The notion of practice has played an increasingly important role in the study of literature, in cultural studies, in anthropology, and in philosophy during the last decades. This increasing interest in practices also entailed a specific interest in forms of writing from a perspective that foregrounds not the production of meaning and the hermeneutic reading of texts, but a specific attention to the ways in which texts shape forms of perception, stiles of thought, and modes of behavior. Thus, we have to distinguish between a focus on and a tension between semiotic and hermeneutic approaches to texts and approaches that…

A German Cabaret WAS ES ALLES GIBT!

Bio: W. Daniel Wilson was professor of German at Berkeley from 1983 to 2005 and departmental chair for four years; he is now professor of German at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely in eighteenth-century literature, culture, and politics, particularly on political, gender and sexuality in Goethe. His most recent books are Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur ‘Homosexualität’ (Insel, 2012), Goethes Erotica und die Weimarer ‘Zensoren’ (Wehrhahn, 2015) and Der Faustische Pakt: Goethe und die Goethe-Gesellschaft im Dritten Reich (dtv, 2018). In 2016 he was awarded the Raimar Lüst Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. https://literaturkritik.de/wilson-der-faustische-pakt-goethe-als-mitlaeufer,25123.html

Helke Sander was a key figure of the early dffb (Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin), where she studied between 1966 and 1969. Returning to her political organizing and her films of the era revises three crucial narratives: 1. it expands narratives about 1968 to include the establishment of feminism as part of it (The Tomatenwurf), which is often read as a 1970s phenomenon; 2. it expands narratives of cinemas of the late sixties to include feminist filmmaking; and 3. it shows how the seeds for her much better known filmmaking of the seventies were already visible thematically and formally in…

Abstract: If money’s status as dominant medium guiding what Jochen Hörisch once called the ontosemiological framework of modern culture has really yielded to the empire of audio-visual media, then why is so much contemporary German literature still so obsessed with money? This presentation considers how one such example—Ulrich Peltzer’s 2015 novel Das bessere Leben, a work whose very title signals its investment in correlating being and meaning—has tracked the convergence of money and image in our contemporary moment but in so doing has also called literature’s powers of critical observation into question. By indexing the museum as a privileged space of aesthetic…

Filmmaker in residence Ulrike Ottinger presents an illustrated lecture discussing her approach to the visual design of her films, as well as her research methods for a nonfiction film project like Chamisso’s Shadow. https://bampfa.org/event/mosse-lecture-ulrike-ottinger See schedule on PFA website: https://bampfa.org/program/afterimage-ulrike-ottinger

Jekaterina Novikova, EU fellow at the Institute of European Studies at UC Berkeley and Innovation Policy Coordinator at the European Commission, will speak about Horizon EU, a European research and innovation programme. This talk will highlight the process of the preparation of the programme based on the lessons learned from the previous programs, its building blocks, key novelties, and priorities.

Affective Realisms 27th Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference February 22-23   We often think of realism as a reactionary gesture, circumscribing all that is possible within the limits of the status quo – but recent developments in critical theory, philosophy, and literary studies have mobilized affect and reality in surprising new configurations. Scholars such as Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Sarah Ahmed, Jane Bennett, and Mel Y. Chen have figured affect as something very “real” in itself, a non-subjective force that gives form to bodies at once material, social, and political. As contemporary theorists return to the question of realism after the…

These past two decades the European Union has been hit by two so-called “crises”: the financial or “Euro” crisis of 2008 and the 2015-2016 migration crisis. Whereas both crises have fed into euro-sceptic sentiments, it is safe to say that the response to the financial crisis at least seemed to be somewhat coordinated and uniform with EU member states coming together to reinforce the monetary union through powerful new instruments and sacrificed control over their banking systems to save the euro. The opposite has been true with regard to EU member states’ response to the so-called migration crisis. Driven by…

These past two decades the European Union has been hit by two so-called “crises”: the financial or “Euro” crisis of 2008 and the 2015-2016 migration crisis. Whereas both crises have fed into euro-sceptic sentiments, it is safe to say that the response to the financial crisis at least seemed to be somewhat coordinated and uniform with EU member states coming together to reinforce the monetary union through powerful new instruments and sacrificed control over their banking systems to save the euro. The opposite has been true with regard to EU member states’ response to the so-called migration crisis. Driven by…