Join us in the Nebel Room for a presentation by Florian Fuchs about his book Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature. He will be joined in conversation by William Stewart of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures....
On October 4, Vera Thomann (Vienna) and Christian Struck (Harvard) will host a workshop on Opacity/Opacification. Perspectives on Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Politics, with Emmanuel Alloa (Fribourg/Yale) and Sebastien Fanzun (Zürich) as guest speakers. A reader of the texts that to be discussed will be sent closer to the date to those who have registered. The program is as follows:
9:30 am Introduction (Struck/Thomann)
9:45–11:15 Being Opaque. On the Ambivalent Politics of Invisibility (Alloa)
11:30–1:00 Outside of the Real Estate: Bee Politics...
Michael Beer (1800-1833), famous for a few years early in life, is one of the many forgotten poets of the 19th century. This lecture will show why it can be rewarding to dig deeper into the work of an author whose dramas are generally neglected because of their „Epigonalität.“ Beer, a German cosmopolitan, stood in close contact with the European world of theater and opera; as an author of tragedies, he was fully aware of the necessity to react in form and contents to the enormous success of opera as personified in his brother, Giacomo Meyerbeer. Michael Beer, as a German Jew, had to...
Why did Wernher von Braun and Norbert Wiener write novels and stories? Based on the fiction of the so-called "father of the American lunar program," and of the founder of cybernetics, this lecture explores the peculiar phenomenon wherein some scientists-- who played a leading role in launching the technical achievements of the 20th century-- engaged in literary avocations. The fact that they wrote at all is as significant as the works themselves. This talk asks about the place that literature plays within the rocketry of von Braun and the cybernetics of Wiener. In what ways does...
In 1931, Max Horkheimer proposed a model of interdisciplinary research that remains a benchmark for understanding how cultures function and might function better. He imagined an institute “in which philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists are brought together in permanent collaboration” (Horkheimer 1993, 9). The institute would not work with a single theory but would let data lead to new hypotheses (Horkheimer 1993, 10). But the work of Horkheimer and colleagues rarely lived up to the 1931 vision of an interdisciplinary, empirically grounded approach to...
Join us for late lunch & cakes and find out more about Germanic languages, our concentrations and secondary field, and study and work abroad opportunities.