German Culture News
Fall 2007 Vol. XVII No. I

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(please click on the title of each passage to read entire article)

The Legacy of Kant: Classical Neo-Kantianism
Paul Guyer (Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania) opened the conference with a discussion of Kantian and Neo-Kantian aesthetics, asking (as his paper was titled) “What Happened to Kant in Neo-Kantian Aesthetics?” Guyer elucidated two aesthetic theories emerging from classical late nineteenth-century Neo-Kantianism; that of Hermann Cohen, as presented in his work Begründung der Ästhetik, and that of Wilhelm Dilthey, whose aesthetic theory appears in his writings on poetics and hermeneutics.  Each of these philosophers created their own distinct synthetic theory of aesthetic experience, responding to and recasting Kant's account thereof.  But, as Guyer pointed out, Cohen and Dilthey often strayed far away from the letter of Kant's own writings, and were clearly just as engaged with the aesthetic theories of the nineteenth century. 

DAAD Weekend: German Mediascapes
Conference organizer Ute Maschke (Cornell University) opened up this year's DAAD weekend, “German Mediascapes,” with a performative demonstration of certain problems inherent to the medium of the power point presentation. By juxtaposing her spoken talk and the facile visuals of power point, Maschke indicated the need to approach the 'fourth estate'—i.e. news media in the public sphere— more critically. Questioning the relationship between media, consumers, and changing “modes of apprehending the world,” Maschke cited Hans Magnus Enzensberger's cynical understanding of the freedom of modern consumers of media to separate media consumption from the pursuit of truth. Maschke pointed out that although the traditional media of newspapers and radio are still the most-trusted, they are losing out in actual use to the much less-trusted medium of the internet; this raises the question of the possible role of what might be called an internet-based 'fifth estate.' After an electronic survey of conference participants on their media habits and awareness, Maschke concluded by inviting conference participants to rethink certain common fears about the future of media: that the end of newspapers is near, that an unhealthy amount of power is concentrated in the media business, that the emphasis on the local comes at the expense of the (inter)national, and that serious journalism will continue to turn into infotainment. (Carl Gelderloos)

Bassam Tibi
Imagining Muslims/Imagining Others: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe
On September 14 th and 15 th, 2007 at the Kahin Center, scholars from diverse fields of interest came together for an international colloquium and series of panel discussions entitled “Imagining Muslims/Imagining Others: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe.” The gathering attempted to blend perspectives around three elements pertaining to questions of religious pluralism: positive images (good others), negative images (bad others) and historical contexts and causes (historical others). Bassam Tibi, professor of international relations at the University of Göttingen and A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University, was among the presenters of the set of public lectures and workshops.

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
On October 26 th and 27 th, Ute Maschke and the Institute for German Cultural Studies organized a conference devoted to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and its effect on the teaching, learning, and assessment of languages in the U.S. The conference consisted of a keynote lecture, a plenary panel and a series of workshops and group discussions designed to bring together professionals in language instruction, assessment, second language acquisition and curriculum development from across different Cornell departments, across the country and across the Atlantic, in order to share experiences and opinions of the usefulness of the CEFR in the US. Ute Maschke’s introductory remarks stressed the significance of the CEFR for rethinking language study in an era marked by globalization, migration, and developments in media technology. The keynote lecture that followed, given by Sauli Takala of the University of Jyväskylä, Finland and Chair of the European Association of Language Testing and Assessment, addressed the history and reception of the CEFR in Europe. He stressed the usefulness of the framework in providing a common basis for the elaboration of syllabi, curricula, exams and textbooks and for emphasizing an “action-oriented” view of language use.

Logics of the Living
While a linguistic paradigm dominated theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th-century, crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics are increasingly formulated in terms of "life" rather than language. Extending across disciplines, whether medical, environmental, juridical, philosophical, anthropological, or biological, an open-ended concept of "life" has also come to inform critical thinking in the humanities. How does an emerging life paradigm in the humanities reflect or lead to the development of various "logics of the living" through which "life" becomes an organizing principle or system, whether aesthetic, conceptual, or social? How do these "logics of the living," as metaphors, actualities, ethical foundations, or theoretical frameworks, come to inform cultural criticism? On October 12 th and 13 th in the A.D. White House at Cornell, the graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature brought together presenters from a variety of disciplines to offer further reflections on how the question of "life" is ordered, represented, repressed, celebrated, idealized or domesticated in the humanities today.

Fall Lectures by Andreas Langenohl and Michael Steinberg

Retrospective: Fall 2007 Colloquium

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