Join us for presentations by graduate student Maya Vinokour (Comparative Literature and Literary Theory) and Professor Ilya Vinitsky (Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures) on Monday, October 21.

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

Monday, October 21, 2013 at 8:30 am
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center
3401 Walnut St., Room 329, A Wing (entrance next to Starbucks) 

 

“K., Kafka, and the Role of Bakhtinian "Outsideness" in The Castle”
Maya Vinokour, Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory 

 

Would-be-interpreters of Kafka's The Castle have been as confounded in their struggle to find semantic unity in the novel as K. himself is in his attempts to access the titular castle. The generalized ambiguity surrounding the people, practices, and terms affiliated with the Castle can be classed as technical "noise," which pervades channels normally used for clear signaling. The Castle's noise compels K. to not only interpret, but actually produce messages, and thereby become an author. But can author and hero be the same person? My paper argues that the Castle's noise prevents K from attaining "outsideness," a term Mikhail Bakhtin employs in "Author and Hero" to describe the separation between author and hero requisite for creation. Without "outsideness," which presupposes communication and clear signaling between these two independent consciousnesses, the possibility of authorship for K is foreclosed.

and

“ The Flower of the Oath: The Hohenzollern's Romantic Myth in Russia."  
Professor Ilya Vinitsky, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

"In 1817, the Russian poet Vassily Zhukovsky (1783-1852) became a tutor of Russian language of the Grand Duchess Alexandra Feodorovna (princess Charlotte), the wife of the future Emperor Nicholas I and the elder daughter of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III and queen Louise. In 1818 the poet published several issues of his “courtly” journal-almanac Für Wenige - For the Few, which was addressed to his royal student and included his best translations, mostly, from German poetry, along with the originals. The bi-lingual composition of the almanac iconically rendered the very process of transformation of the original into the translation, the path from the flourishing "Teutonic" tradition to the “young” Russian poetry.

This tradition of “for the few” was literally brought by princess Charlotte to Russia in the form of literary and drawing albums, family relics, customs, "sacred" musical pieces, a “prayer-book” with her mother's letters, etc. “The few” addressees of Zhukovsky’s journal constituted an aesthetic “family of the chosen,” which had gathered together around the beautiful princess. In this paper, I contend that Zhukovsky tried to create its own kind of religious and spiritual (as well as Prussian and Russian) order, sealed by the memory of Grand Duchess’s glorious, martyred mother. To illustrate this thesis, I will focus on Zhukovsky's appropriation of one of the secret Romantic customs of the Prussian royal family which he turned into a new—Russian—historical myth.