This Thursday, 16 November, Katrin Kohl will be addressing our Working Group with a paper entitled

 

‘Exchanging metaphors - concepts of literature in German and English Poetics during the period of Romanticism’

 

at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, 32 Russell Square, London WC1. A précis is appended below. We meet at 5.30 pm for sherry, with the seminar beginning at 6 pm in Room ST273 on the second floor.

 

Dr Kohl’s paper will be followed by a discussion, and the seminar will conclude at 7.30 pm.

 

We would be very pleased if you were able to join us.

 

With best wishes,

 

(Dr) Elinor Shaffer

 

Convenor, Working Group for the Reception of German/ Austrian/ Swiss Literature

Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

http://igrs.sas.ac.uk

 

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The paper will consider the role of metaphor in establishing a cohesive context for developing and discussing concepts of literature, and in particular its role in the debates that shaped Romantic poetics. I will examine how cognitive theories of metaphor can shed light on the issues that preoccupied German and English writers in the period of Romanticism, notably language, representation, creativity and the imagination. Drawing on M. H. Abrams’s seminal study *The Mirror and the Lamp* (1953), I will look at the workings of metaphor in a process of cultural transfer that depends on the productive interplay of anthropological universals and cultural particulars, collective tradition and individual originality. By way of conclusion, I will discuss the legacy of Romanticism and Idealism in English and German criticism.’

 

Katrin Kohl is a Fellow and Tutor of German at Jesus College, Oxford, and Lecturer in German in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages. She studied at the Universities of Westminster and London, where she obtained her PhD in German.  Her research focuses on 18th-century and 20th-century poetry, Poetics, and the theory and practice of metaphor. Her current research project concerns the role of metaphor in poetics and explores the different ways in which authors from the Middle Ages to the present conceive of literature (e.g. as a ‘natural’ process, as a skilful ‘contest’, as a form of ‘prayer’, as ‘speaking’ or ‘singing’) and communicate their conception to other authors as well as to readers. With Ritchie Robertson she is the editor of *The History of Austrian Literature 1918-2000*(Camden House, 2006) and *Poetologische Metaphern: Formen und Funktionen in der deutschen Literatur* (de Gruyter; in press).

 

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