See the Centre for Attention Studies at King's.

Zoom link:

Zoom link:

The theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche's philosophy has recently been at the centre of an important debate in the literature between Robert Pippin (2010) and Lanier Anderson and Rachel Cristy (2017). Engaging with these scholars, I will consider three major questions: (1) What is cheerfulness? (2) What is its value for philosophy? (3) Is Nietzsche a cheerful thinker and writer? If yes, in what sense? As insinuated by the title of this presentation, I propose that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of significant ones.

In person and on Teams:

Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

Panelists Eileen John, Nick Lawrence, and Emma Williams (Warwick), with comments by Professor Zumhagen-Yekplé (who will join us on Teams)

Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009). The film, I indicate, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her shantytown and country. I signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for the notion of a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although tremendously impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

Organisers: Antonia Hofstätter and Christine Achinger (German Studies/Modern Languages)

Caroline Summers (Warwick SMLC)

5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24 Location: Ramphal R3.41

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an ‘afterlife’ to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author’s work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which ‘a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. […] In [translation], the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development’. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a ‘literary invigoration’ of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience and asks what Benjamin’s reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

In collaboration with the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies

This is an online event. Professor Stump will speak remotely. Follow this link to join the seminar:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88410605504Link opens in a new window

Teams link here

Teams link here