Events calendar
Critical Time in Modern German Literature and Culture: Symposium at the University of Nottingham, 11-12 July 2014
Colleagues from Warwick, Durham and Nottingham Universities, as well as leading international researchers from North America and the EU, are coming together 11-12 July in Nottingham for another milestone meeting in the Critical Time Project. The conference marks a continuation of events held in Warwick, GB (2013) and Konstanz, DE (2014), which have centred on questions regarding the temporality of art, the aesthetics of slowness, the intellectual history of time, the temporality of literary genres, the cross-mapping of time and space, the ethics of time and the politics of memory, and the poetics of time in contemporary German culture. For more details, follow the link: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/german/research/conferences.aspx
Time and temporality have been defining concerns of modernity since the emergence around 1800 of the modern sense of critical time that Koselleck defined as the progressive “Verzeitlichung” (temporalisation) of all areas of human knowledge: subjectivity, history and nature. The digital age with its revolution of conventional and modern conceptions of time and space on a global scale has given the modern sense of critical new virulence in critical discourse as well as cultural production. This international and interdisciplinary conference covers a full range of aspects in the philosophical, literary and cultural study of time and temporality: the temporality of art, the aesthetics of slowness, the intellectual history of time, the temporality of literary genres, the cross-mapping of time and space, the ethics of time and the politics of memory, and the poetics of time in contemporary German literature. Guests are welcome subject to registration.
Conference Programme
Friday, 11 July 2014
From 1 pm: reception, registration, refreshments
14:00 Welcome and introduction (Dirk Göttsche)
The Temporality of Art
14:15 Jonathan Tallant (Nottingham): “Time in Renaissance Art”
15:00 Karen Lang (Warwick): “The Problem of Historical Time (Simmel, Benjamin, Panofsky)”
15:45 coffee break
The Aesthetics of Slowness
16:15 Jerome Carroll (Nottingham): “‘Acceleration’ and ‘Retardation’: Temporality, Modernist Poetics and Modernity in Hans Blumenberg and Viktor Shklovsky”
16:45 Lutz Koepnick (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee): “Slowness as a Strategy of the Contemporary”
17:30 coffee break
The Intellectual History of Time
17:45-19:15 Maike Oergel (Nottingham): “‘The Grand Poem of our Time’: Carlyle, Zeitgeist and his History of the French Revolution”
Catherine Moir (Cambridge): “Untimely Histories: Ernst Bloch, Utopia and the Politics of Progress”
Brian Elliott (Portland State University, Oregon): “Benjamin and Sloterdijk on Time, Revolt and Redemption”
20:00 Dinner (location tbc)
Saturday, 12 July 2014
The Temporality of Literary Genres
9:00 Dirk Oschmann (Leipzig): “Zur Konstitutionsphase des modernen Formbewußtseins als eines Zeitbewußtseins”
9:45-10:40 Eva Axer (Frankfurt/Main): “The ‘inexorable law of perpetual mutation’: Theories on Generic Development and Tradition (Motherwell/Goethe)”
Dirk Göttsche (Nottingham): “Zeitpoetik in Kleiner Prosa der Gegenwart“
10:40 coffee break
Chronotopes: Time and Space
11:10 Ralf Simon (Basel): “Die Zeiten des Gastes”
11:50 Simon Ward (Durham): “Time and the Postmodern City: Berlin after 1975”
12:20 buffet lunch
Time and the Politics of Memory
13:30 Iulia-Karin Patrut (Paderborn): “Zeitlichkeit und zeitgeschichtliche Zäsur in der Literatur nach 1989
14:15 Ulrich E. Bach (Texas State University): “Memories of Lost Possiblities: Christoph Ransmayr’s and Thomas von Steinaecker’s Postmodern Colonialism”
14:50 coffee break
The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature
15:20-16:50 Sabine Zubarik (Erfurt): “The Ethics of Time: Stasis and Dilation in Thomas Lehr’s 42 and Svend Age Madsen’s Days with Diam”
Tomislav Zelic (Zadar): “Snapshots, Ekphrasis and Palimpsest: The Discourse of Crisis in W. G. Sebald’s Travelogue Ringe des Saturn”
Sascha Seiler (Mainz): “The End of All Time: The Disappearance of the World in Recent Literary Texts”
17:00 final discussion and end of symposium
Contact:
Professor Dirk Göttsche
Department of German Studies, Nottingham
Tel. 0044-115-8466297
Email: dirk.goettsche@nottingham.ac.uk