"Germany From the Outside"

Event Type

Conference/Workshop

Sponsor

"Germany From the Outside" is made possible by the support of: The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; the Max Kade Foundation, New York City; the School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics; and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Location

Levis Faculty Center, Room 210, 919 W. Illinois St., Urbana

Date

Sep 20, 2019 - Sep 21, 2019   All Day

Contact

Professor Laurie Johnson

E-Mail

lruthjoh@illinois.edu

Views

42

Originating Calendar

School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics Calendar

German Studies has always grappled with navigating the relationship between geopolitical and linguistic-cultural spaces. “Germany from the Outside” brings current debates about curricular and institutional issues together with discussions about the relation between nation, language, and culture. Just as “Germany” has never been one discrete entity, “German culture” and “German language” have never been the property of one ethnic or national group.

The conference speakers will present work on perspectives on Germany that emanate, in one way or another, from outside the borders of Germany itself. This includes work on: authors who write in German but are not actually German themselves; on how literature produces reflections on the changing nature of the nation-state; or on authors who live in Germany but are in some way "outsiders."

Located at the nexus of cultural, political, historiographical, and philosophical discourses, the talks will inform our institutional discussions about next directions for our discipline.

SCHEDULE

Friday, September 20, 2019 - Levis Faculty Center Room 210

1:30 – 2:00 p.m. Welcome Coffee and Opening Remarks
Elena Delgado, Director, School of Literatures, Cultures, and Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Stephanie Hilger, Head, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Laurie Johnson, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2:00 – 3:30 p.m.      Archive
“Mobilizing the Archive: Marica Bodrožić und Deniz Utl's Unterhaltungen deutscher Eingewanderten"
Claudia Breger, Columbia University

“Tracing the Continual Present: Yoko Tawada and Vilém Flusser”
Gizem Arslan, Southern Methodist University

Moderator: Heidi Schlipphacke, University of Illinois-Chicago

3:30 – 4:00 p.m. Coffee and Cookies

4:00 – 5:30 p.m.    Memoir
“Between Times and Places:  German Identity in Albert Vigoleis Thelen’s Travel Memoirs from Spain and Portugal (31 August – 2 September 1939)”
Carl Niekerk, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 

“Writing Germany with Brazil: Julia Mann’s Memoirs”
Veronika Füchtner, Dartmouth College

Moderator: Meike Werner, Vanderbilt University

 
Saturday, September 21, 2019 - Levis Faculty Center Room 210
 
8:30 – 9:00 a.m.  Pastries and Coffee

9:00 – 10:30 a.m.    Displacement
“Viennese Holocaust Refugees, American Humanitarians and the Midwest”
Bettina Brandt, Pennsylvania State University

"The Exile Author Hermann Broch on Germany During the 1940s"
Paul Michael Lützeler, Washington University-St. Louis

Moderator: Christiane Eydt-Beebe, Eastern Illinois University 

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.  Coffee and Snacks

11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.      Dialectic   
"Addresses of Our Last Homes: Refugees and Hyperlinked Literary Histories"
B. Venkat Mani, University of Wisconsin-Madison

"The Return of the Prodigal Galician Sons: An Austro-Jewish Dialectic"
Scott Spector, University of Michigan

Moderator: Imke Meyer, University of Illinois-Chicago

12:30 – 1:00 p.m. Closing Discussion and End of Conference

2:30 – 4:30 p.m. Annual Meeting of the Board of the American Friends of Marbach, Levis Faculty Center Room 208

 

SPEAKERS

Gizem Arslan is Lecturer of German at Southern Methodist University, where she specializes in literatures of migration, translation studies, and postwar German literature and culture. She works on topography and space in literature, theories of language, and on the relation between literature and mathematics. Arslan has published on the Turkish author and director Emine Sevgi Özdamar (who writes in German), on synesthesia in the works of Paul Celan and Yoko Tawada, and has spoken about literature “beyond the multilingual-monolingual divide.”
 
Bettina Brandt is Teaching Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Her own background, like that of several of our speakers, is multinational, multicultural, and multilingual, as she grew up in Germany, the Netherlands, and in French-speaking Belgium. Brandt works on twentieth- and twenty-first-century transnational literature, literary multilingualism and translation studies, and literatures of migration, among other areas. Her current book in progress is Cutting Out: Radical Figures and Letters on the Move, and she has co-edited volumes on China in the German Enlightenment and on travel and early relations between the Low Countries and the New World.
 
Claudia Breger is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Culture at Columbia University. Her research foci include theater and performance studies, media and cultural theory, and intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. Her first book, Ortlosigkeit des Fremden (1998), was about the history of modern representations of Romani and other itinerant people at the intersection of race and gender around 1800. In Szenarian kopfloser Herrschaft (2004), Breger examined imaginings of royalty beyond sovereignty in twentieth-century German culture. Her other books include An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance (2012) and Nach dem Sex? (2014). Currently Breger is working on Making Worlds: Affect and Collectivity in Contemporary European Cinema. She argues that the power of cinema to do “worldmaking” grants contemporary film the ability to reimagine collectivity (among other things, beyond the limits of the nation and the “national” language).
 
Veronika Fuechtner is Chair and Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College, and is also Adjunct Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine. Fuechtner co-edited volumes entitled A Global History of Sexual Science 1880-1960 and Imagining Germany, Imagining Asia. She is the author of Berlin Psychoanalytic (2011), and currently is at work on a book on Thomas Mann’s Brazilian mother and Mann’s construction of race and “Germanness.”
 
Paul Michael Luetzeler is Rosa May Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and the Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Luetzeler’s many publications include over ten books, which focus on ideas and constructions of Europe, exile literature, and German-American cultural relations, among other topics. He is President of the American Friends of Marbach, President of the International Hermann Broch Society, and on the executive committee of the Society for Intercultural German Studies.
 
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He speaks Turkish, Hindi, and Urdu in addition to German and English. His research and teaching interests include the histories and stories of migrants and refugees in Germany, Europe, and elsewhere, the cultural histories of digital and print media, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, post-colonialism, and transnationalism. Mani is co-editor of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature. His books on transnational and world literature received wide acclaim: Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact With Books (2017), and Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (2007). Mani also directs the University of Wisconsin’s Center for South Asia.

Carl Niekerk is Professor of German at the University of Illinois, with affiliations in the Program in Comparative and World Literature, French, and Jewish Studies. His books include Reading Mahler (2010), Zwischen Naturgeschichte und Anthropologie (2005), and Bildungskrisen (1995). He has published numerous articles on German literature and culture since 1750, Dutch culture, Dutch-Indonesian colonial and postcolonial culture, Austrian culture, and Jewish-German culture. At the University of Illinois, he teaches a popular course entitled “Europe in Trouble.”

Scott Spector is Rudolf Mrazek Collegiate Professor of History and German Studies at the University of Michigan. He works on intellectual and cultural history, ideas of Europe, gender studies and sexuality, and law and society. His multiple books range from Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000) to Modernism Without Jews? German-Jewish Subjects and Histories (2017). Spector works to uncover previously unseen relationships between politics and  culture by examining the history of and tracing connections between the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which literature and other cultural products are made.

Moderators at the conference are Christiane Eydt-Beebe (German, Eastern Illinois University), Imke Meyer (German, University of Illinois-Chicago), and Heidi Schlipphacke (German, University of Illinois-Chicago), and Meike Werner ​(German, Vanderbilt University).