Generations, or better: inter- and transgenerational studies, are back. The concept of generations allows us, among other things, to adopt both a transnational and national perspective, to look beyond social class boundaries and integrate various smaller group formations into larger wholes. Moreover, a generation perspective can favourably be combined with network theory. This one day colloquium wants to explore on the one hand the profits of a sociological and historical based concept of generation for the analysis of literary and artistic networks. It will on the other hand show how in literary and intermedial works family relations are remembered or transcended.

 

Program

12.15   Lunch and coffee

 

1 pm   Welcome

Welcome by Catriona MacLeod (Head of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, UPenn)

Introduction by Hans Vandevoorde (Free University of Brussels/UPenn)

 

1.15 – 3 pm   Generations & social networks

Chair: Robert A. Naborn (UPenn)
 
Keynote lecture: Christophe Verbruggen (UGent): The Generation of 1900. A Social Network Approach

Hans Vandevoorde (Free University of Brussels/UPenn): Generations and the Collective in Belgian Constructivist Art around 1920

 

3 – 3.30 pm: Coffee break

 

3.30 – 5.00 pm  From father to daughter: family trauma in Dutch and German post-war literature

Chair: Didem Uca (UPenn)

Lut Missinne (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster): Erased but Still Readable. Transgeneration Trauma in Carl Friedman’s Nightfather
Jan Lensen (Freie Universität Berlin/University of Toronto): The Generation of Meta-Memory. New Perspectives in Contemporary Dutch and German Literature about the Second World War

 

5.00 – 5.45 pm  From father to son: documentary film

Chair: Erika Kontulainen (UPenn)

Simon Richter (UPenn): Perfection and Personality. The High Stakes of Culinary Transition in Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012) and Entre les bras (2012)

 

5.45 – 6 pm  Concluding remarks

 

Abstracts

Christophe Verbruggen: The Generation of 1900. A Social Network Approach

In this paper I will elaborate the analytical potential of the concept of generation in combination with a social network approach to trace and understand social and cultural change. One way to get a grip on cultural change is the analysis of the contact zones where cultural goods (ideas, experiences, publications…) are exchanged.  Another option is an actor-centred approach towards the dynamics of intellectual movements and generational shifts. Using a mixed digital approach (including data visualization techniques and ‘traditional’ close reading), I will combine insights from the sociology of ideas and the literature on social movements in order to identify a generation of writers and social reformers educated and socialised in Belgium around 1900.

Hans Vandevoorde: Generations and the Collective in Belgian Constructivist Art around 1920

In my contribution I want to study the various constructivist groups that originated around 1920 (which along with Russian constructivism, include Bauhaus, purism, neo-plasticism, etc.) as a unified whole and, moreover, compare their ideas and forms with those of other currents of thought among the same generation of avant-garde artists and with the ideas of previous avant-garde generations. I would like to focus on whether we can distinguish a “generation style” and “generation genres” in the production of the artists who were part of the “community art” (gemeenschapskunst in Dutch and art communautaire in French) movement in Belgium. With my lecture I aim to show that the theory of Karl Mannheim can be made productive for the study of arts by exploring both the synchronic and diachronic potentials of the concept of generation.

Lut Missinne: Erased but Still Readable. Transgeneration Trauma in Carl Friedman’s Nightfather

So called ‘postmemory’ or the transmission of Holocaust trauma to a second generation have been discussed in psychological trauma studies as well as in literary studies (Hirsch 1997, 2008; Van Alphen 2006, Suleiman 1993, 2002). The suggestion of transgenerational continuity and the possibility of ‘memory transfer’ that these concepts encompass , have been criticized. In my lecture I want to search for parallels between the process of transgenerational ‘trauma transfer’ and the process of artistic representation of traumatic experiences in  autobiographical literature. I will take the novella Nightfather (1994; orig. Tralievader 1991) by the Dutch author Carl Friedman as my starting point. Not only questions of authenticity and veracity are foregrounded in these processes, imaginative distance, empathy and affective intensity play an important part in it. These parallels make it extremely complicated to judge on literary representations of traumatic experiences with a fictional dimension.

Jan Lensen: The Generation of Meta-Memory. New Perspectives in Contemporary Dutch and German Literature about the Second World War

Ever since Marianne Hirsch coined the term ‘the generation of postmemory’, it has been paradigmatic to understand and define how second-generation descendants of Holocaust survivors (ánd perpetrators) have coped – psychologically, socially, and artistically – with inherited and troubling memories. Yet, in light of the arrival of new generations of artists and the shift from communicative to cultural memory, does the notion of ‘postmemory’ remain theoretically valid and functional today. Can it still cover the plurality of approaches by young artists, who perceive this past far less as an identity-defining ‘haunting legacy’ (Schwab)? To be sure, Hirsch’s concept remains a very useful heuristic tool, however, I wish to supplement it with a new concept that enables us to account for current engagements with the memory of World War II: the generation of meta-memory. Devised with a nod to Hirsch and to Birgit Neumann’s ‘fictions of meta-memory’, this notion serves at gauging the literary construction of World War II-memory today. This construction, I suggest, is marked by a meta-reflexive preoccupation with the notion of war memory and reflects the idea of a post-traumatic perspective. Rather than with questions of historical truth, psychological working-through, and political rectification, contemporary memory narratives seem primarily concerned with memory transfer and its mediation, with the interconnectedness of war memory with that of other traumatic events, and with the relevance of this memory for our identity today. They often reveal historical and ethical irreverence as well as formal playfulness. Via some examples from Dutch, Flemish, and German literature, I will illustrate this new trend, while arguing that its emergence flows from a complex interplay between authors from different generations, and that it is indebted to political and poetological developments since the nineties.

Simon Richter: Perfection and Personality. The High Stakes of Culinary Transition in Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2012) and Entre les bras (2012)

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (David Gelb, 2011) and Entre les Bras (Paul Lacoste, 2011) are two documentary films intently focused on the difficulties fathers and sons face in the transmission of a Michelin three-star restaurant from one generation to the next. Although the restaurants could not be more different (Jiro’s is located in an underground metro station in Tokyo, while Michel Bras’s primary restaurant is a resort in Laguiole in the south of France), both are distinguished by a unique and untransmittable mediation of culinary perfection and personality. There may be no words for the intractable dilemma faced by the respective sons, Sébastien Bras and Yoshikazu Ono. Gelb and Lacoste, however, hone a quiet visual language that allows viewers to feel it in full measure.