The Germanic Department invites you to the first meeting of our Work-in-Progress Colloquium this semester, December 1, at 3:30-5 p.m., in LCLB 2090. We will meet to discuss a pre-circulated paper by Anna Hunt, which she is planning to submit to Diacritics. The article will also appear as a chapter in her book Sites of Grief: Mourning, Politics, Forgiveness. Sites of Grief studies works of art and literature that transform the spectacles of bodies exposed to and by state-sanctioned violence into sites of resistance. These works of art not only expose the ungrievability produced by the state, they experiment with modes and frames that open the possibility of mourning what has been rendered unmournable. In changing the angle from which the body is viewed, in providing some mediation between the eye and the body, in many cases by foregrounding the mourner rather than the body, these works imbue mourning with political power and prompt a reimagination of the world from the ground up. The colloquium is a forum of discussion on pre-circulated work in progress in and around the Germanic department. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Anna Hunt is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She’s affiliate faculty with the EU Center and Jewish Studies. She received her PhD from Yale with a dissertation entitled “Taking the World by Storm: Forgiveness in the Early Writings of Walter Benjamin.”
