Programme 2024-2025
17 October 2024
5.45pm
JOHANNES SALTZWEDEL
(Hamburg)
Werther’s World – Events and Characters of the Year 1774
5.45pm
JOHANNES SALTZWEDEL
(Hamburg)
Werther’s World – Events and Characters of the Year 1774
The publication of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers by
the 25-year-old Goethe has long been identified as a seminal event in German
and European literary history. But in what contexts did his novel appear?
What what was the reading world discussing in 1774? What was happening in
Europe and in the world at large? These circumstances, socio-political,
intellectual, artistic and scientific, are here presented as a tour d’horizon,
from new literary genres to opera triumphs in Paris, from achievements in
chemistry to Captain Cook's expeditions in the South Seas and the bold
frauds of a false tsarina. Sectarians and blackmailers appear on stage, the
social role of spas and the conditions of mobility get a mention; we hear
of the first recycled paper and the first electric telegraph. There are also
quite a few signs of a brooding revolutionary spirit - but for the moment, an
important engagement rounds off the picture.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
16 January 2025
5.45pm
KATRIN KOHL (Oxford)
Dialogue beyond Death: Epic Endings in Klopstock’s Der Messias, Goethe’s Faust and Rilke’s Duineser Elegien
(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5pm, Senate House)
5.45pm
KATRIN KOHL (Oxford)
Dialogue beyond Death: Epic Endings in Klopstock’s Der Messias, Goethe’s Faust and Rilke’s Duineser Elegien
(preceded by the Annual General Meeting, at 5pm, Senate House)
The talk
will explore how Klopstock, Goethe and Rilke exploit the finality of an epic
ending to depict both death and a journey beyond it. Der Messias, Faust and
the Duineser Elegien differ markedly
in terms of genre, yet Goethe competes with his predecessor’s epic by creating
a tragedy of epic length and cosmic reach while the elegiac speaker in Rilke’s most
ambitious work responds to the voice and hexameter rhythms in Klopstock’s epic.
By contrast with the great classical epics of antiquity, which end with the deaths of the heroes’ antagonists, the endings of these three works extend beyond the finality of death. Like Klopstock, Goethe takes his protagonist up a vertical cosmic trajectory accompanied by the celebrations of celestial choruses. Rilke by contrast depicts the journey of an unnamed youth through a mythical landscape imbued with symbols of death into which the youth eventually merges in silence. The ending of Klopstock’s religious epic marks the culmination of God’s redemptive act while Goethe and Rilke conclude their more secular works with brief poetic codas that articulate timeless maxims touching respectively on themes of gender and ecology: Goethe extols the elevating force of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’; Rilke poignantly celebrates the modest fertility of the falling catkin.
The paper will argue that the differences between the three projects are as important as the correspondences in shaping a distinctive tradition that draws energy from its dialogic complexity.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
By contrast with the great classical epics of antiquity, which end with the deaths of the heroes’ antagonists, the endings of these three works extend beyond the finality of death. Like Klopstock, Goethe takes his protagonist up a vertical cosmic trajectory accompanied by the celebrations of celestial choruses. Rilke by contrast depicts the journey of an unnamed youth through a mythical landscape imbued with symbols of death into which the youth eventually merges in silence. The ending of Klopstock’s religious epic marks the culmination of God’s redemptive act while Goethe and Rilke conclude their more secular works with brief poetic codas that articulate timeless maxims touching respectively on themes of gender and ecology: Goethe extols the elevating force of ‘das Ewig-Weibliche’; Rilke poignantly celebrates the modest fertility of the falling catkin.
The paper will argue that the differences between the three projects are as important as the correspondences in shaping a distinctive tradition that draws energy from its dialogic complexity.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
6 March 2025
5.45pm
Prawer Lecture
MARTIN LINDNER (Oxford)
Aesthetics of Sameness and the Ethics of Narrative Representation: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) in the Context of the German-Czech National Conflict in Late Austria-Hungary
5.45pm
Prawer Lecture
MARTIN LINDNER (Oxford)
Aesthetics of Sameness and the Ethics of Narrative Representation: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) in the Context of the German-Czech National Conflict in Late Austria-Hungary
It has been a dominant historiographic narrative that
nationalist and colonialist thinking in late nineteenth-century Austria-Hungary
overwhelmingly pervaded cultural and political life, conceptualizing its
diverse population as being divided along binary, and growingly exclusive,
categories of identity and difference. This not least characterized
Germanophone discourse in Central Europe, propagating ideas about cultural
superiority, for example over the empire’s Slavic-language speakers, in a way
that often merged tropes of inner-European difference and exoticist imagery of
European colonialism overseas.
Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, however, this lecture will discuss the often formally creative ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) as primary example for exploring these so far neglected ‘aesthetics of sameness’, it will demonstrate how the writer challenged nationalist ideas of separation by formally rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging.
Methodologically, the lecture has two aims: to demonstrate the value of a distinctively narratological approach for investigating colonialist and ethno-national identity discourses and counter-discourses as constructed cultural narratives, and secondly, to show how thinking about similarity and sameness in the complex context of multiethnic Austria-Hungary can help overcome binary identity-alterity conceptions that still characterize narrative postcolonial research in other fields of study.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
Inspired by recent revisions in Habsburg historiography, however, this lecture will discuss the often formally creative ways in which some German-language writers in Austria-Hungary challenged the divisive rhetoric of their times, by creating alternative narrative languages that foregrounded sameness and commonality. Taking the prose fiction of Moravian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) as primary example for exploring these so far neglected ‘aesthetics of sameness’, it will demonstrate how the writer challenged nationalist ideas of separation by formally rendering ambiguous markers of national, ethnic, and linguistic belonging.
Methodologically, the lecture has two aims: to demonstrate the value of a distinctively narratological approach for investigating colonialist and ethno-national identity discourses and counter-discourses as constructed cultural narratives, and secondly, to show how thinking about similarity and sameness in the complex context of multiethnic Austria-Hungary can help overcome binary identity-alterity conceptions that still characterize narrative postcolonial research in other fields of study.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
10 April 2025
5.45pm
POLLY DICKSON (Durham)
Adelbert von Chamisso’s Bounding Lines
5.45pm
POLLY DICKSON (Durham)
Adelbert von Chamisso’s Bounding Lines
Adelbert von Chamisso was a consummate draughtsman as well
as a writer, poet and botanist. His notebooks attest to a finely tuned ability
to capture, with deft precision, some natural form or human likeness. But
Chamisso was also a doodler, and within the extensive collection of materials
in his archive are a number of dazzling and bizarre line drawings that have no
obvious representational or diagrammatic content. These drawings will form the
impetus for the talk. Spirographic and dreamy, tangled and immense, these
whimsical designs — for which there is no precise clue as to their function or
provenance — are best understood, it will be argued, as experiments in form.
Chamisso’s doodles and other graphic experiments will be traced across and
beyond his poetry notebooks and draft manuscripts, paying attention to how his
doodling practice interweaves with, and interrupts, his forays in verse writing.
Doodling emerges as a method of coping with and working through the
complexities and pressures of constructing precise metrical forms. By paying
close attention to Chamisso’s notebook practice, and exploring cross-medial
considerations of his notational ‘style’, the paper will unfold the interplay
of pleasure, compulsion, and frustration in the compositional process and make
a broader case for doodles and notebook drawings as an ‘other’ writing, as
writing’s shadow self. At the centre of these considerations is the intermedial
form of the line — the line of verse, on the one hand, and the graphic line, on
the other — measured and constrictive, yet trembling with life.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (Senate House, Malet Street) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
8 May 2025
5.45pm
Venue: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WCIA 2NJ
Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
STEFAN MATUSCHEK (Jena)
Um Goethe betrogen. Über die anhaltende Wirkung des kulturpatriotischen Klassik-Begriffs
5.45pm
Venue: German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, London WCIA 2NJ
Wilkinson-Willoughby Lecture
STEFAN MATUSCHEK (Jena)
Um Goethe betrogen. Über die anhaltende Wirkung des kulturpatriotischen Klassik-Begriffs
Im Gegensatz
zu den europäischen Nachbarn, die Goethe als den führenden Romantiker
verstanden haben, hat ihn die deutsche Germanistik aus diesem
Epochenzusammenhang herausgelöst und als Klassiker gegen die Romantik
profiliert. Das hatte keine wissenschaftlichen, sondern patriotische Gründe.
Denn der germanistische Klassik-Begriff bezeichnet nur vorgeblich eine Epoche;
tatsächlich drückt sich in ihm ein Ethos aus, mit dem man Goethe über alle
zeitgenössische Literatur zum spezifisch deutschen Kulturgipfel erheben wollte.
Ideologiegeschichtlich ist das vielfach aufgearbeitet worden. Was man bislang
weniger sieht, ist die Verwirrung, die dieser patriotische Klassik-Begriff bis
heute stiftet. Auch wenn seine politische Intention Vergangenheit ist,
verstellt er weiterhin das Goethe-Verständnis.
This lecture will be given in person (German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, WC1A 2NJ) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
This lecture will be given in person (German Historical Institute, 17 Bloomsbury Square, WC1A 2NJ) and will be streamed live via Zoom. Attendance is free.
Advance registration is essential, whether attending in person or online!
Please register HERE.
22 May 2025
5.45pm
PAUL KERRY (Brigham Young / Oxford)
George Bancroft’s Goethe
5.45pm
PAUL KERRY (Brigham Young / Oxford)
George Bancroft’s Goethe