Dear colleagues,
Warwick is delighted to welcome Elisabeth Herrmann as our first seminar speaker of the year. Please see below for the rest of this year's WWIGS programme. All welcome!
Wednesday, 31 October, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Elisabeth Herrmann (Warwick): When Anti-World Literature Turns into World Literature: Franz Kafka’s Archives of Resistance
This paper investigates how Kafka developed a very distinct form of ‘anti-world literature’ through the fictional creation of different world systems. In most of his short stories as well as in the three novel fragments America. The Missing Person, The Trial, and The Castle the protagonists are exposed to abstract forms of social domination and a feeling of universal guilt, non-belonging and isolation. In many aspects, the social systems the protagonists encounter feature the alienating experience of living in a depersonalized modern (capitalist) world. In opposition to the established notion that Kafka’s protagonists suffer from the inability to act independently, not succeeding in pursuing their individual goals, this paper argues that there lies a subliminal, but very powerful social and political revolutionary potential in Kafka’s text. It is the unremitting search for a message that is yet to be conveyed and the refusal to integrate into a world in which the rules are not transparent, that create a symbolic repository and counter-archive to a world system in which indifference, impersonality and passivity are identified as the foundation of our ‘relationship to the world’ (Rosa 2016). There is no vision, no utopian world view, but a hidden message in Kafka’s texts, conveyed through an ever-resistant melancholy with which the individual fights the impersonal system he is exposed to without knowing its rules. The analysis of a sample of texts will show that Kafka’s literary examples of individual resistance have been able to circulate globally because they translate universally – that is across political systems.
Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies 2018-19
Term 1:
Wednesday 31 October 2018, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Elisabeth Herrmann (Warwick): When Anti-World Literature Turns into World Literature: Franz Kafka’s Archives of Resistance
Wednesday 14 November, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Ina Linge (Exeter): The Potency of the Butterfly: Gender, Sexuality and Non-human Animals in German Sexology and the Arts after 1900
Wednesday 21 November, 3-5pm, Humanities Building H0.60 (Please note different time and venue!)
Writer in residence Olga Grjasnowa reads from her novel Gott ist nicht schüchtern
Wednesday 28 November, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Chantal Wright (Warwick): Revisiting the re-translation hypothesis: Antoine Berman reading Walter Benjamin
Term 2:
Wednesday 16 January 2019, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Elizabeth Boa (Nottingham): Feminism, Ecocriticism, Identity Politics: Texts, Theories, and Historical Contexts
Wednesday 30 January, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Holger Schulze (Copenhagen): What are Sound Studies? A Journey into Historical, Anthropological and Political Aspects of Listening and Sounding
Wednesday 20 February, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Thomas Martinec (Regensburg): ‘Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu’. Poetischer Sinn als musikalisches Verfahren in Lautgedichten der Avantgarde
Term 3:
Wednesday 1 May, 5-7pm, Humanities Building H2.44
Kate Rigby (Bath Spa): Rereading Herder in the Horizon of the Environmental Humanities
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