Dear colleagues,
The German Department at the University of Bristol cordially invites you to attend the conference
ENCOUNTERS
taking place from 8 to 10 September 2014
at Clifton Hill House, Lower Clifton Hill, Bristol BS8 1BX
Registration is now open at: www.encountersconference.org
INTRODUCTION
What goes on in an encounter, and what can we say and know about the meeting between two people?
Personal encounters are intense, asymmetrical, and often surprising exchanges. They bring into play the differences between two people and thus influence their identities. While the encounter itself may be planned, its experience cannot be premeditated. It is a sudden moment in which contingency challenges strategy.
Encounters are, in essence, unmediated, and they can only happen in a context of mobility - there can only ever be contact if there was distance first and subsequently movement. The notion of encounter thus demands to be reconsidered in a time in which (social) media have assumed unprecedented influence over society and a large number of people are on the move.
"We do not have more friends, but we have more strangers." This is how the critic Sven Hillenkamp sums up this state of affairs. Encounters are difficult to analyse because they require, from those engaged in them, a willingness to avoid analysing them while they are unfolding (Levinas). In retrospect, on the other hand, any creative attempt at capturing what has happened relies on memory and results in works of art that are shaped by narrative conventions as much as by momentary events.
At the conference, we will examine this notion of encounter in its most fundamental meaning, and carry out a rigorous study of personal encounters by setting theory alongside the practical experience and retrospective reconstruction of specific meetings. In so doing, our project seeks to establish parameters for understanding a practice at the very core of arts and humanities research. We wish to place particular emphasis on the enduring potential of visual and literary art to capture and reflect on interpersonal engagements. The encounter as such is different from the trace it leaves in a work of art, and yet paradoxically, dialogues in film, on stage, and in narrative prose simulate personal encounters in one of these genres' most basic forms.
There is a substantial and diverse body of literature on encounters at various levels: between writers and the subjects of their writing, between travellers and "locals", between scholars and their subjects of research, between diplomats and politicians, etc. The attempts at conceptualizing what is at stake in these encounters have yielded influential models in fields such as phenomenology, comparative literature, anthropology, cultural theory, the study of travel literature, social psychology, and religious studies. With this project we seek to explore how far the principles developed in one field can fruitfully be applied in another, and in particular to understand the relationship between methods in the sciences, broadly conceived, and approaches to the imaginative domain of the arts.
PROGRAMME
Monday, 8 September 2014
11.00 Registration
11.45 Welcome
12.00 Elmar Schenkel (Universität Leipzig): John Milton visits Galileo Galilei
Timothy Senior (REACT, Bristol): Coping With Complexity: Encounter in Cross-disciplinary Research
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Keynote: Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, London): The Pedagogical Encounter
15.00 Marlo Alexandra Burks (University of Toronto): Aesthetic and Ethical Encounters in Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland
Anna Kurz (Universität Innsbruck): A Diagnosis of the Encounter between a Writer and a Philosopher in Christa Wolf’s Novel Stadt der Engel oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud (2010)
16.00 Tea
16.30 Shelley Hales and Vanda Zajko (University of Bristol): Illusionary Plenitude: Encounters with the Myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus
17.30 Roundtable
19.00 Dinner
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
9.30 John Walker (Birkbeck, London): Wilhelm von Humboldt and Intercultural Encounter
Marko Pajevic (Royal Holloway, London): The Encounter – Martin Buber’s Dialogical Definition of Humanity
10.30 Tea
11.00 Carlos Reijnen (University of Amsterdam): Cultural Encounters and European Spaces
Marleen Rensen (University of Amsterdam): Stefan Zweig and Émile Verhaeren: a Case Study
12.00 Gertrud Maria Rösch (Universität Heidelberg): Begegnung an der Wolga – Christa Wolf und Max Frisch in Gorki 1968
Jamie Jarvie (University of Glasgow): An Unpicked Conversation: Celan and Heidegger and Hey Check Out That Barbed Warbler
13.00 Lunch
14.00 Susanne Fuchs (NYU): Clash of Bodies, Clash of Words: On Pre-discursive Encounters in German Drama
Erin Greer (UC Berkeley): Turning Together: the Conversational Intimacy of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
15.00 Philippe Roepsdorff-Robiano (HU Berlin): Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Encounter as a Potluck of Knowledge
Betiel Wasihun (University of Oxford): Shameful Encounter: Kafka’s Description of a Struggle
16.00 Tea
16.30 Alex Clayton (University of Bristol): When Bruno Met Guy: Asymmetrical Encounter in Strangers on a Train
Frédéric Döhl (FU Berlin): Close-up: On André Previns Adaption of David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) for the Opera Stage (2009)
17.30 Roundtable
19.00 Dinner
Wednesday, 10 September 2014
9.30 Keynote: Rolf Goebel (University of Alabama in Huntsville): The Promise of Personal Encounters in the Age of Technological Sound Reproduction
10.30 Tea
11.00 John S. Partington (Independent Researcher): Clara Zetkin, Dora Montefiore and British Socialism: The Misrepresentation of British Socialism in the International Socialist Women’s Movement, 1907-1912
Nadine Menzel (Universität Leipzig): Encounters with Her Self – Clare Sheridan’s Russian Travel Diary of 1920
Carolyn Birdsall (University of Amsterdam): (Un)familiar Encounters: German Post-Imperialism, Modern Media and the Sounds of Others
12.30 Roundtable
13.30 Lunch
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Should you have any queries, please do not hesitate to contact us.
With best wishes,
Christophe Fricker ([log in to unmask]) and Margit Dirscherl ([log in to unmask])
Department of German
School of Modern Languages
University of Bristol
17 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TE
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