February 1, 2007

Professor Karen Feldman (UC Berkeley) will lecture on "The Temporal Aside: On 'Transcendental Buffoonery' in Two Works of Novalis."

February 1, 2007

Christine Lehleiter (Indiana University) will present a lecture titled "Can a Woman Have a Self? Masquerade and Subjectivity in Sophie von La Roche’s ‘Lady Sternheim."

February 1, 2007

Professor Chenxi Tang (University of Chicago) will lecture on "The Tragedy of Popular Sovereignty: Hölderlin’s ‘The Death of Empedocles."

November 1, 2006

Jocelyn Holland and Jan Reimann will present a lecture titled "Denoting Chaos." Claimed by theology, aesthetics, science and – most recently – popular culture, chaos has undergone vast semantic shifts in the course of its history. From its early roles in narratives of creation, chaos has been championed alternately as the epitome of order and disorder, beauty and formlessness, and elaborated both discursively and in symbolic form. The Berkeley Department of German invites you to a conversation on chaos: on the basis of a small selection of excerpts drawn from literature and philosophy, ranging from the classical to the bizarre,…

November 1, 2006

Karl Heinz Bohrer (Professor Emeritus, Univ. of Bielefeld) will lecture on "Style as Provocation: Goethe, Nietzsche, Brentano, Heine."

October 1, 2006

Christoph Koenig (University of Osnabrueck) will give a lecture titled, "The Disgrace of Failed Memory: Günter Grass and the Hidden Past in German Studies."

September 1, 2006

Professor Wilhelm Vosskamp (Univ. of Cologne) will lecture on "Schillers Utopie der aesthetischen Bildung." The basis of my talk will be Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man," published in 1795. In the context of German discussions on "Bildung" (education, selfformation, selfperfection), I want to outline that the preconditions of Schiller's aesthetics are his anthropology (this was first conceptualized in the dissertation on the "Connection between the Animal and Spiritual Man") and a critique of modern societal differentiation. My main purpose is to elaborate the specific characteristics of "aesthetical education" and the role of a "state of beauty" in…

August 1, 2006

Dr. Erwin Tschirner (University of Leipzig) will give a lecture titled "Häufigkeitsverteilungen im Deutschen und ihr Einfluss auf das Lehren und Lernen des DaF." Erwin Tschirner is Dean, Professor of German, and Director of the Herder Institute at the Universiy of Leipzig. He received his PhD in Germanic Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of numerous books and articles on the Acquisition and Teaching of German as a Foreign Language (DaF), most recently the Frequency Dictionary of German: Core Vocabulary for Learners ( with R. Jones, London: Routledge, 2005). He is co-author of the most…

May 1, 2006

The 2006 Kenneth Weisinger Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Ulrich Baer (NYU). His lecture is titled "Rainer Maria Rilke’s 'Beyond': On sublimation and desire in modern poetry."

April 1, 2006

The Bonwit-Heine Lecture Series presents Meike Werner (Vanderbilt University), who will lecture on "Translating the Orient. Eugen Diederichs and the Literatures of the World."