieg (Max Kade Guest Profes- Kassandra and Die Rättin stage dialogues sor, Georgetown University / Westfälische between two voices: whereas Kassandra ul- Wilhelms-Universität Münster) presented timately regains her “body voice,” in Grass’ a lecture entitled “‘Priester-Schriftsteller’? novel the rat has the better arguments and Politische Autorschaft und Religion in der leaves the narrator at a loss. Sieg reads these deutschen Nachkriegsliteratur.” Sieg began constellations as the elimination of ‘wrong’ by referencing the political engagement of voices in the texts, by which the commu- several post-war German writers such as and allusions. In his analysis of two exempla- nication of certain knowledge is assured. Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), Günter Grass ry works of fi ction, Christa Wolf’s Kassandra (*1927), and Christa Wolf (1929-2011), and (1983) and Günter Grass’ Die Rättin (1986), With reference to Carl Schmitt’s Politi- emphasized that the critical reception of their Sieg traced the role of religion in relation to cal Theology (1922), Sieg pointed out the respective works often seeks to identify liter- politics. In these texts, Sieg argued, religion structural similarity of religion and political ary texts with the public intellectual activi- functions not simply as a secularized arse- modernity. By relying on familiar patterns ties of their authors. Sieg argued for an ap- nal of signs. Instead, he suggested reading of religious discourse, he argued, political proach that concentrates instead on the texts them in the tradition of narratives of apoca- authorship draws on analogies that, accord- themselves and examines how the question lypse, stressing that apocalypse is not itself ing to Hans Blumenberg, can foster cogni- of political authorship, or writing as po- an event, but rather a text that describes and tion (Erkenntnis). Thus, political authorship litical intervention, is staged in these works. interprets an event. Therefore, much like the in German post-war literature, in an attempt model of apocalyptic authorship in religious to distinguish itself from a self-consciously Sieg stressed that political authorship—both works, the function of writing as depicted by secular mainstream society, withdrew to the as a genuine literary practice and with regards these authors is to reveal the future. Further- social realm of religion in order to commu- to post-war German literature—relies heavi- more, in his analysis of paratexts, including nicate a complex truth. (Matthias Müller) ly on religious motifs, intertextual references, 19 Inheritance Trouble: Migration, thereby becomes vivid in its Memory and the German Past reach beyond a German Erb- schuld, and can be understood September 12, 2014 as a transnational and transcul- tural fi guration in which diverse The lecture, “Inheritance Trouble: Migration, memory discourses converge. Memory and the German Past,” presented by Michael Rothberg (English, University of The discussion after the talk Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Yasemin raised several questions regard- Yildiz (Germanic Languages and Literatures, ing the status of inheritance, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), connections between differing and co-organized by graduate students of the national discourses, dimensions Department of German Studies at Cornell, of gender, as well as the will to focused on intersections of apparently dis- be included in such a painful crete memory cultures, and promoted a trans- memory as that of the Holocaust. cultural approach to the analysis of memory Rothberg and Yildiz emphasized and inheritance in Germany. Focusing on the that inheritance functions as a production of Holocaust memory, Rothberg metaphor for memory that is lecture. The short story, titled Der Brief im and Yildiz laid out how German practices closely connected to citizenship and national Koffer, was written in Turkish but is set in of memorializing the Holocaust as inherited identity; it can therefore be desirable and nec- Berlin; extracted from Toprak’s 2007 collec- guilt simultaneously construct a national essary for migrants to be part of this discourse. identity that leaves out members of society tion Valizdeki Mektup, the text was published of migrant background. Due to the exclusion in German translation in 2012. In the narra- The seminar led by Rothberg and Yildiz the of this population from the concept of Ger- tive, Toprak depicts a young Turkish-German next day, titled “Memory Studies after the man “Erbschuld,” which is dependent on the woman on a tour of an underground bunker; Transnational Turn,” centered on theoretical idea of blood inheritance, migrant subjects there, the woman encounters a space in which questions of how to defi ne basic concepts of are also ignored by any national identity stories of the Second World War and the Ho- memory, the transnational, and the transcul- formed by this concept. Rothberg and Yildiz locaust are evoked, along with recollections tural, as well as futurity’s role in the concep- consequently drew attention to memory work of her own past and of the history of Turk- tualization of a transcultural memory. The that thematizes the Holocaust while making ish migration in Germany. In her imagina- content of the discussion was informed both passing but overdetermined references to tion and memory, these seemingly disparate by the lecture from the previous afternoon, migrants, thus marking their lack of associa- narratives of memory are brought together in and by seminar participants’ research inter- tion with events that implicate the majority the image of the suitcase indicated in the title. ests in matters of migration, inheritance, the population, as well as works that intertwine Toprak thus intervenes in German Holocaust fi eld of memory studies as such, a dynamic the memory of both Holocaust and Turkish- discourse by incorporating Turkish-German and contingent notion of memory, and mate- German experiences. A literary text by the migrant experience into the performance of rial implications of memory work in global Turkish-German author Menekşe Toprak (b. memory. Rothberg and Yildiz claimed that and local contexts. (Mascha Vollhardt) 1970) featured prominently throughout the the question of inheritance and memory

University Lecture: Multilingual Institute for German Cultural Studies, and Literary Reading, in German, the Department of Comparative Literature. Japanese, English and Other Surprises As organizer of the event, Leslie Adelson (German Studies, Cornell) fi rst introduced Tawada’s work from a German Studies March 11, 2015 perspective. She described how Tawada’s On Wednesday, March 11, the Tokyo-born oeuvre explores imaginative intersections literary author Yoko Tawada, known in- between philosophies of language, cultures ternationally for her creative approaches to of migration, and questions of translation multilingual aesthetics in German and Japa- in experiences of globalization today. Next, nese, fi lled the Guerlac Room in the A.D. Brett de Bary (Asian Studies, Cornell), White House for her University Lecture, described Tawada’s position in contempo- “Multilingual Literary Reading, in German, rary Japanese literature and scholarship. De Japanese, English and Other Surprises.” For Bary emphasized how Tawada’s writing is the event, Tawada collaborated with Bettina involved in the work of mourning, particu- that might arise in the course of the reading. Brandt (Pennsylvania State University), a larly with regards to the nuclear meltdown prominent scholar and translator of Tawa- and its aftermath in the Fukushima prefec- ture in Japan. She observed that Tawada’s Tawada and Brandt opened with selections da’s work into Dutch. Following Tawada’s from the collection of poetry titled Abenteuer readings, primarily in German or in Japa- literary reading was appropriately being held on the fourth anniversary of the 2011 earth- der deutschen Grammatik (2010). At fi rst al- nese, Brandt read English translations of ternating between German and English ver- the presented texts. The event was funded quake and tsunami in the region. These in- troductory remarks encouraged the audience sions of the poems, they then began to read the by the University Lectures Committee and German and English texts simultaneously, in- co-sponsored by the East Asia Program, the to abandon their position as passive con- sumers and to actively respond to surprises creasingly blurring the boundaries between the two languages. The performance culminated also imitated the syntax of a twelfth-century of her writing. The reading was accompanied in the reading of the poem “Passiv,” in which Japanese epic tale. In contrast, the English by a dramatic performance, in which Brandt both languages were intertwined so closely translation, rendered by Susan Bernofsky attached sheets of paper to a line strung across that a hybrid language seemed to emerge. from a German version of the story written the room. After each poem was read aloud in by Tawada, provided a linear narrative from German and in English, the paper on which it The second part of the performance was a modern point of view. Thus, the English was written was affi xed to the line, along with titled “Shirabyōshi.” With reference to the presentation of the story was supplemented cards on which Japanese words representing practices of certain twelfth-century Japanese by Japanese and Italian phrases that added an each poem were written. Leaves propped female court dancers who performed for intentionally defamiliarized layer of affect. in cups of water and aligned beside the two nobles while dressed as men bearing swords, readers made reference to the environmental Tawada and Brandt initially donned ostenta- The event concluded with the presentation of consequences of nuclear contamination. The tiously westernized paper masks. Employing twenty-four untitled and unpublished poems performance opened up a multilingual and Japanese, English, and Italian, they read a that developed out of Tawada’s experiences multi-medial space between German, English, story of two dancers who become trapped in and reactions during a visit to Fukushima. and written Japanese, and the audience found a triangular relationship with a wealthy pa- Tawada explained that she wrote the poems itself drawn into this space by the voices of tron. Italian words drawn from a lexicon of in German during her trip in order to take ad- the two women and by aural and visual mani- musical terminology replaced descriptors of vantage of an affective distance between the festations of language. (Annekatrin Sommer) speed and emotion in the Japanese text, which Japanese of her surroundings and the German

They that sow in tears of Schütz’s Ich will den Herren loben allezeit endowed Schütz’s song April 12, 2015 of praise with a sonorousness that fi lled the chapel. In turn, Raphaelson On April 12, 2015, the IGCS co- conveyed a highly effective sense sponsored “They that sow in tears,” of urgency at the tense beginning of a concert organized by David Miller Schütz’s Eile mich, Gott, zu eretten. (Music, Cornell). Presented in the Anabel Taylor Hall Chapel, the An instrumental ensemble historically-informed performance accompanied the vocalists and, at brought together sacred music by moments such as the second half of Baroque composers Matthias Weckmann, describing an encounter with the enemy Schein’s Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu Johann Hermann Schein, Heinrich Schütz, during the Thirty Years’ War. These secular dir, created the effect of confounding the grain and Samuel Scheidt, infl ecting the modern texts lent the performance a sense similar to of the voice with the vibration of strings in the concert setting with a sense of the original that of religious readings in a church service. full ensemble’s musical communion. Both seventeenth-century liturgical context of the Miller and Zoe Weiss (Cornell) performed works performed. The musicians, including Especially powerful was the musicians’ on viols — a visual and acoustic reminder graduate students from the Department use of the altar and loft at opposite ends of that even through much of the eighteenth of Music at Cornell as well as visiting the chapel to produce acoustic effects. An century, the contemporary hegemony of the experts in historical performance practice, impressive yet seemingly effortless musical cello was unimaginable in the face of the impressed the audience with the sum of their moment was the call and response between viol’s dominance. Matthew Hall (Cornell) virtuosic technical and expressive skills. baritone David Tinervia in the loft and other performed on the harpsichord with thoughtful musicians at the altar in Schein’s Aus Tiefer expressiveness, and Anna Marsh offered In his opening remarks, Miller indicated that Not schrei’ ich zu dir. Similarly, in Schein’s interpretations on the bassoon that were lucid the concert program followed a progression Meister, wir haben die ganze Nacht gearbeitet, in tone and timbre. Another sight and sound from a “stable picture of the order of things” Tinervia and tenor Scott Mello executed a unfamiliar to many modern audiences was the through “doubt, fear, [and] despair” to a highly exposed, antiphonal call and response, theorbo, a large instrument of the lute family, fi nal “reaffi rmation of faith” that musically aided in creating this ‘music for tears’ by played by award-winning lutist Ryaan suggested a “hopeful future.” The program Jonathan Schakel (Cornell) on the organ. Ahmed. Together, instrumentalists and offered a three-part selection of pieces Schakel’s organ interlude provided a reprieve vocalists musically enacted for an audience in for voice and varying organ and continuo from the religious “cry” to God at the end of a modern, secular environment the religious accompaniments. Interjected into the second the second section of the program. Soprano theme of the program, drawn from the biblical and third parts of the program were readings Claire Raphaelson and Mezzo-Soprano verse, “They that sow in tears shall reap in concerning the “Great Comet of 1618,” Julia Cavallaro likewise sang highly exposed joy” (Psalm 126:5-6). (Alexander Brown) interpreted as a fateful omen by an astronomer solo and soli passages with comfort and and doctor, and an account by Sister Junius control. Cavallaro’s sonorous interpretation The Antisocial Turn: The Age of Riots

October 17-18, 2014 Forum at Cornell University, and co-orga- gan. Gilligan’s fi lms, which include Crisis nized by Tatiana Sverjensky (Comparative in the Credit System (2008), Self Capital The interdisciplinary conference, “The An- Literature, Cornell University) and Joshua (2009), and Popular Unrest (2010), engage tisocial Turn: The Age of Riots,” presented Clover (Department of English, UC Da- in a project of aesthetically knowing in a by the Department of Comparative Literature vis), began with a conversation moderated way that counters the mystifi cation of the and the Comparative Cultures & Literature by Clover, with fi lmmaker Melanie Gilli- fi nancial world. Gilligan seeks to represent 21 spheres that for their breadth and level of graphic changes in suburban spaces, and how urban and suburban spaces, and the infl uence abstraction seem to otherwise defy repre- these factors will shift the structure of riots of suburban riots. Using Seattle and St. Louis sentation. Her current work in progress, en- and strikes as forms of collective resistance. as examples for the suburbanization of pov- titled The Common Sense, takes up similar erty, Neel showed that more poor people in themes of narrative and representation while Clover, who specializes in twentieth century the US are currently residing in suburbs than Anglophone poetry and poetics, crisis theory, turning from the world of fi nancial capital in large cities. These national trends also sig- and political economy, mainly focused on nal a signifi cant shift in the racial geography to the challenges involved in staging a riot. intersections of literature, culture, and fi - of the country, as thoroughly gentrifi ed urban nance. In his talk, he elaborated on how and centers such as New York, Seattle, and San According to Gilligan, fi lms that stage ri- why tactics of civil resistance develop over Francisco may soon be encircled by rings of ots tend to fall short of representing social time and changing economic systems. In the suburban poverty and public housing, with the processes in detailed and meaningful ways. centuries before capitalism, the riot, defi ned poor increasingly banished from the interior Riots are depicted either with an investment as a violent form of civil disorder or chaos, of the city. In his outlook, Neel opened up the of particular personal feelings or in strictly was central to the tactical repertoire of the problematic infrastructural aspects of these systemic terms. On the other hand, amateur dominated classes. This situation persisted transformations, and posited how they will footage of riots, such as videos posted by par- in the generalization of the marketplace that become infl uential for specifi c forms of subur- ban riots in the future. (Annekatrin Sommer)

In the second panel on Saturday, which fo- cused on “Place and Manner,” Eli Fried- man (International and Comparative Labor, Cornell University) opened the discussion by examining conditions and causes of re- cent urban riots in the People’s Republic of China. His presentation, entitled “Riots in the PRC,” began by conceptualizing riots in gen- eral, distinguishing them from “social move- ments.” Whereas a social movement is sub- ject to the logic and language of the state and uses this language to express its demands, Friedman argued that riots operate according to their own internal logic, which remains unintelligible to authority. In contrast to a so- cial movement that engages with the state in a continuous effort to achieve certain articu- lated goals, a riot, in declining to propose a specifi c vision of the future, appears from the ticipants or passersby on the Internet, often presaged industrialization and the forma- perspective of the state as something ephem- capture a building energy in events without tion of a working class. Riots, while some- eral, violent, and spontaneous. Friedman then creating a discernible narrative. Gilligan’s times concerning themselves with taxes, land asked why it is that we are currently experi- fi lm, The Common Sense, works around this rights, and other traditional privileges, found encing an “age of riots,” specifi cally focus- their modern coherence as struggles in the ing his query on the conditions that have led problem of perspective by developing two marketplace. However, over the course of the to a massive increase of riots in China over different stories: the eruption of a revolution nineteenth century, the strike, understood as the past decade. Friedman proposed four pos- on the one hand, presented against a more the formalized tactic of passive resistance, sible reasons for this increase: the withering personal narrative in which political events emerged as the tactic of choice. Even when it of a civil society and the decline of organiza- bring about no change. Gilligan is interested adopts the violence and confrontation of riot, tions, such as unions, that mediate between in the dispersal of market-wide experience transforming sometimes into general insur- the proletariat and the state; the informaliza- into individual lives and how riots are gener- rection, the strike nonetheless begins from tion of work, which produces a large class of ated from within capitalist social relations. In the standpoint of labor and its product, and people that are no longer absorbed by formal The Common Sense, as in her other fi lms, she emphasizes a pacifi c and moralized element. labor; the commodifi cation and militariza- confronts diffi cult representational situations Clover observed that strikes are legitimated tion of urban public space, as cities move by moving beyond synchronic representa- precisely insofar as they are purged of vio- from spaces of production to spaces of bour- lence; thus, a latent opposition comes to the geois consumption; and an expanding deni- tions of socio-economic circumstances, such fore, and the riot becomes the strike’s ‘other.’ zenship class, that is, a growing population as graphs or individual fi lm scenes. Her fi lms The riot is transformed, as it were, behind the of workers who do not have access to full do not trace a narrative with a development back of the strike. It thence appears as the mé- citizenship in their place of residence. The and culmination, but instead represent a se- tier of the urban poor, the colonized peoples militarization of public space and the prob- rial string of activities. (Alexander Phillips) of the third world, of women and homosexu- lems of denizenship are particularly perti- als and that strange new social category, the nent in China, where citizenship is explicitly The morning panel of the conference capi- “youth,” who are now involved in what has tied to registration in a given locality. Mil- talized on the theme of “Time.” Joshua come to be called “The New Age of Riot.” lions of migrants are thus excluded from full Clover turned his gaze towards the past in citizenship rights and from access to public order to theorize concepts of riot and strike From the perspective of this new generation spaces in the urban areas in which they live. as historical phenomena. In contrast, Phillip of riot, as both a graduate student and cura- Neel (Department of Geography, University tor of the website ultra-com.org, Phillip Neel Next, Tatiana Sverjensky challenged the of Washington) presented an outlook on the presented a quantitative and qualitative anal- framework of the “campaign” as an organiz- future of geographic, economic, and demo- ysis of geographic and demographic data of ing principle of political resistance, arguing that the campaign, though emblematic of Beverly Silver (Department of Sociology, the persistence of neoliberal policies to- grassroots movements today, is in fact a his- Johns Hopkins University) presented the key- day, a new legitimacy crisis has been at torically specifi c form that is inherently re- note address that concluded the conference. hand since 2003 and especially since 2008. formist and limited in scope. A campaign has Entitled “Age of Riots: Past and Present,” a concrete goal, and mobilizes a set of actors Silver framed her lecture with three questions In addition to using empirical economic data, in order to achieve its stated reform or policy raised in order to defi ne the notion of an “age Silver confi rmed and further elaborated her change; as such, it is easily narrativized and of riots”: How is it? What is it? What will it be? theoretical framework using a database of analyzed in the language of the state. Though reports of labor unrest since 1870 from The anarchism has long been critical of reform- Relying upon a wide-reaching historical Times of London and The New York Times. ism, Sverjensky argued that many ostensibly framework, Silver focused on systemic cycles Reports of labor unrest increased in periods anti-reformist movements have in fact uti- of crisis characteristic of the longue durée of that marked the systemic legitimacy crisis lized the campaign as their default organiz- historical capitalism. According to Silver, the and transition from one hegemonic power to ing structure, and thus have demonstrated cycles of crisis in these periods can be con- another. These tumultuous periods of non- an inconsistency between anarchist rheto- ceptualized as “pendulum swings” between normative social unrest from under- and ric and grassroots practice. The riot, on the the poles of capitalist profi tability and sys- unemployed redundant laborers occurred other hand, produces a demand that cannot temic legitimacy. These cycles largely cor- during periods of fi nancialization, marked be answered in the language of the current respond to three periods of global economic by capital circulation, and followed longer, system, and points to another possible model hegemony since the early sixteenth century: sustained periods of capital accumulation. of (anti-)political resistance. As examples the Dutch colonial empire that lasted until of campaigns that nevertheless make efforts the mid-eighteenth century; the British co- In the current systemic legitimacy crisis, re- to move beyond reifi ed forms of resistance, lonial empire that lasted until the mid-twen- ports of labor unrest began spiking in 2010 Sverjensky turned to the SHAC (Stop Hunt- tieth century; and US-American hegemony with striking workers at Honda in China, ingdon Animal Cruelty) campaign to shut that is now facing its own “terminal crisis.” followed by resistance to austerity measures down one of the largest animal testing labo- in the European Union, the Arab Spring, Oc- ratories in Europe, and RAMPS (Radical Ac- For example, in the transition from British cupy Wall Street in the United States, and tion for Mountain People’s Survival), which to American hegemony, the reestablishment more recent uprisings including those in seeks to end strip mining in Appalachia. of the Gold Standard in the “Great Transfor- Ferguson and worldwide. Far from being at While SHAC targets specifi c aspects of capi- mation” of the 1920s served as a response to “the end of history,” Silver insisted that we talist organization so as to more effectively at- the profi tability crisis of British hegemony, are at another pivotal moment of transition tack parts of its structures, RAMPS explores as evidenced by newly elected socialist gov- in capitalism’s historical cycles of transfor- possibilities of reproduction beyond capital. ernments that enacted austerity measures. mation, creative destruction, and constant In conclusion, Sverjensky proposed that an In the 1960s and 1970s, the acceptance of reorganization of our livelihood. Silver “anti-politics” that allows for extra-legal Keynesian redistributive policies constituted cautioned, however, that older Keynesian tactics, organizes according to affi nity rather the reaction to the systemic legitimacy crisis politics were a response to a past legitima- than identity, and focuses on what an action that corresponded with the rise of American cy crisis, and that the crises of the present produces rather than what it represents, could hegemony. The neoliberal counterrevolu- and future demand that we radically rethink challenge the limitations of the campaign tion confronted a new profi tability crisis in our modes of action. (Alexander Brown) model of social movements. (Leigh York) the proceeding years. Therefore, despite

Call for Submissions The Peter Uwe Hohendahl Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory The Institute for German Cultural Studies is pleased to announce its 2015 call for submissions for The Peter Uwe Hohendahl Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory. This named prize honors a distinguished scholar of international renown for his many publications on German literatures of modernity, comparative intellectual histories, critical theory writ large and the Frankfurt School especially, and the history and desiderata of university education in Europe and North America. As Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature from 1977 to 2011, Peter Uwe Hohendahl taught and inspired many Cor- nell students on the importance of critical theory for public life and the collective good.

Essay submissions may be submitted in German or English on any topic pertaining to critical theory, and registered graduate students in any relevant fi eld of study at Cornell University are eligible to apply. Only one submission per person. The author of the winning essay will be awarded a prize of $250.

Essays may be up to 25 double-spaced pages in length and should be submitted under an assumed name. Authors must indicate their primary fi elds of study on the essay and submit a sealed envelope containing the author’s identity, including student ID number, local address, telephone, and Cornell e-mail address. The title of the essay submitted for prize consideration must be entered on the outside of the envelope. The deadline for submission is October 15. Entries should be submitted to Olga Petrova, Assistant to the Director of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, at . IGCS offi ces are located at 726 University Avenue on the third fl oor (tel. 255 8408).

The Peter Uwe Hohendahl Graduate Essay Prize in Critical Theory is made possible by a generous gift from an anonymous donor. 23 THE CHALLENGE OF REALISM: Theodor Fontane all events in

September 18-19, 2015 258 GOLDWIN SMITH HALL Keynote Lecture: Friday, Sept. 18, 4pm Eric Downing (University of NC) Fontane & the Future Ends of Realism

Workshop: Saturday, September 19 9:30am Sean Franzel, University of Missouri Schach von Wuthenow: Fleeting Fashions, Prussian Crisis, and the Historical Novel

10:30am Ulrike Vedder, Humboldt Universität, Berlin Pre-registration and advance readings Ringe, Glocken, Tränen: Theatralität in Graf Petöfy required for workshop. To register and receive readings, please email 12pm AneĴ e Schwarz, Cornell Olga Petrova at Cécile, or the Invention of the Psyche in Space [email protected].

2:30pm Peter Hohendahl, Cornell Eindringliche Beobachtung: Zur Konstitution des Sozialen in Unwiederbringlich

3:30pm Elisabeth Strowick, Johns Hopkins Die Poggenpuhls: Fontanes Realismus der Überreste

5pm Samuel Frederick, Penn State Furnished Inutility: The Objects in Mathilde Möhring db h d hl Institute for German Cultural Studies Fall 2015 Colloquium Series 156 GOLDWIN SMITH HALL FRIDAYS @ 3PM

SEPTEMBER 4 Andreas Kraß Institut für deutsche Nur über seine Leiche: Literatur Literaturgeschichte der Männer- Humboldt-Universität freundschaft zu Berlin SEPTEMBER 25 Kirk Wetters German Studies Genealogy Trouble: Yale University Secularization in Löwith, Blumenberg, Schmitt and Agamben OCTOBER 16 Kristina Mendicino German Studies Before Truth: Truth:Walter Walter Benjamin’s Brown University “Erkenntniskritische Vorrede”

NOVEMBER 6 Jonathan Hess * Germanic Languages & Mosenthal’s Deborah and Literatures the Politics of Compassion: UNC at Chapel Hill Anatomy of a Tearjerker *co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program

NOVEMBER 20 Paul Dobryden German Studies Clouded Visions: Particulate Cornell University Matter in F.W.Murnau’sF. W. Murnau’s Faust and Hartmut Bitomsky’s Dust

DECEMBER 4 Matteo Calla German Studies Klopstock’s Darstellung and Cornell University the Cult of Aesthetic Experience

Additional information about all events listed is available on our website: http://igcs.cornell.edu. Event listings will be updated throughout the semester. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please contact Olga Petro- va ([email protected]). Institute for German Cultural Studies Archived copies of past newsletters are available elec- Cornell University tronically at http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/han- 726 University Avenue dle/1813/10777

Ithaca, NY 14850 Contributions to German Culture News are welcome. If you would like an event listed or have a brief review or article to submit, please con- http://igcs.cornell.edu/ tact Olga Petrova ([email protected]).