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Reminder: Deadline for Abstracts extended to 1 August ‘Damals, dann und danach’. Symposium in Honour of the 70th Birthday of Barbara Honigmann Monday, 25 February 2019 Venue: Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU CALL FOR PAPERS Barbara Honigmann is one of the best known Jewish authors writing in German, but also an indispensable part of the canon of writers who grew up in the GDR and left that country before its demise. The perspective she brings to both themes is distinctively, but not stridently, feminine. At the time of her birthday she will have been living and writing for 35 years in Strasbourg, so her work is of central importance for all those working in diasporic literature. A major theme of her work is concerned with the extraordinary lives and personalities of her parents so, as well as being an important example of ‘Elternliteratur’, her books offer exceptional insights into perennially fascinating aspects of European history, such as the story of her stepfather, the spy Kim Philby. The account of her ten-week residency in New York inaugurated a special form of Jewish travel writing, whilst in her recent best-seller about the street where she lives in Strasbourg she found a new angle from which to explore belonging, home, history and multiculturalism. Because she draws extensively on her own experience in her writing, her work is a rich source for thinking about autobiography and autofiction. She has revived the form of the epistolary novel, and letters play an extremely important part in all her works. This has implications both for her mastery of literary form, and for the question of her literary voice. Thus far she has eschewed the long novel, acknowledging instead her indebtedness to a particular tradition which, following Deleuze and Guattari, she calls a ‘minor literature’. The symposium hopes to cover as many aspects of her work as possible – plus many that are not mentioned here. The organisers would therefore welcome proposals of papers of 25-30 minutes’ length on any aspect of Barbara Honigmann’s work. Please address these ̶ in the form of ca. 300-word abstracts ̶ to both Godela Weiss-Sussex ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Robert Gillett ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) by 1 August 2018 (deadline extended from 15 July). Institute of Modern Languages Research University of London School of Advanced Study Senate House |Malet Street |GB- London WC1E 7HU Website http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk<http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/> The Institute of Modern Languages Research<http://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/> modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk The Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) is the new designation for the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS), itself the outcome of a merger in 2004 between the Institute of Germanic Studies and the Institute of Romance Studies, founded in 1950 and 1989 respectively. ######################################################################## To unsubscribe from the GERMAN-STUDIES list, click the following link: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=GERMAN-STUDIES&A=1