Retrospective: Spring 2009 Colloquium Series

Wim Wenders and Topographies of German Identity
January 23, 2009
Lawrence Shapiro (History of Architecture and Urban Design, Cornell University) opened the Spring colloquium series with a paper entitled “Wim Wenders and Topographies of German Identity.” Shapiro’s talk, supplemented by filmic images, centered on his recent work concerning the different respects in which the German landscape was reinscribed with meaning after the Second World War. Shapiro explored the ways in which topographies in Wim Wenders’ films are presented with a critical yet reverent respect and sought to understand what particular role the frequent images of dead ends and impasses assume in this context. Shapiro thus presented his paper as a part of his larger research interests, which aim to tease out the “linkages between ethnographic fieldwork, documentary photography, and art historical formalism in the writing and rewriting of German space and culture, and especially the mechanisms of recognition and identity formation across the time period 1890-1975.” (Grace Gemmell)

Gradiva, the Woman Who Walks: Reincarnated in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Art History
February 6, 2009
On February 6th Francesca Cernia Slovin, an independent scholar based in New York City, presented her paper “Gradiva, the Woman Who Walks: Reincarnated in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Art History.” The paper developed out of a collaboration with Geoff Waite (Cornell University), who was a discussant at the colloquium, commenting on the paper, presenting slides and taking questions along with Slovin. In her paper Slovin situated a close reading of Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 story Gradiva (and its famous analysis by Freud in 1907, Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva) at the intersection of psychoanalysis, etymology, and art history, particularly Aby Warburg’s iconology. The paper (supplemented by the discussion) posed the question, in Waite’s words, of the visual equivalent of etymology, by interweaving an analysis of the incestuous etymology of proper names in Jensen’s text with the image of a woman’s gait (initially glimpsed in a bas-relief) that obsesses the protagonist of Jensen’s story (not to mention Freud himself). Moreover, by connecting that same image of a woman’s gait to Warburg’s obsession with a woman’s gait (from Ghirlando’s Birth of St. John the Baptist), Slovin and Waite showed how a visual image can function as a “primal word,” and the joint discussion and presentation of slides (of Ghirlando’s painting and of images mentioned in Jensen’s text) revealed the dizzying interrelations between, as Slovin put it, “archaeology, ideology, literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, art history, memoirs, and anecdotes,” all of which constitute the “spider web we today call the ‘humanities.’”(Josh Dittrich)

Forced Motion: Kinematics and Narrative in the 19th Century
March 6, 2009
Helmut Müller-Sievers (Northwestern University), in his paper “Forced Motion: Kinematics and Narrative in the 19th Century,” presented research from a current book project, and, following an account of the rise of kinematics as a science, laid down an argument for the interpretive potential kinematics can offer to a rereading of 19th century prose. The science of kinematics, born in the 1830s but largely unacknowledged as a discipline, would contribute, in Sievers’ vision, to the explanation of connections between disciplines and would help link technological phenomena with modes of interpretation, while unraveling those phenomena in the light of a discipline that transcends the classical, anagogical, or moral interpretive patterns of the 19th century. Sievers’ project takes its cue from Kleist’s well-known short text, Über das Marionettentheater, a prose piece featuring the machines’ potential for unrest and resistance against the rules of “grace, motion, or subjectivity” characteristic of the Weimar classical ideals. Sievers claimed that Kleist’s text goes even beyond the scope of polemical engagement with the Weimar models by opening up venues for an interpretation of the future of mechanisms and their role in the aesthetics of the 19th century. An analysis of marionettes or machines from the perspective of their meta-textual presence would reveal them as the very principles of textual construction, tools of transmission and prototypes of textual kinematics. Sievers’ approach would have the reader understand Kleist’s text beyond the scope of traditional hermeneutics or ethics and engage with the marionettes’ anticipation of cinematic grace as a textual operating principle, present in such later realist novels as those by Dickens or Balzac. (Arina Rotaru)

Notes from the Tenure Track
March 27, 2009
John Namjun Kim (University of California, Riverside) gave his take on the state of the profession in his colloquium talk entitled “Notes from the Tenure Track.” In a convivial discussion, Kim, a recent PhD of Cornell’s Department of German Studies, shared insights and experience from his first years as an assistant professor. In addition to the three standard requirements for tenure (teaching, research, and service), he emphasized the importance of a fourth, underacknowledged factor: collegiality. In his own experience, research had to be put on hold for the first couple years because of the demands of teaching, service, and just “learning how to be faculty.” Although challenging, these initial years can also be very rewarding, according to Kim, especially interactions with students. He recounted how he has encouraged his students to explore new projects, study abroad, and apply for (and receive) fellowships, among other things.
Besides tips on what to expect in the first few years of a tenure-track position, Kim also had advice for the students in the audience on how to get there in the first place. He detailed the benefits of attending conferences, of participating in interdisciplinary writing groups, and of making and maintaining institutional connections. Above all, he indicated the importance of writing a good dissertation and actively participating in Pandaemonium Germanicum, the organization of German graduate students at Cornell, in order to get experience organizing and collaborating with other students. The discussion centered around questions such as the relationship between the intense focus of graduate school and the demand for breadth as faculty, the pedagogical and performative differences between teaching a lecture and a seminar, and the need to engage closely with one’s new department, both with students and with other faculty. (Carl Gelderloos)

Unvermeidlich und nicht zu fassen. Das Reale als Problem in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Literatur
April 17, 2009
In his paper entitled “Unvermeidlich und nicht zu fassen. Das Reale als Problem in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Literatur,” Albrecht Koschorke (Universität Konstanz) focused on problems of writing the history of science, and more generally on the epistemology of modernity.
Koschorke presented two texts by Adalbert Stifter, Nachkommenschaften and Aus dem bairischen Walde, as representative of the oscillations of realist aesthetics: striving toward a reproduction of “wirkliche Wirklichkeit” on the one hand (Nachkommenschaften) and an inundation of the senses by the real (Aus dem bairischen Walde) on the other, both tendencies can be represented in language only as a negation of language’s ability to represent or articulate. Koschorke presented this, however, not as a problem specific to a literary period, but as generalizable to an epistemological problem in modernity. The real can take the form of an epiphany, an aesthetic experience of the sublime, or of horror, as in the Gothic novel. In all three cases, Koschorke claimed, the real takes the form of a massive presence which eludes representation and which seems to occupy a realm neither within nor beyond symbolic order. As in Nachkommenschaften, attempts to capture and represent it result in fragments of representation ripe only for destruction.
Thus Koschorke situated his project against postmodern, and in particular poststructuralist cultural critique, which holds that reality cannot be discovered, but only constructed in sign systems. Referencing methodological debates between cultural constructivists and realists, Koschorke suggested the more fruitful alternative of an ambivalent position better able to capture the ambivalences within modernism and modernity, one which would allow more space for reflections on modernity’s treatment of the real, where the elusiveness of the real by no means forecloses quests in search of it. (Gizem Arslan)

Ressentiment as Corrective: Jean Améry and the Duty of Unforgiving
May 1, 2009
Melanie Steiner Sherwood, a PhD candidate in German Studies here at Cornell, concluded this semester’s colloquium series with a paper entitled “Ressentiment as Corrective: Jean Améry and the Duty of Unforgiving,” which centered on Holocaust survivor Jean Améry’s use of the term “ressentiment” in his polemical book, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966). Steiner Sherwood’s paper was excerpted from a longer chapter of her dissertation that addresses how Améry and Wolfgang Hildesheimer employ the respective concepts of ressentiment and melancholy in their work as a corrective to what they perceived was a morally vacuous (or tenuous) West German post-war society vis-à-vis its relationship to the Holocaust. Steiner Sherwood argued that Améry’s use of ressentiment took specific aim at what, since Nietzsche, had been primarily thought in negative terms: ressentiment as merely reactive, affective, symptomatic of a physical weakness in the face of an oppressor, and vengeful. For Améry, ressentiment had, on the contrary, a deeply ethical dimension, one that had been obscured by Nietzsche but had been somewhat rehabilitated by certain twentieth-century philosophers of ethics. Rather than positing a morally dubious and merely affective response, Améry places the term squarely within the realm of justice. For Améry, only through a conscious unwillingness to either forgive or forget on the part of a victim could it be possible to reconcile the present with the unfinished past. Steiner Sherwood’s talk was followed by an engaged discussion centering around Améry’s possibly problematic appropriation of the Nietzschean term and the status of ressentiment as rhetorical, literary, and political practice. (Ari Linden)