 Participants from around the United States, including professors of German Literature as well as Comparative Literature and Philosophy, will present a series of papers that take up a challenge to theorize and to demonstrate the unique contribution that literature—specifically, modern literature—makes to ethical inquiry. References by literary theorists to an “ethical turn” in past decades underscore the urgency of this inquiry. This conference will bring a much-needed focus to bear upon the particular complexity that inheres in articulating an ethics within the context of modernism. The all-but-untranslatable title of the conference, Unanschaulichkeit, gestures toward a dilemma that speakers will engage through German literary texts by authors including Büchner, Robert Walser, Kafka, Carl Einstein, and Hermann Broch; collectively, they will ask how modernist literary texts distance themselves from traditions of didactic art but nevertheless implicate ethical concerns within the textual structures of literature. This question, in turn, raises the philosophical problem of moral contingency that is of particular urgency in Western culture today.
March 30, 2007
5:30 p.m.Reception at Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities
7:00 p.m.Performance: Odradek (Christian Sinn, Gesa Frömming, Ingo Kieslich, Zuzka Kralova, Denis Mujic, Jessica Riviere, Susanne Scholz, Randall Self, Brett Sterling) in Buttrick Hall 205 (map)
March 31, 2007
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Furman 209 (map)
Section I: Moderator, Christian Sinn (Vanderbilt University)
Christopher Wild (UCLA):
“…attendo, cogito, revolvo…” Meditation and the Institution of Self in Ignatius and Descartes
Rüdiger Campe (Johns Hopkins University):
Lovers’ Daydreams: On theDifference between Image and Imagining in Lessing’s Laokoon.
Stephen Dowden (Brandeis University):
The Medusa Gaze of Art: Unanschaulichkeit in Büchner, Kafka, and Beckett
Lunch 12:00 – 2:00 p.m.
2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Furman 209
Section II: Moderator, Meike Werner (Vanderbilt University)
Anette Schwarz (Cornell University):
Literature of "Unanschaulichkeit": Robert Walser's Ornamental Prose.
Zachary Sng (Brown University):
False Alarm: On ‘Responsibility’ in Kafka’s Writings
Sara Eigen (Vanderbilt University):
Metamorphosis and Monstrous Ethics: On the Loss of Ideology in the Literature of Hans Grimm
7:00 p.m.Dinner at Professor Barbara Hahn’s home
April 1, 2007
departure
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