Dear colleagues,

with apologies for cross-posting, we would like to remind you of the WiGS conference on the theme of Time, which will be held 28-30 June 2012. We would like to invent members and and non-members (women and men) to propose papers of ca 20 minutes duration on the conference theme. Papers may be given in either English or German. Please send abstracts of max. 250 words to Gillian Pye ([log in to unmask]) by Monday 13^th February 2012.

Postgraduate members of WiGS who have held membership for at least three months prior to the submission of a claim are eligible to apply for a modest grant to help towards the cost of travelling to the conference. Further information can be found at http://www.wigs.ac.uk/travelgrants.html

About Time: Conceptualising and representing temporality in German, Swiss and Austrian culture

Time is an inescapable dimension of human life. It is both the medium within which we operate and the driving force behind our actions. Not only do the rhythms of our bodies motivate the basic activities of survival, but our general awareness that life is finite also prompts us to do something with ‘our’ time. But ‘our’ time, so intrinsic to individual action,cannot in fact be disentangled from wider cultural processes. As Nancy Munn observes, even talking about time involves ‘using media already encoded with temporal meanings.’ (1992, 94)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century the complexity of time is attracting renewed attention. Not least, a heightened sense of simultaneity and the dominance of social practices which seem to demand a daily ‘virtual performance of being in touch’ (Hunt, 2008: 14) demand a re-engagement with constructions and conceptualisations of time, both past and present. In the German-speaking world, the need for such a re-engagement also arises from the direction taken by debates since the end of communism and in the light of an increasing distance to the Second World War. This includes, for example, concerns such as genealogical periodisation, the relationship between daily time and historical narrative or the interrelationship between space, time and belonging.

This conference aims to explore the issue of time in German, Austrian and Swiss culture from any period in history. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Controlling time and political agency; time, eternity and the spiritual; history and time; gendered constructions of time; time and the body; ecological crisis and the conceptualisation of time; scientific discourses of time; the impact of technologies on constructions and representations of time; attention; acceleration; linguistic perspectives on time and tenses; periodisation.

[log in to unmask]" class="iwcQuote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(0, 0, 255); padding-left: 13px; margin-left: 0pt;" type="cite">

Leeds-Swansea Series in Contemporary German Literature     Constructing the Nation in Literature and Film   CALL FOR PAPERS   16-18 July 2012, Swansea University   Colloquium organizers: Julian Preece and Frank Finlay   Supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum   This Colloquium explores the contention that the national question is being posed across Europe at present, which is in turn manifested in contemporary works by German, Austrian and Swiss authors (and indeed by writers of German from other national backgrounds), both thematically and in terms of form. For example, globalization may be argued to have fostered two extreme tendencies: on the one hand championing the dissolution of national allegiances, while on the other provoking a return to the nation state as a bastion of identity. Writers react in a variety of ways: by taking hybrid culture as a given and investigating tensions which arise within in it and which in turn determine their use of literary narrative or dramatic or poetic forms; by seeing dangers in the disappearance of national cultural models, which can also be a reaction against the perceived hegemony of the ‘Sixty-Eighters’ (cue: Thilo Sarrazin’s 2010 inflammatory bestseller, Deutschland schafft sich ab); or by engaging with uncritical uses of tradition. Political disputes have gone to the heart of how society is ordered. Some German writers follow French trends in terming neo-liberal capitalism ‘Anglo-Saxon’. In the forms and themes of literature, political developments are reflected, explored, and challenged in all sorts of ways - sometimes arguably anticipated.   The Colloquium will ask: what has literature in German been saying lately about nations, nationalisms, and nationalism’s ‘others’: globalism, Europeanism, Atlanticism, cosmopolitanism, provincialism, political religion, or ‘unpolitical’ attitudes? Contributors are asked to interpret their chosen novels, dramas, volumes of poetry, or films as metaphors / narratives of the twenty-first century nation. Possible topics include: images of the nation as construed by imaginative writers of the younger generation such as Katharina Hacker, Daniel Kehlmann, Michael Kumpfmüller, André Kubitschek, Ingo Niermann / Alexander Wallasch, Charlotte Roche, Katrin Röggla, and Uwe Tellkamp, as well as established figures, like Grass, Jelinek, and Walser; themes, such as national-unity narratives; nation and gender / race / class; the crisis year of 2005; the historical novel; leftwing vs. rightwing nationalisms; dystopias; political fiction and non-fiction.     Please send title and brief synopsis in English or German to either [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> or [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> by 31 January 2012.     A selection of the papers will be published in volume 3 of the Leeds-Swansea Series. For details of volume 2, Religion and Identity in Germany Today: Doubters, Believers, Seekers in Literature and Film (Lang, 2010), click here: http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?event=cmp.ccc.seitenstruktur.detailseiten&seitentyp=produkt&pk=54513&concordeid=430156       Confirmed Speakers William Collins Donahue (Duke), ‘Bernhard Schlink’s Heidelberg Lectures’ Sven Hanuschek (Munich), ‘Andreas Maier’s series of Heimat novels’ Ortrud Gutjahr, (Hamburg, Professor), ‘Transnationalität im Deutsch-Türkischen Film’ Carmen Ulrich (Delhi), ‘"was ein Liebender im Taumel tränke" - > Zerfurchte Porträts deutscher Geschichte in Reinhard Jirgls Roman Die Stille (2009)’ Stefan Neuhaus (Innsbruck), ‘Neo-Nationalism and Literature’ Matthias Uecker (Nottingham), ‘German Stories for International Audiences: or, Why does the Rest of the World Love Goodbye Lenin! but not Das Wunder von Bern?’ Uwe Schütte (Aston), ‘W.G. Sebald on Germany’ Thomas Irmer (Berlin), Christof Schlingensief Greg Bond (Berlin), Moritz von Uslar, Deutschboden. Eine teilnehmende Beobachtung       Julian Preece Professor of German Studies Department of Languages, Translation and Media Swansea University Singleton Park Swansea SA2 8PP Tel. 01792 602949