THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents

 

The Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

 

Tuesday, March 22, 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)

"Woman, Foreigner, Animal, Cripple? Yoko Tawada’s Multiply Othered Protagonist"

Didem Uca, PhD Student, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, UPenn

(presentation in German)

 In her fascinating short story “Missing Heels” (originally published in Japanese in 1993, translated into German by Peter Pörtner in 1994, and translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani in 1998), Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada portrays a female character who is utterly out of place; after arriving in a new city to marry a man she has never met, the nameless protagonist is subjected to discrimination at every turn, from the children on the street, to the social worker at her new school, to healthcare professionals. Her inability to assimilate into her new surroundings seems to be the fault of her body, which provokes distress and distrust in those around her.

Employing a theoretical framework that combines contemporary approaches in disability studies and migration studies, this paper will explore the ‘troubling’ qualities of the protagonist’s body - her femaleness, her foreignness, her animality - to consider the intersection of physical and cultural alterity in Tawada’s text. In particular, the protagonist’s encounters with squids and her apparent affinity to them will be analyzed closely to provide a case study of how difference is inscribed onto the body of the female migrant.

and

"Schiller and the End of the World as We Know it"

Prof. Andree Hahmann, DAAD Visiting Professor, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / UPenn

While Schiller’s philosophy of aesthetics has received more scholarly attention during the last years, his conception of history and its relation to his overall philosophical program is still very little known. This is unfortunate because Schiller’s writings and lectures on history were not only very popular in his day but, moreover, they became extremely influential in the further philosophical development. His Jena inaugural lecture can be cited as a good example: First Fichte and subsequently Schelling drew on basic ideas that Schiller set forth in this lecture. The reason for the general neglect of his historical writings is said to be Schiller’s naïve application of teleological principles in his investigations. At the latest since the mid 19th century, and the critiques of Ranke and Nietzsche, teleological approaches to history have become untenable for most serious historians and philosophers of history. In this presentation, I will show that and why Schiller embraced teleological principles. I will argue that he did not at all naïvely employ a teleological conception to history. Instead, he is well aware of the subjective character of these principles and their application. Moreover, we will see that a better appreciation of Schiller’s conception of a universal history is essential even for an adequate understanding of his Aesthetic Letters.