THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

 

presents

 

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

 

Tuesday, March 1, 2016 at 8:45 am
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center 
3401 Walnut St., Room 329, A Wing (entrance next to Starbucks)

 

"Towards Transnational Noir? Tatort Goes to Scandinavia"

Erika Kontulainen, PhD Student, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, UPenn

Although regionalism and crimes ‘made in Germany’ have become crucial features and formulas for success for the German crime television series Tatort, the series still cannot neglect the realities of a globalized world, in which subjects and objects are constantly moving in and out of places and spaces, and between national borders. Consequently, my paper will briefly address and problematize transnationalism as a relatively recent tendency inTatort, as it seeks to find new modes of expression with which it can justify the general development of the crime genre and its aspirations of realism.

I will specifically focus on two episodes from the Tatort Kiel sub-series, which involve Scandinavia (here Sweden and Finland) as both a geographical and imaginary space subject to appropriation, differentiation and reduction. The episodes either displace the German protagonist Borowski in an anonymous space (Finland) beyond the regional and national borders of ‘home,’ simultaneously confirming stereotypical notions of the Other, or rework the Other (Sweden) into what at least seems to be a transnational success story, while at the same time reestablishing the status quo of Kiel and the German hero Borowski at the cost of the Other. Whether transnationalism will become a permanent element of Tatort, demands further investigation. Yet, drawing on the long success of Tatort, one should not fail to see the importance of place (region) in the series and for its viewers. Therefore Tatort could possibly be viewed as carrying the legacy of the Heimatfilm into the twenty-first century.

and

"Talking Trash: Kafka's Odradek as Ecocritical Compost"

Prof. Ian Fleishman, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, UPenn

 

This paper proposes a reading of Kafka’s infamously enigmatic Odradek (from the 1919 miniature, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters”) as a kind of talking waste product—a tiny trash heap made up of leftover bits of metal, wood and ragged thread. Like the plastic bags and bottles we discard daily, Odradek just sticks around indefinitely, and the Hausvater’s greatest worry is that this little object might survive him: “Sollte er also einstmals etwa noch vor den Füßen meiner Kinder und Kindeskinder mit nachschleifendem Zwirnsfaden die Treppe hinunterkollern? Er schadet ja offenbar niemandem; aber die Vorstellung, daß er mich auch noch überleben sollte, ist mir eine fast schmerzliche.” In this manner, argues ecocritic Timothy Morton, who compares the figure to nuclear radiation from plutonium, “Odradek is what confronts us at the end of the world.” Comparing and appraising how three recent approaches in the environmental humanities—Morton’s thinking on the hyperobject, Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and J. Hillis Miller’s notion of the ecotechnological—have each explicitly recycled and repurposed Odradek as an illustration of their key theoretical concept, this paper will ask what Kafka’s figure can teach us in an age of impending ecological catastrophe. If our trash could talk what would it say—and could we learn to listen?