Gert Hofmann
RECENT EVENTS AND ACTIVITIES:
January 2023 Research leave: Finalizing the manuscript of 'Poetik des Leibes'; preparatory work on 'Exohumanism', a critique of the Post- and Transhumanism debate, co-authored with SanShin, a feral cat who shares my kitchen and life.
2019 on research leave: Excursion to Bali, studying traditional Balinese dance culture and gamelan music.
July 2017: (Anti-)Classicism & (Anti-)Idealism research network established. https://anticlassicismantiidealism.wordpress.com/; book project accepted by deGruyter: Anti | Idealism.
9-10 June 2017: International Workshop on "(ANTI-)IDEALISM and (ANTI-)CLASSICISM" in UCC
Autumn 2016: New book publication:
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić, PRESENCE OF THE BODY. AWARENESS IN AND BEYOND EXPERIENCE, Leiden and Boston: Brill | Rodopi 2016
March 2015: ISOLATOPIEN. Colloquium on Contemporary German Literature:
Lutz Hagestedt (University of Rostock), “Schockierende Sache". Walter Kempowski als Beobachter; Sabine Egger (University of Limerick, Mary Immaculate College), Magical Realism as a Mode of Transnational (Post)Memory in Contemporary Fiction; Nikolai Preuschoff (DAAD/UCC), Zeichenwelt: Kartografie und Typophilie bei Judith Schalansky; Rachel MagShamhráin (UCC), The Afterlife of an Old Master: Thomas Bernhard cites Kleist; Gert Hofmann (UCC), Somagraphien: Leiblichkeit und Schriftlichkeit bei Herta Müller.
May 2015: Graduate Seminar on "Antiklassizismus: Heinse, Hölderlin, Nietzsche" at the University of Rostock.
2014 Full Professor (Visiting) at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea.
August-September 2012:
DAAD Research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, University of Montreal.
June 2012 New Publication:
TOPODYNAMICS OF ARRIVAL. ESSAYS ON SELF AND PILGRIMAGE.
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić (eds.), Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2012.
http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=SPATIAL+14
28 May- 1 June 2012, Académie du Midi in Alet-les-Bains:
LANDSCAPE AND TRAVELLING - EAST AND WEST
Presentation: "Dass alle heiligen Orte der Erde zusammen sind um einen Ort" ... Hölderlins Bordeauxreise und die Geburt einer Poetik des Leibes
28-30 June 2012: First International Conference of the Comparative Literature Association of Ireland, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK, IRELAND.
TRANSITIONS IN COMPARATIVE STUDIES
http://complit.org/complit/transitions-2012/
25 - 27 May 2012: International Conference at the University of Zadar.
"BODY AND AWARENESS. THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY, LITERATURE AND THE ARTS"
http://www.ucc.ie/en/german/past-events/body&awareness/
Gastseminar an der Universität Rostock:
NIETZSCHE FÜR ALLE UND KEINEN. PHILOSOPHIE ALS KUNST. (Blockseminar April/Mai).
Phone: 00353 21 4902283
Address: National University of Ireland, Cork
Department of German
January 2023 Research leave: Finalizing the manuscript of 'Poetik des Leibes'; preparatory work on 'Exohumanism', a critique of the Post- and Transhumanism debate, co-authored with SanShin, a feral cat who shares my kitchen and life.
2019 on research leave: Excursion to Bali, studying traditional Balinese dance culture and gamelan music.
July 2017: (Anti-)Classicism & (Anti-)Idealism research network established. https://anticlassicismantiidealism.wordpress.com/; book project accepted by deGruyter: Anti | Idealism.
9-10 June 2017: International Workshop on "(ANTI-)IDEALISM and (ANTI-)CLASSICISM" in UCC
Autumn 2016: New book publication:
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić, PRESENCE OF THE BODY. AWARENESS IN AND BEYOND EXPERIENCE, Leiden and Boston: Brill | Rodopi 2016
March 2015: ISOLATOPIEN. Colloquium on Contemporary German Literature:
Lutz Hagestedt (University of Rostock), “Schockierende Sache". Walter Kempowski als Beobachter; Sabine Egger (University of Limerick, Mary Immaculate College), Magical Realism as a Mode of Transnational (Post)Memory in Contemporary Fiction; Nikolai Preuschoff (DAAD/UCC), Zeichenwelt: Kartografie und Typophilie bei Judith Schalansky; Rachel MagShamhráin (UCC), The Afterlife of an Old Master: Thomas Bernhard cites Kleist; Gert Hofmann (UCC), Somagraphien: Leiblichkeit und Schriftlichkeit bei Herta Müller.
May 2015: Graduate Seminar on "Antiklassizismus: Heinse, Hölderlin, Nietzsche" at the University of Rostock.
2014 Full Professor (Visiting) at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea.
August-September 2012:
DAAD Research Fellow at the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies, University of Montreal.
June 2012 New Publication:
TOPODYNAMICS OF ARRIVAL. ESSAYS ON SELF AND PILGRIMAGE.
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić (eds.), Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2012.
http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=SPATIAL+14
28 May- 1 June 2012, Académie du Midi in Alet-les-Bains:
LANDSCAPE AND TRAVELLING - EAST AND WEST
Presentation: "Dass alle heiligen Orte der Erde zusammen sind um einen Ort" ... Hölderlins Bordeauxreise und die Geburt einer Poetik des Leibes
28-30 June 2012: First International Conference of the Comparative Literature Association of Ireland, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK, IRELAND.
TRANSITIONS IN COMPARATIVE STUDIES
http://complit.org/complit/transitions-2012/
25 - 27 May 2012: International Conference at the University of Zadar.
"BODY AND AWARENESS. THE DISCOURSE BETWEEN ANTHROPOLOGY, LITERATURE AND THE ARTS"
http://www.ucc.ie/en/german/past-events/body&awareness/
Gastseminar an der Universität Rostock:
NIETZSCHE FÜR ALLE UND KEINEN. PHILOSOPHIE ALS KUNST. (Blockseminar April/Mai).
Phone: 00353 21 4902283
Address: National University of Ireland, Cork
Department of German
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Books by Gert Hofmann
Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dialogue
between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human
awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance.
This dialogue benefits from the neuro-systematic integration of
“embodied” knowledge in the cognitive sciences, but it also suggests
creative and transformative dynamics of embodiment which, beyond
conceptualisation, emerge in sophisticated acts of writing, performing and
meditating.
Exploring the presence and experience character of the body-awareness
relationship a double perspective beyond cognitive fixations is suggested:
1) a body-centred touch of the world which inspires life as a creative
‘writing’ process, and 2) in line with Buddhist thought an empty space of
‘pure presence’ from which all conscious processes originate.
Gert Hofmann, Dr. phil. habil. (2011, University of Rostock) is Head of the
Department of German at the National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC).
He has published extensively on literary and cultural theory, including
Schweigende Tropen. Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Ohnmacht (Francke,
2003).
Snježana Zori´c, Dr. phil. (2000, University of Zagreb), is Professor of
Cultural Anthropology at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. She has published widely on Asian religions and anthropological theory, including
Yongsan-jae. Buddhist Ritual as a Mirror Image of the Korean
Culture (Institute of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Zagreb, 2004).
Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process itself. Arrival is an event of conclusion as well as of urgency for subsequent explorations of new meanings to be read from the topography of the place, mirroring thus a signifying dynamic for the metamorphosis of the traveller’s self: “topodynamic” of arrival. In this vein this book investigates for the first time the dynamic of cultural formations of space, an aspect of spatiality which since the “spatial turn” in cultural discourse has mostly been neglected.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić: Introduction: Topo-dynamic of Place and Body
Snježana Zoric: The Stupa of Borobudur – a Place of Inner Pilgrimage
Michael Shields: Coming to Oneself: Structures of Arrival in Songs Sung by Flagellant Pilgrims in Strassburg in 1349
Antonija Zaradija Kiš: St Clement of Rome: The Romanic-Slavic Symbiosis of the Cult and its Tradition in the Croatian Lands
John Outhwaite: The Literature of Pilgrimage and the Search for Community: Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago and the Imagining of National and Pan-European Identities
Martin Potter: Catholic Approaches to Jerusalem: Fragmentation and Continuity of Identities – Evelyn Waugh’s Helena and Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate
Gert Hofmann: Colonus Heterotopos. Theatre as Tragic Inversion of Ritual Order
David Buchanan: Reading the Other. Bakhtin and the Topography of Arrival in Literature
Irina Dzero: From Exile to Escape: Frame Narratives of the Decameron and the Heptameron
Andreas Stuhlmann: Pilgrimage, Transformation and Poetical Anthropology. Hubert Fichte’s Journeys into the Afro-American Religions in Brazil
Ketevan Kupatadze: Magic of the City: Travel Narratives of the Project “Año 0”
Adrienne Bernhard: Topographies Real and Imagined in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron
List of Contributors
Index
Embedded in the theoretical discourse triggered by Adorno and others focal points are the poetical oeuvres of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and Ingeborg Bachmann, their frictions and mutual contradictions with regards to the meaning of poetical traditions. A second historical stage of the post-war literary discourse is marked by the writings of Heiner Müller, emphasising the significance of figures of discontinuity. Further German authors who are being discussed are Nelly Sachs, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Ausländer, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Thomas Kling, and Uwe Timm. The final section of the volume is committed to comparative explorations, dealing with European authors of particular importance such as Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Danilo Kis.
Among the contributors are Rüdiger Görner (London), Gisela Dischner (Hannover), Chris Bezzel (Hannover), and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa (National University of Ireland, Galway).
Review:
http://www.iaslonline.de/index.php?vorgang_id=2819
„Dies bestimmte ihre Popularität, ihre Art, fremde Naturen anzunehmen und sich ihnen mitzutheilen, darum haben sie ihr Eigentümlichindividuelles, das lebendig erscheint, sofern der höchste Verstand im griechischen Sinne Reflexionskraft ist (...); sie ist Zärtlichkeit, wie unsere Popularität.“
Als der essentiell fremde Gott wurde Dionysos zum Siegel auf die Wahrheit einer produktiven, „originellen“ Griechenrezeption, die sich von den zeitgenössischen Konzepten eines ästhetischen Klassizismus zusehends unterscheidet. Als der sterbliche Gott, der eine kategorische Ambivalenz von menschlicher Geburt und göttlichem Sterben figuriert, artikuliert er für Hölderlin die Zeitenwende zwischen Mythos und Moderne, den Schritt von der mythischen zur mysterischen Wahrheit, von der Affirmation des Vorfindlichen zur kritischen Initiation des Zukünftigen, von der Ekstase des Rhapsoden zur poietischen Exzentrizität. Dionysos verbindet Mythos und Poiesis, indem er sie kategorisch differenziert. In Dionysos ist die Arché des mythischen Prozesses selbst auf mythische Weise realisiert: Er ist der Gott der kulturellen - und mythischen - Initiation. Die mythische Selbstreferenz signalisiert die Endzeit des Mythos und inspiriert zugleich ein neues poietisches Selbstbewußtsein. Dionysos Archemythos wird für Hölderlin zum Paradigma einer transzendentalen Selbstreflexion der eigenen poietischen Spontaneität. Die poetischen Signaturen dieser Reflexion als Schritte einer fortschreitenden literarischen Selbstartikulation sollen hier zur Darstellung kommen.
Papers by Gert Hofmann
Die These vom Verschwundensein des Subjekts erweist sich insofern als unrichtig. Als Subjekt der Ohnmacht entzieht es sich dem Zugriff der Macht, auch der Macht der Erkenntnis, aber es behauptet sich durch eine ästhetische Reflexion auf die Wirklichkeit jenes Todes, dem zuletzt auch die Macht und die Erkenntnis unterliegen. Es konfiguriert sich ästhetisch – in synkopischen Strukturen – nicht als Subjekt des Wissens, sondern als Subjekt des Überlebens.
Talks by Gert Hofmann
Based on the Film Essay of Graham Parkes (which will be screened).
Organised by the Anti|Classicism&Anti|Idealism Network – Philosophy and Literature.
Thursday 2nd February 2017, 5pm
CACSSS Mary Ryan Seminar Room, ORB G27
Consideration of the interaction between the two spheres of discourse is important for an understanding of the development of German thought from the late eighteenth century through to the first half of the twentieth.
The late eighteenth century is characterized by two crucial events. On the one hand, it is marked by the rise of Goethe as Europe’s leading literary figure and his far-reaching influence on German intellectual life. On the other, it sees the birth and development of Kant’s thought which soon became the lingua franca of all German academic philosophy.
From the philosophers who founded German Idealism in the late eighteenth century to Freud in the twentieth, much of German thought can be understood as an attempt to establish a synthesis between these two intellectual inputs, between, so to speak, Dichtung und Wahrheit.
While the young philosophers of the Tübinger School concreatively adopted Kant’s view of philosophy as a system of ideas, they also reacted to some extent against his systematizing impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason.
This can be seen notably in The Oldest System Program of German Idealism, dating from ca. 1797, a fragmentary manifesto co-authored by Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, where beauty is described as a unifiying principle between truth and goodness.
Guided by the idea that all philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy, The Oldest System Program argues that we cannot have knowledge of anything unless we also have an aesthetic sense and that even our understanding of history requires an aesthetic sensibility.
Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing an equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, while trying to overcome the problems within the model of Bildung espoused by German classicism, the Oldest System Program argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and art. For this reason, the fragment suggests that “Die Poesie bekommt dadurch eine höhere Würde, sie wird am Ende wieder, was sie am Anfang war – Lehrerin der Menschheit.”
This critical engagement with these divergent traditions of Goethe and Kant enabled the literary and philosophical discourse around 1800 to develop new aesthetic and philosophical impulses which, beyond idealism and classicism, paved the way for the development of a whole range of new traditions of thought and writing in the long 19th and 20th centuries, such as, among others, romanticism, realism, historical materialism, existentialism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and hermeneutics.
In the light of these programmatic divergences and their creative potential between lived experience and speculative autonomy we will attempt a new reading of the protagonists of the literary, aesthetic and philosophical discourse around 1800, including e.g. Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, Heinse and Jean-Paul. Hegel’s disturbed preoccupation with Antigone in his phenomenological approach to the idea of morality, Hölderlin’s late notion of the apriority of the individual, or Goethe’s ironically conceded realistic tic in Wilhelm Meister could be seen as possible topics for proposals.
We also welcome proposals dealing with the critical reception of German Idealism and Classicism within European thought in the 20th century (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, etc.).
Hans Walter Schmidt-Hannisa is Professor of German at NUI Galway. He has largely published on literary and cultural theory and is an eminent expert on Sigmund Freud’s hermeneutics of dreams.
Presence of the Body provides an interdisciplinary forum for the dialogue
between theory and practice about the impact of the body on human
awareness in the fields of art, writing, meditative practice, and performance.
This dialogue benefits from the neuro-systematic integration of
“embodied” knowledge in the cognitive sciences, but it also suggests
creative and transformative dynamics of embodiment which, beyond
conceptualisation, emerge in sophisticated acts of writing, performing and
meditating.
Exploring the presence and experience character of the body-awareness
relationship a double perspective beyond cognitive fixations is suggested:
1) a body-centred touch of the world which inspires life as a creative
‘writing’ process, and 2) in line with Buddhist thought an empty space of
‘pure presence’ from which all conscious processes originate.
Gert Hofmann, Dr. phil. habil. (2011, University of Rostock) is Head of the
Department of German at the National University of Ireland, Cork (UCC).
He has published extensively on literary and cultural theory, including
Schweigende Tropen. Studien zu einer Ästhetik der Ohnmacht (Francke,
2003).
Snježana Zori´c, Dr. phil. (2000, University of Zagreb), is Professor of
Cultural Anthropology at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. She has published widely on Asian religions and anthropological theory, including
Yongsan-jae. Buddhist Ritual as a Mirror Image of the Korean
Culture (Institute of Ethnology and Folkloristics, Zagreb, 2004).
Each arrival happens, and its very place manifests itself only as a momentous component of the process itself. Arrival is an event of conclusion as well as of urgency for subsequent explorations of new meanings to be read from the topography of the place, mirroring thus a signifying dynamic for the metamorphosis of the traveller’s self: “topodynamic” of arrival. In this vein this book investigates for the first time the dynamic of cultural formations of space, an aspect of spatiality which since the “spatial turn” in cultural discourse has mostly been neglected.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table of Contents
Gert Hofmann and Snježana Zorić: Introduction: Topo-dynamic of Place and Body
Snježana Zoric: The Stupa of Borobudur – a Place of Inner Pilgrimage
Michael Shields: Coming to Oneself: Structures of Arrival in Songs Sung by Flagellant Pilgrims in Strassburg in 1349
Antonija Zaradija Kiš: St Clement of Rome: The Romanic-Slavic Symbiosis of the Cult and its Tradition in the Croatian Lands
John Outhwaite: The Literature of Pilgrimage and the Search for Community: Cees Nooteboom’s Roads to Santiago and the Imagining of National and Pan-European Identities
Martin Potter: Catholic Approaches to Jerusalem: Fragmentation and Continuity of Identities – Evelyn Waugh’s Helena and Muriel Spark’s The Mandelbaum Gate
Gert Hofmann: Colonus Heterotopos. Theatre as Tragic Inversion of Ritual Order
David Buchanan: Reading the Other. Bakhtin and the Topography of Arrival in Literature
Irina Dzero: From Exile to Escape: Frame Narratives of the Decameron and the Heptameron
Andreas Stuhlmann: Pilgrimage, Transformation and Poetical Anthropology. Hubert Fichte’s Journeys into the Afro-American Religions in Brazil
Ketevan Kupatadze: Magic of the City: Travel Narratives of the Project “Año 0”
Adrienne Bernhard: Topographies Real and Imagined in Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron
List of Contributors
Index
Embedded in the theoretical discourse triggered by Adorno and others focal points are the poetical oeuvres of Paul Celan, Gottfried Benn and Ingeborg Bachmann, their frictions and mutual contradictions with regards to the meaning of poetical traditions. A second historical stage of the post-war literary discourse is marked by the writings of Heiner Müller, emphasising the significance of figures of discontinuity. Further German authors who are being discussed are Nelly Sachs, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Ausländer, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Thomas Kling, and Uwe Timm. The final section of the volume is committed to comparative explorations, dealing with European authors of particular importance such as Jean Paul Sartre, André Malraux, and Danilo Kis.
Among the contributors are Rüdiger Görner (London), Gisela Dischner (Hannover), Chris Bezzel (Hannover), and Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa (National University of Ireland, Galway).
Review:
http://www.iaslonline.de/index.php?vorgang_id=2819
„Dies bestimmte ihre Popularität, ihre Art, fremde Naturen anzunehmen und sich ihnen mitzutheilen, darum haben sie ihr Eigentümlichindividuelles, das lebendig erscheint, sofern der höchste Verstand im griechischen Sinne Reflexionskraft ist (...); sie ist Zärtlichkeit, wie unsere Popularität.“
Als der essentiell fremde Gott wurde Dionysos zum Siegel auf die Wahrheit einer produktiven, „originellen“ Griechenrezeption, die sich von den zeitgenössischen Konzepten eines ästhetischen Klassizismus zusehends unterscheidet. Als der sterbliche Gott, der eine kategorische Ambivalenz von menschlicher Geburt und göttlichem Sterben figuriert, artikuliert er für Hölderlin die Zeitenwende zwischen Mythos und Moderne, den Schritt von der mythischen zur mysterischen Wahrheit, von der Affirmation des Vorfindlichen zur kritischen Initiation des Zukünftigen, von der Ekstase des Rhapsoden zur poietischen Exzentrizität. Dionysos verbindet Mythos und Poiesis, indem er sie kategorisch differenziert. In Dionysos ist die Arché des mythischen Prozesses selbst auf mythische Weise realisiert: Er ist der Gott der kulturellen - und mythischen - Initiation. Die mythische Selbstreferenz signalisiert die Endzeit des Mythos und inspiriert zugleich ein neues poietisches Selbstbewußtsein. Dionysos Archemythos wird für Hölderlin zum Paradigma einer transzendentalen Selbstreflexion der eigenen poietischen Spontaneität. Die poetischen Signaturen dieser Reflexion als Schritte einer fortschreitenden literarischen Selbstartikulation sollen hier zur Darstellung kommen.
Die These vom Verschwundensein des Subjekts erweist sich insofern als unrichtig. Als Subjekt der Ohnmacht entzieht es sich dem Zugriff der Macht, auch der Macht der Erkenntnis, aber es behauptet sich durch eine ästhetische Reflexion auf die Wirklichkeit jenes Todes, dem zuletzt auch die Macht und die Erkenntnis unterliegen. Es konfiguriert sich ästhetisch – in synkopischen Strukturen – nicht als Subjekt des Wissens, sondern als Subjekt des Überlebens.
Based on the Film Essay of Graham Parkes (which will be screened).
Organised by the Anti|Classicism&Anti|Idealism Network – Philosophy and Literature.
Thursday 2nd February 2017, 5pm
CACSSS Mary Ryan Seminar Room, ORB G27
Consideration of the interaction between the two spheres of discourse is important for an understanding of the development of German thought from the late eighteenth century through to the first half of the twentieth.
The late eighteenth century is characterized by two crucial events. On the one hand, it is marked by the rise of Goethe as Europe’s leading literary figure and his far-reaching influence on German intellectual life. On the other, it sees the birth and development of Kant’s thought which soon became the lingua franca of all German academic philosophy.
From the philosophers who founded German Idealism in the late eighteenth century to Freud in the twentieth, much of German thought can be understood as an attempt to establish a synthesis between these two intellectual inputs, between, so to speak, Dichtung und Wahrheit.
While the young philosophers of the Tübinger School concreatively adopted Kant’s view of philosophy as a system of ideas, they also reacted to some extent against his systematizing impulse by positing the equiprimordiality of world and Self, of art and reason.
This can be seen notably in The Oldest System Program of German Idealism, dating from ca. 1797, a fragmentary manifesto co-authored by Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, where beauty is described as a unifiying principle between truth and goodness.
Guided by the idea that all philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy, The Oldest System Program argues that we cannot have knowledge of anything unless we also have an aesthetic sense and that even our understanding of history requires an aesthetic sensibility.
Adhering to the self-critical impulse of Kant’s philosophy by positing an equiprimordiality of both the empirical world and the intelligible subject, while trying to overcome the problems within the model of Bildung espoused by German classicism, the Oldest System Program argued for the co-extensiveness of the reality of both philosophy and art. For this reason, the fragment suggests that “Die Poesie bekommt dadurch eine höhere Würde, sie wird am Ende wieder, was sie am Anfang war – Lehrerin der Menschheit.”
This critical engagement with these divergent traditions of Goethe and Kant enabled the literary and philosophical discourse around 1800 to develop new aesthetic and philosophical impulses which, beyond idealism and classicism, paved the way for the development of a whole range of new traditions of thought and writing in the long 19th and 20th centuries, such as, among others, romanticism, realism, historical materialism, existentialism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and hermeneutics.
In the light of these programmatic divergences and their creative potential between lived experience and speculative autonomy we will attempt a new reading of the protagonists of the literary, aesthetic and philosophical discourse around 1800, including e.g. Hegel, Schelling, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Hölderlin, Heinse and Jean-Paul. Hegel’s disturbed preoccupation with Antigone in his phenomenological approach to the idea of morality, Hölderlin’s late notion of the apriority of the individual, or Goethe’s ironically conceded realistic tic in Wilhelm Meister could be seen as possible topics for proposals.
We also welcome proposals dealing with the critical reception of German Idealism and Classicism within European thought in the 20th century (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, etc.).
Hans Walter Schmidt-Hannisa is Professor of German at NUI Galway. He has largely published on literary and cultural theory and is an eminent expert on Sigmund Freud’s hermeneutics of dreams.
European Theatre between Religion, Philosophy, and Art:
The classical cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of theatre, invokes his presence by alluding to his absence. Dionysian theatre enacts “the limit concept of religious experience in general, the point in which religious experience passes beyond itself and calls itself into question” (Agamben). Both Nietzsche’s philosophy of theatre and Artaud’s theatre of cruelty adopt this spiritual borderline experience and convert it into a creative impulse for the modern discourse of European theatre.
Mary Ryan Room, CACSSS, ORB G27B
2pm: Lutz Hagestedt (University of Rostock),
“Schockierende Sache". Walter Kempowski als Beobachter
2.45pm: Sabine Egger (University of Limerick, Mary Immaculate College),
Magical Realism as a Mode of Transnational (Post)Memory in Contemporary Fiction
3.30pm: Nikolai Preuschoff (DAAD/UCC),
Zeichenwelt: Kartografie und Typophilie bei Judith Schalansky
4.15pm: Rachel MagShamhráin (UCC),
The Afterlife of an Old Master: Thomas Bernhard cites Kleist
5pm: Gert Hofmann (UCC),
Somagraphien: Leiblichkeit und Schriftlichkeit bei Herta Müller
A debate about new definitions and delimitations of the subject, alternative concepts of authorship and an extended theory of literature and art that called into question earlier certainties and traditions has been set in train. The boundaries of the ‘person’ are redrawn; fundamental aspects of its conditio humana, as well as of its ‘animality’, become visible, aspects which had hitherto been concealed beneath reflection – either because no language had as yet been found for them or because they had simply not become visible in the conflict of discourses.
The central question: “What aesthetic configuration of human subjectivity is possible in the space between annihilation and self-assertion?” requires a ‘cultural aesthetics of the body’ that has not yet been written. In response, we will examine the phenomenon of corporeality, defining it (within aesthetic parameters) as a ‘recessive’ form of subjectivity – that is, one that is still asserted in the process of its contestation; a form of subjectivity that critiques, relativises and supplements observations upon the disappearance of the subject.