THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents The Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Jehnna Lewis and Christophe Madelein

Tuesday, April 16, 2013 5:00 pm
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, 3401 Walnut St.,
Room 329, A Wing
(entrance next to Starbucks)

"The Perilous Nature of Manifestation and Apprehension of Romantic Music."
Jehnna Lewis, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania

The idea of music that transcends accessibility by earthly means pervades the writings of German Romantics. However, despite its place beyond that which is earthly, human experience of music is also necessarily bound to material production. Through the lens of romantic music theory, theories of the sublime, and the concept of ekstasis, my paper will center on a of reading Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s “Das merkwürdige musikalische Leben des Tonkünstlers Joseph Berglinger” and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Rat Krespel, in which, I will argue, this inherent paradox of Romantic music is addressed specifically through the moments in these texts in which characters either “manifest” or “apprehend” unearthly music through earthly means, and also through an analysis of their ability or inability to do so successfully.

and

"Overwhelming Unity: Bilderdijk’s Bright Sublime”
Christophe Madelein, Brueghel Visiting Professor

In the canonical history of the sublime, the 18th century saw the emergence of a ‘natural’ sublime: the language of Longinus’ 1st-century treatise on the ‘rhetorical’ sublime was used to describe powerful emotions that arose when confronted with grand, impressive scenes in nature. Instead of a rhetorical effect of enthusiasm and transport, the sublime came to stand for, in Edmund Burke’s words, delightful horror, a mixture of fear and pleasure, the strongest emotion a human being could feel. Kant took this up, and in his analysis the sublime is that feeling that confronts us at the same time with our physical vulnerability in nature and our rational superiority over nature. However, the more positive sublime of Longinus remained popular – I take the terms positive and negative sublime (which I find more productive than rhetorical and natural) from Thomas Weiskel. At the end of the 18th century poets like William Blake surrendered willingly to that which they could not understand. In the beginning of the 19th century, so did a Dutch poet: Willem Bilderdijk, arrogant hypochondriac and poetic genius, self-proclaimed poète maudit (avant la lettre, that is) and éminence grise of Dutch literature. Bilderdijk was a conservative thinker, rejecting Enlightenment philosophy for being godless and disrespectful towards the natural law and order. His interpretation of the sublime is not in line with the by then mainstream negative sublime: his sublime is positive, bright, and subversive.