Events

April 30, 2009, 4:15pm, Fisk 413

Rüdiger Campe (Yale) - The Sense of a Continuation: Goethe’s “Conversations of German Refugees” and the Emergence of Communication

Rüdiger Campe is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. He received his PhD from the University of Freiburg in 1986. Before joining the department at Yale he taught at Johns Hopkins University. He has been a visiting professor at the European University at Frankfurt on the Oder, at New York University, and at the University of Konstanz. His books include Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. Literatur und Berechnung zwischen Pascal und Kleist, published in 2002, (the English translation is forthcoming at Stanford UP under the title Playing the Game of Probability), and Affekt und Ausdruck. Zur Umwandlung der literarischen Rede im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, 1996. In 2002, he received the Aby-Warburg-Award for the Humanities, and during the 2007/2008 academic year he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. His focus in teaching and research is on rhetoric and aesthetics, the history of science and representation, (baroque) theater, and the European novel (from the 18th century to the present). His current projects comprise a study of procedures of evidence in the Enlightenment; institution and the novel in the 20th century; and a theory of advocacy in law, literature and politics.

April 17, 2009, 4:30 p.m., Powell Family Cinema (Center for Film Studies 190)

Fassbinder in his Films with Juliane Lorenz

Juliane Lorenz, the president of the Fassbinder Foundation in Berlin and a documentary filmmaker, began her career as a film editor with the great German director and has also edited the films of Werner Schroeter and others. She has been instrumental in the restoration and distribution of Fassbinder’s cinematic oeuvre including Berlin Alexanderplatz, the fifteen-hour adaptation of Alfred Düblin’s great city novel, one of five Fassbinder films now available on DVD in the prestigious Criterion Collection. She also edited Chaos as Usual. Conversations about Fassbinder (1997) and, more recently, In the Land of the Apple Tree (2005), a collection of the precocious teenager‘s poetry and prose. On Friday, April 17, Juliane Lorenz will comment on a screening of the Fassbinder episode from the omnibus political film Germany in Autumn (1978) and talk about her life and work with the director. http://www.wesleyan.edu/german/lorenzposter.pdf

March 30, 2009, at 5:00 p.m. in the Center for African American Studies, 343 High Street, Middletown, CT 06459

Zafer Senocak, German Turkish author, will be reading from his new book of poems Door Languages/Türsprachen. English translations by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright.

Born in Ankara in 1961, Zafer Senocak has been living in Germany since 1970, where he has become the most prominent and versatile German Turkish writer of our day. A prize-winning poet, translator, editor, political and philosophical essayist, and fiction writer, Senocak is the most challenging voice of the Turkish population in united Germany. His stylish and provocative essays explore taboo and repressed aspects of relations between Occident and Orient, Europe and Islam. His fiction has won him international acclaim, especially for the post-unification novel Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998), which deals with the German-Jewish-Turkish-Armenian complex. But poetry is always at the heart of his work. Senocak will be reading from his recent publication, Door Languages, translated into English by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and published by Zephyr Press in fall 2008.

Mr. Senocak has worked as a Writer-in-Residence at several American universities, among them M.I.T., Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, University of California at Berkeley, and Lafayette College.

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright received her MFA for literary translation from the University of Arkansas. She is now living in Boston, MA. She translates contemporary German texts, especially lyric poetry, into English. From September 1994 until July 1995, she lived in Berlin and translated, among others, the German-Turkish poets Zafer Senocak and Zehra Cirak. She has worked as a lecturer in Arkansas, at Boston University and at Oberlin College. Together with Zafer Senocak she has given bilingual readings in Memphis, New York City, Cambridge, San Francisco and Los Angeles. She has received several awards and research fellowships.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/german/zaferposter_4.pdf

February 26, 2009, at 4:30 p.m. in 413 Fisk Hall

Mark Anderson ’78, professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, will lecture on the topic: “The Art of Melancholy: W. G. Sebald and the Archive of German Memory”

Mark Anderson was a COL major at Wesleyan and also took many German courses. He is the author of the acclaimed study Kafka’s Clothes (Oxford UP) and of several other studies of Kafka. He has translated and edited Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard. His research focuses on German modernism, contemporary Austrian literature and the theory and practice of translation. At Columbia, he regularly offers courses on modern German-Jewish culture from 1750 to the present, on opera and the idea of music in German culture, and on German exile during the Nazi period. His courses in comparative literature have included “Problems of the Gothic,” “The Materiality of the Book in Western Culture,” and “Jewish Identity in Modern European Culture.”

September 29, 4:15 pm - 5:30 p.m. 404 Fisk Hall

Rüdiger Löwe from Bavarian Television
A Conversation about Germany's Views of the Presidential Election

Rüdiger Löwe is a journalist and editor at Bavarian Television in Munich, where he heads up the sections on international security affairs and "Books on Politics". Löwe studied at Wesleyan in 1967-1968 as a Fulbright scholar. He is a longtime friend of Bill Clinton's and has just attended the annual meetings of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008, 4:15PM, Fisk 414

The Practice of Recording: On the Relation of the Pathologist to the Poet Gottfried Benn

Christoph Hoffmann is a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and is currently the Max Kade Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Christoph Hoffmann's work combines literary studies and the history of science in an exemplary fashion, and he has widely published in this field of research. He is the author of two books: Der Dichter am Apparat. Medientechnik, Experimentalpsychologie und Texte Robert Musils 1899-1942 (Wilhelm Fink 1997); Unter Beobachtung: Naturforschung in der Zeit der Sinnesapparate (Wallstein 2006).