THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 8:45 am
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center 
3401 Walnut St., Room 329, A Wing (entrance next to Starbucks)

 

“Avant-Garde Printing—For and Against”
David Nelson, PhD Student, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, UPenn

 

Avant-garde literary journals of the twentieth century often reflect the military metaphor of the notion “avant-garde” in their printed forms. Journals modeled on the appearance and pricing of daily newspapers seek to engage the masses in an assault against the tastes of bourgeois culture. The literary journal Marsyas, which had six issues from 1917 to 1919, offers an interesting counterexample. While still presenting itself as a journal of the avant-garde and of literary expressionism, the notoriously expensive journal, printed in a numbered edition of 235, eschews forms that suggest any imaginary relationship to a mass audience. In fact, the use of laid paper, the individual numbering of the editions, and the artists’ signatures below many of the journal’s numerous engravings and lithographs points towards a private quality to the journal motivated by an attempt to assert the value of human labor, in contradistinction to printing technology, in the production of the journal. This paper will problematize the revolutionary aspirations of the avant-garde through an examination of the material forms of Marsyas. In particular, the numerous etchings of the journal, which are unusual for a period that favored woodcuts for their low cost and ease of printing or lithographs as a new and superior visual form, point towards the journal’s conservative and elitist project that nonetheless engages critically with the anti-bourgeois aspirations of the avant-garde.

 

and

“Impressionism, Seriality, and the Eternal Return"  
Professor André Dombrowski, Department of the History of Art, UPenn

 

This talk considers the relationship between the theory of the eternal return of history and the emergence of seriality in painting. When, in the 1870s and 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche, Auguste Blanqui,  and others (including Walter Benjamin in the early 20th century) established “eternal return” as a counter-narrative to historic progress, they conceived of the universe as inherently repeatable and serial. Such conceptions of existence (and representation) as perpetual repetition, I hold, form one of the conceptual grounds of Monet’s first forays into seriality in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Indeed, art history has heretofore overlooked the concrete circumstances that link these two practices intimately together. Focusing on Monet’s visit to Belle-Île-en-Mer in fall 1886 (where he followed in Blanqui’s footsteps), I will demonstrate how Nietzsche’s and Blanqui’s thought shaped Monet’s novel ways of organizing his art.