Publications

Krishna Winston’s Werner Herzog Translation in Harper’s. “The Jungle is Obscene,” an excerpt from Krishna Winston’s translation of Werner Herzog’s book Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo, is included in the “Readings” section of the June issue of Harper’s. The book is published this month by Ecco.

The excerpt is available online to subscribers.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/06/0082507

Krishna Winston’s Translation of Hans Jonas’s Memoirs. Krishna Winston’s translation of the Memoirs of the philosopher Hans Jonas was published in July 2008 by Brandeis University Press. More information is available at http://www.brandeis.edu/tauber/publications/biography.html. Her translation of Peter Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in July 2007.

Ulrich Plass on Kafka in Zeitschrift fur Deutsche Philologie. Uli Plass has published a review of Bernd Neumann’s Franz Kafka. Aporien der Assimilation. Eine Rekonstruktion des Romanwerks in the Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie: http://www.ZfdPhdigital.de/aid/zfdph_20080211/inhalt.html

Leo Lensing on Kraus and Benjamin in NYRB. Leo Lensing’s letter criticizing Adam Kirsch’s review of Paul Reitter’s The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siècle Europe appeared recently in The New York Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22132

Leo Lensing on Karl Kraus in Süddeutsche Zeitung. His article “Nur noch Geist und kaum mehr Körper. Von den letzten Tagen ihres Freundes Karl Kraus berichtet Helene Kann in ihren bisher unbekannten Memoiren” appeared as the featured article in the “Literature” section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung on October 9, 2008. The article introduces Helene Kann’s memoir of the final years of the satirist Karl Kraus, including her explanations of his controversial support for the clerico-fascist dictator Engelbert Dollfuss, who attempted to suppress the Nazi Party in Austria. Lensing also argues for more biographical attention to Helene Kann herself, one of Kraus’s closest friends in the last decade of his life.

Leo Lensing's review essay that treats the correspondence between Karl Kraus and the publisher Kurt Wolff and the book for the exhibition “Kurt Wolff. Ein Literat und Gentleman” appeared under the title “Unter Literarhysterikern” on April 14, 2008, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The review is available online at: http://www.faz.net/s/RubC17179D529AB4E2BBEDB095D7C41F468/Doc~E87495F9D407841088BA55C03B898C9DA~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Ulrich Plass's book Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno's Notes to Literature was published on October 2, 2006 by Routledge. This is the first book-length study of Adorno's philosophical literary criticism found in his four-volume Notes to Literature. Rather than relying exclusively on aesthetic concepts inherited from his predecessors in the Western tradition (such as Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard), Adorno seeks in these essays to transgress and transcend the conceptual limitations of aesthetic discourse by adopting a non-conceptual, metaphorical vocabulary that he borrows from the literary texts themselves; Adorno's interpretations of literature mobilize an alternative subterranean, primarily essayistic and fragmentary discouse on language and history that eludes the categories that predominate in his major work, Aesthetic Theory.

Ulrich Plass’s article “Journalism, Television, Poetry: Rainald Goetz’s 1989 was published in a special issue of The Germanic Review (vol. 81, no. 3, summer 2006, pp. 202-220) that focuses on the unconventional literary work of Rainald Goetz, one of the most prolific and original writers in contemporary German literature.

Presentations

On November 6, 2008, Krishna Winston spoke in the translation seminar of Indiana University’s Institute for Advanced Study. Her topic was “Poetry, Puns, Parody, Prolixity: The Translator as Co-Creator.” Her talk was sponsored by the Lilly Library, which is building a major collection of materials on literary translation.

Ulrich Plass, Assistant Professor of German Studies, Wesleyan, spoke on “Franz Kafka and the State of Exception” on November 17, 2008. Prof. Plass is a fellow at the Center for the Humanities, whose topic this fall is “Figuring the Human.”

Iris Bork-Goldfield presented An Outside Voice from the Inside: German Literature by Non-Heritage Authors and Its Role in the German Classroom on Monday, October 27, 2008. This paper was part of the 2008 CT COLT Fall Conference in the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford, CT. In an increasingly globalized world it might not come as a surprise that the works by authors of non- German descent are being recognized and defined as a new German literature. These authors with varied cultural backgrounds introduce the reader to a world in need of civil courage and tolerance as well as hope and endless possibilities. In this workshop she introduced the participants to poems and short stories that were selected and pedagogically implemented by her and one of her German majors for use in beginning and intermediate German language classrooms. This workshop was presented in GERMAN, with examples in German.

Leo Lensing gave a lecture on “The Neue Freie Presse Neurosis: Freud, Karl Kraus and the Newspaper as Daily Devotional” at the University of Notre Dame on March 12, 2008. The lecture was sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures. A summary of the lecture is online at: http://www.nd.edu/~nanovic/events/lensing/lensing.html

Ulirich Plass delivered a keynote address at the annual graduate student conference in German literature at Yale University on April 4, 2008. The conference topic was “The Essay as Form”; Plass’s lecture had the title “The Essay as Aphorism: Adorno’s Minima Moralia.” The conference program is online at: http://www.yale.edu/german/conference.html

In November and December 2007, Ulrich Plass presented a paper on "Adorno's American Experience and the Question of Metaphysics" at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.

At the annual German Studies Association convention in San Diego (October 2007), Ulrich Plass delivered a commentary and gave a talk titled "Lyric Modernity and the Crisis of Tradition in Poetry Anthologies by Borchardt, Enzensberger, Schrott, and Kling"

At the annual Midsouth Philosophy Conference, held February 23-24, 2007, at the University of Memphis, Ulrich Plass served as a commentator for a panel that discussed Jacques Lacan's reading of Antigone in his Seminar "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis."