Graduate Student/Faculty Colloquium

Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures 

Monday, April 20th at 9am

Max Kade German Culture and Media Center

3401 Walnut St., Wing A, Rm. 329, 3rd Floor

The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures cordially invites you to our Graduate Student/FacultyColloquium on Monday, April 20th at 9am, with a breakfast at 8:45am catered by Metropolitan Bakery. Below are the descriptions of the talks. We hope that you will be able to join us. This will be our final colloquium of the academic year!Please email the colloquium coordinator, Didem Uca (uca@sas.upenn.edu), with any questions or requests for special accommodation.

The Lady, the Thing, and the Resurrection: Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis and Walther von der Vogelweide’s ‘late’ songs

Allan Madin, Phd Student, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

This paper addresses the renunciation of worldly Minne in three songs by Walther von der Vogelweide from the standpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Departing from Lacan’s provocative depiction of the psychical economy of courtly love in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, it tries to account for the turn away from Minne (which Lacan treats as an exemplary form of sublimation) and toward the salvation of the soul from within an analytic framework. Reading Lacan’s elaborations alongside a variety of courtly literature that he does not explicitly address opens up new perspectives from which to assess his “ethics.”

Adapting to a new medium? Video Games and German Studies

Dr. Yasemin Dayıoğlu-Yücel, DAAD Visiting Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Video games have made their way into academia, both as research object and as pedagogical tool. Despite this academic interest, and despite the endeavors to engage writers of literary fiction with video games—as has recently been done within the framework of the International Literature Festival in Berlin—video game adaptations of literary works are still rare. In my presentation, I will show how an independent German-American Point and Click Adventure ‘interacts’ with the literary original and why this interaction matters beyond adaptation studies.