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Dear Colleagues, German Seminars at St Andrews in March and April Regine Strätling (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn) The Bland and the Pale. Failures and Variants of Far Eastern Exoticism Tuesday, 28th March at 4.00pm (please note the earlier time) Barthes’ notebooks from a three-week trip to Maoist China in 1974 document on nearly every page his boredom and frustration: Besides its dogmatic political positions, China seems bland and indistinct to him. After Barthes’ return, his readers expect in vain a book similar to L’Empire des signes, his celebrated essay on Japan. Was the trip then without any productive input for Barthes’ work? In a reading of some of his posthumously published writings, this paper seeks – via a detour through the German poet Max Dauthendey’s reflections on Japanese aesthetics – to identify the theoretical values of this seemingly failed trip for Barthes’ late work. Valerie Heffernan (National University of Ireland Maynooth) #RegrettingMotherhood in Germany: Between Societal Taboo and Feminist Protest Thursday, 6th April at 5:00pm In April 2015, an article from Signs made headlines in Germany and provoked a storm of controversy in mainstream and social media that lasted several weeks. The #RegrettingMotherhood debate in Germany – so-called because of the many tweets that used the English-language hashtag #RegrettingMotherhood to highlight their contribution to the ongoing debate – illustrates the intense public interest in motherhood in contemporary Germany. This paper analyses how the debate played out and uses the controversy to raise some broader questions about the meaning of motherhood in the contemporary era. Jeffrey Ashcroft (University of St Andrews) The Painter’s Pen: Albrecht Dürer’s Words for Art in Renaissance Venice and Nuremberg Thursday, 13th April at 5:00pm Jeffrey Ashcroft’s new book, Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography, tells his life-story as he and those who knew him wrote it between his birth in 1481 and his death in 1528. It provides the entire extant written records and a comprehensive commentary on them. It is the most complete and the first chronologically structured documentation of Dürer in either English or German. As the first English translation of the whole corpus of material, with a commentary referencing many hundreds of art-historical writings, it is an unprecedented resource opening wholly new access to Dürer’s writings and artistic work. Translation and commentary shed new and clearer light on numerous aspects of Dürer’s personality, artistic production and intellectual development. One key aspect of Albrecht Dürer: Documentary Biography is its philological exploration in translation and commentary of Dürer’s linguistic achievement as creator of a German discourse, style and lexis of the theory and praxis of art and aesthetics. In his talk Jeffrey Ashcroft will look at Dürer’s borrowing of Venetian vocabulary to convey essential Renaissance concepts and terms in early modern German. All Seminars will be held in Room 216 of the Buchanan Building. Seminars will be held in English, though some material in German may not be translated. All are welcome, further details are available from Andrew Cusack. Dr Andrew Cusack Department of German Buchanan Building Union Street St Andrews KY16 9PH [log in to unmask]