Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents The Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Bethany Wiggin and Caroline Weist
Wednesday, December 5, 2012, 5:00 pm
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, 3401 Walnut St.,
Room 329, A Wing
(entrance next to Starbucks)

"Emblems of the Body: Prosthesis, Heimat, and Modernity in Von morgens bis mitternachts"

Caroline Weist, University of Pennsylvania

In his 1912 play Von morgens bis mitternachts (From Morning to Midnight), Expressionist author Georg Kaiser frenetically stages the final twenty-four hours in the life of an embezzling, desperate bank teller, whom he names simply "The Cashier."  Projecting his own romantic aspirations onto an exotic female customer, Kaiser's smalltown Cashier absconds to the big city with 60,000 Marks and embarks on a spectacular, but ill-fated quest, in which he strives to unite distinct entities, including himself and the woman, money and happiness, his dreams and reality.  My paper considers the performance of this doomed pursuit in order to argue that a structuring principle of "emblematic tension" underlies Kaiser's "Stück in zwei Teilen" ("Piece in two parts") and fundamentally shapes the work's dramaturgy.   By focusing on a scene from the Cashier's brothel visit, where a prostitute's wooden leg embodies the emblem's enduring and productive incongruence, I posit Kaiser's emblematic dramaturgy as an innovative model for thinking the relationship between bodies, their differences, and the environments they inhabit.

~AND~

"Romancing the Novel: Pre- and Post-National"

Bethany Wiggin, University of Pennsylvania

This paper hails from my new project, World Literatures Before Goethe, a series of essays sketching the “true history of the novel.” The talk sets theories and practices of the novel before the nation (in particular by Pierre Daniel Huet) in counterpoint to post-national considerations of the genre (in particular by Franco Moretti). It draws too from recent writing on world literature (in particular David Damrosch) and returns us to that term’s seminal discussions (Goethe’s correspondence with Carlyle). Such early-modern/ post-modern dialogues help to generate a theory of the protean genre no longer overdetermined by the time-space of the nation; and they point us toward critical itineraries and historical trajectories appropriate for a genre always on the move.