Please find details below of King’s German Studies research seminar series for the academic year 2018-19.
Our next seminar will take place next Wednesday 10 October at 5pm, when the film historian Thomas Elsaesser will show and discuss his film ‘Sun Island’. Following the screening and talk, Erica Carter (King’s) will join Thomas Elsaesser in conversation.
We meet in the Nash Lecture Theatre (King’s Building, Room 2.31) on the Strand Campus.
All very welcome!
Áine
Term 1:
Wednesday 10 October 2018: 5pm
Joint Seminar with Film Studies; Nash Lecture Theatre (K2.31)
Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
Sun Island: Screening & Discussion
In my lecture, I outline the external circumstances, legal constraints, and posthumous fortuitous constellations that brought me to making The Sun Island. I also discuss the technological, institutional, and political contexts, which have led to the migration of nontheatrical film material into archives and art-spaces. After briefly referencing the essay film as placeholder genre, I will try and make a case for my film as a home movie repurposed. In the final part, I will raise the question of authorship, acknowledging on the one hand the ‘author’ of the images which the film ‘appropriates’, and on the other, suggest that The Sun Island also revisits and reworks a number of topics associated with my writings: family melodrama; German cinema; media archaeology; film history; memory and trauma
Wednesday 17 October 2018: 12.30-2pm
Room: VWB 6.01
Sophie Seita, University of Cambridge
‘Translating the “Blur-Print” in Uljana Wolf’s Translational Poetics’
This talk will attend to the nuances and difficulties in reading and translating contemporary multilingual poetry. My main example will be the German poet Uljana Wolf, who has traversed the language barriers between English, German, Polish, and Belarusian in conceptually and linguistically innovative ways in her translingual and politically engaged poetry. Considered within the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, Wolf’s work lends itself to a critique of borders, nationality, and ‘mother tongues’, but—crucially—this critique is performed not only thematically but also poetically, i.e. by way of neologisms, unusual syntax and prefixes, and by splicing a number of languages into the texture and prosody of her ‘German’ poetry. I will demonstrate how such an approach to multilingualism as a formal feature with political stakes and a concomitant rejection of an idealised originality invites a similarly rigorous playfulness and multilingual alertness from a translator like myself. I will contextualise Wolf’s experimental translational practice by reference to such innovative English-language writers as Rosmarie Waldrop and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and to the recent translation anthology Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016) which reconceives translation as a radically inventive and collaborative practice that complicates access to the ‘foreign’ it is usually supposed to facilitate.
Wednesday 24 October 2018: 4.15-6pm
Joint Modern Languages Research Seminar; Lecture Theatre 2, Bush House, 30 Aldwych, WC2B 4BG
Peter M Boenisch, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London
‘Confronting the present: from representation to reflexion in the Regie-work of Thomas Ostermeier’
Based on my research collaboration with German theatre director Thomas Ostermeier on contemporary methods of theatre direction, my lecture will discuss some recent productions by Ostermeier as they engage with the political crisis of the present through the medium of theatre. Staging plays from the canon of dramatic classics, such as Shakespeare’s Richard III and Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi, but also devising new stage work based on biographical narratives – Didier Eribon’s Retour ŕ Reims and Édouard Louis’ Histoire de la violence – the director responds to the right-wing radicalisation of society, homophobia, the crisis of the left, and the uncertainty about ‘what is to be done’ in these present times. Outlining Ostermeier’s directorial method, I shall argue that the director seeks to further extend the options of contemporary political theatre beyond the limits of representation, subversion, and deconstruction. Attempting to turn theatre into a space for deliberation, but also agonism (in the sense of Habermas and Mouffe, respectively), his productions arrive at a postrealist theatral form, based on the – surprisingly conventional, albeit notably epic – means of narration and story-telling. In particular, spectatorial desire, subjective ideological identification as well as affective involvement are employed in order to invite (or rather, command) the audience – in a purely theatral, and in Slavoj Žižek’s sense ‘interpassive’ way – to reflect on our own individual responsibility of ‘par(t)-taking’ (Rancičre) in the drama of our present times.
Wednesday 7 November 2018: 12.30-2pm
Joint Seminar with the Centre for Early Modern Studies; VWB 6.01
Anna Linton, King’s College London
‘The Gunpowder Plot in Early Modern Texts’
News of the English Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 quickly reached continental Europe. In German lands accounts appeared in news booklets by the end of the year, and soon the event was so notorious that it merited whole publications dedicated to it. But as the English government’s construction of events began to shift, so the German accounts soon became embedded in a strongly anti-Jesuit narrative, the flames of which were fanned across Europe by the assassination of Henri IV of France in 1610. The paper will trace this development in German seventeenth-century texts, from the early news booklets through confessionally motivated polemical texts to travelogues, and will place the interest in the Powder Treason within the context of a German fascination with Stuart Britain as a whole.
Wednesday 21 November 2018: 12.30-2pm
Room: VWB 6.01
Christoph Pretzer, King’s College London
‘Concepts of History in the 12th-century Middle High German Kaiserchronik’
Wednesday 5 December 2018: 12.30-2pm
Room: VWB 6.01
Tashi Petter, Queen Mary University London
‘“I am not modern”: Anachronism and the Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger’