Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Nate Davis and Dr. Nele Bemong

The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures presents its Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

The Degenerative Side of Progress:
Literary Reflections on the Drawbacks of the Industrial Revolutionin Dutch 19th-century Physiological Sketches

Nele Bemong, Breughel Visiting (Assistant) Professor, University of Pennsylvania

The rise of prose narrative, and especially of the novel of manners in Dutch literature coincided with the Industrial Revolution that swept over Europe in the first half of the 19th century. Many novels of manners, especially in Flanders, precisely depicted the pernicious effects of industrialization. This ‘subtype’ of the novel of manners, in which social issues were raised and social abuses were denounced, was modeled on works of Ch. Dickens, B. Disraeli, E. Gaskell, Ch. Kingsley, G. Eliot, and V. Hugo. The raising of social issues in novels of manners was far more common in Flanders than in the Netherlands, a difference which can be explained by the different conception of realist literature in both countries: in Flanders, realism always maintained a subjective component, contrary to realist literature in France and the Netherlands. While almost every Flemish novelist wrote one or several of such ‘socially involved’ novels of manners (H. Conscience, J.D. Courtmans-Berchmans, P. Ecrevisse, P. Geiregat, D. Sleeckx, A. Snieders, A.C. Van der Cruyssen, E. Van Driessche, P.F. Van Kerckhoven, K. Versnaeyen, and E. Zetternam), in the Netherlands this type of works is limited to some sketches and novels by J.J. Cremer, G. Keller and C.E. van Koetsveld.

The topic of the drawback of progress was thus well established. Against this background, my paper will investigate how progress is dealt with in another subtype of the novel/sketch of manners, to wit the ‘physiologies’. The physiological sketches, which originated in France in the beginning of the 1830s and spread all over Europe in the following decade, depict characters from all classes of society through their typical (i.e. historical) features, with detailed attention for these characters’ profession and place of residence. These physiologies display a very interesting view on progress: it is claimed that the effect of the recent technological and industrial developments is precisely that the traditional, typically national characters are on the verge of disappearing. This disappearance, in turn, has a profound effect on literature as well, so it is argued: precisely the genre of the physiology or sketch of manners is threatened by the “uniforming” tendency in society.

 Antigone’s Entgipsung (Hölderlin, Brecht, Straub/Huillet)
Nathaniel Davis, University of Pennsylvania

 According to Brecht, Hanns Eisler’s musical settings accomplish an “Entgipsung” (literally, “deplastering”) of Hölderlin’s poems. By this, Brecht implies that an adaptation has the power to remove the accumulated residue of appropriative cultural misreadings, restoring the original spirit of the work through a contemporary reframing. Brecht’s Bearbeitungen of classical works attempt an extreme version of this, often altering or making additions to the original text in order to expose what Brecht deems to be the work's implicit social concerns. Hölderlin’s own attempts at an Entgipsung of Greek art, through his radically literal translations, aim to alienate the original works from the easy Verdeutschung of conventional German classicism. With their 1992 film adaptation of Brecht’s Bearbeitung of Hölderlin’s Antigone, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are thus faced with the challenge of preserving the multi-faceted translation history of the work, adapting the parallel methodologies of Wörtlichkeit and Verfremdung into a set of formalist film aesthetics that would also renovate, for a third time, the “pure language” of Sophocles' play. [A clip of the first two minutes of the Straub/Huillet film can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXZ2yCB70nk]