Dear colleagues, you are warmly invited to the third in the series of guest lectures 'Authorship and the Profane in German-language Literature' at the School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent (Centre for Modern European Literature).

Thursday 28 January, 5.00pm, Rutherford College, Lecture Theatre 2

Lucia Ruprecht (Cambridge), 'On Supplicants and Dancers: Profane Liturgies in Franz Kafka, Niddy Impekoven, Charlotte Bara, and Mary Wigman'

‘Once when [...] I was watching the other people praying, my eye was caught by a young man who had flung his long emaciated figure on the ground. From time to time he clutched his skull with all his strength and, moaning loudly, beat it in the palms of his hands on the stone floor’, we read in Kafka’s ‘Conversation with the Supplicant’. Evoking the onlooker’s intense curiosity, such scenes demand to be read within the larger framework of what I would like to call the early twentieth century’s gestural imaginary. My lecture will pace out this imaginary between the writings of Kafka and the dances of Niddy Impekoven, Charlotte Bara, and Mary Wigman. Tracing the dialectical dynamic between the profanation of religion and the sacralisation of art, it addresses gestural performances which reflect back on the forms of authorship that they transport.

Lucia Ruprecht is an affiliated Lecturer at the Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College. She is researching and teaching across literature, dance, and film studies. Her Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine (2006) was awarded Special Citation of the de la Torre Bueno Prize; her most recent book is New German Dance Studies (edited together with Susan Manning, 2012). From 2013-2015, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Theatre Studies, Free University Berlin. She is currently completing the manuscript of a book entitled Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and the Culture of Gestures at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Best wishes,

Deborah Holmes and Heide Kunzelmann