Faculty News

On May 2, Leo Lensing attended a screening of A Little Pocket Mirror, a documentary on the Austrian writer Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), at the Neue Galerie in New York. The British art historian Gemma Blackshaw and the award-winning filmmaker David Bickerstaff collaborated on the project. Lensing is one of the consultants interviewed in the film, which includes footage of several objects from his collection of Altenberg’s manuscripts and inscribed photographs.

On April 13, Ulrich Plass presented a talk titled “Metaphysics and the Body: Adorno and Nietzsche on Living Rightly” at the Philosophy Department of the University of South Florida. His lecture compared Nietzsche’s philosophy of the body with Adorno’s attempts to ground an ethics of the good in somatic experience, i.e., in the spontaneous articulation of impulses.

Träume. Das Traumtagebuch 1875-1931, Leo Lensing’s edition of the dream journal of the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the author of  La Ronde, Fräulein Else and other classics of early twentieth-century German literature, was published by Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen) on March 6. Prepared together with Peter Michael Braunwarth to celebrate Schnitzler’s 150^th birthday, the revised and expanded version of the dream texts originally included in his diaries can be read as an implicit challenge to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.  Schnitzler’s Träume is both an “unconscious” autobiography of its author, whom Freud called his doppelgänger, and a dark, surreal reflection of the era between the final phase of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of fascism in the 1920s. His dreams are peopled not only by his family and famous Viennese contemporaries, including Freud, Mahler, Klimt, Karl Kraus and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but also by Goethe, Mozart, Wagner, Emperor Franz Joseph, Kaiser Wilhelm, and even Marlene Dietrich.  An early review in the Viennese music journal Der neue Merker marveled over the “profound richness” of the dream texts and praised commentary and afterword as a “compendium of knowledge” about Schnitzler’s world. Träume was also featured on April 15 in “Ex libris,” a weekly program discussing new publications on ORF, Austrian National Radio.

Leo Lensing’s essay “Rainer ‘Maria’ Fassbinder. Cinema between Literature and Life” is included in the new Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker.

Leo Lensing contributed the article on Karl Kraus (1874-1936) to the Handbuch der Kunstzitate, a lexicon documenting allusions to painting, sculpture and photography in the work of more than two hundred German-language writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The “handbook,” edited by Konstanze Fliedl et al., is published in two volumes by De Gruyter.

On November 19, 2011 Iris Bork-Goldfield talked at the ACTFL conference in Denver, CO on how one can effectively integrate short movies into the foreign language classroom. Movies, she argues, motivate students, support listening comprehension, and convey much cultural and historical information. As a good example she used Ingo Rasper’s humorous film Dufte that tells the story about German coffee smugglers in 1952.

Iris Bork-Goldfield presented at the Massachusetts Foreign Language association on October 28, 2011 on Digital Story Telling. She illustrated how Intermediate German students at Wesleyan University brought their hometown into the language classroom and created an engaging multicultural environment that enhanced students’ writing, speaking, and listening skills.

The Middletown International Film Festival presents Cherry Blossoms – Kirschblüten – Hanami by Doris Dörrie, with an introduction by Associate Professor Iris Bork-Goldfield.

Doris Dörrie’s bittersweet film beautifully juxtaposes German and Japanese culture and tells the story of mourning and the futility of trying to recover something lost.

The screening will be at 7:00 p.m., on Thursday, October 13, 2011, at Wesleyan University’s Center for Film Studies

Admission is free

Leo Lensing took part in a celebration of the 75^th birthday of Friedrich Pfäfflin, held on December 11, 2010, at the Akademie für gesprochenes Wort in Stuttgart. Pfäfflin, the former director of the Schiller Nationalmuseum and, for many  years, the editor of the catalogues and “Marbacher Magazine” of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, was honored with a festive evening that featured a small exhibition from his Karl Kraus collection and a fine menu based on Kraus’s favorite dishes.Lensing and other friends and colleagues  – Kurt Krolop (Prague), Christian Wagenknecht (Göttingen), Jens Malte Fischer (Munich) and Joachim Kalka (Stuttgart)- gave  brief talks on manuscripts that were present in the exhibition.

Leo Lensing and the honoree Friedrich Pfäfflin

The Rilke specialist Joachim Storck  and Leo Lensing in a friendly exchange about the relationship between Rilke and Karl Kraus

In the latest issue of Wesleyan’s online newsletter, Krishna Winston, Marcus L. Taft Professor of German Language and Literature, dean of arts and humanities, answers “5 Questions” on the art of literary translation. Winston has been the principal English-language translator for the works of the Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass since 1990. Here Winston talks about the art of translation and working with a giant of 20th-century literature.

Ulrich Plass and Arne Höcker together compiled and introduced the newest issue of the prestigious Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie. The title of this issue is Die Einrichtung der Literatur, which, on the one hand, refers to literature as an institution and to the institutionalization of literature, and, on the other hand, carries the meaning of the interior design and the furnishings of literature. The interest of the volume is to provide a contribution to the research of the processes and techniques of writing under the conditions of modernity, to shed light on the modern scene of writing understood as an “unstable ensemble of language, instrumentality and gesture” (R. Campe). With the focus on furniture, the volume draws particular attention to the material side of the project of literature, which contributes to its success, or – in the case of modernity – to the successful exhibition of its failure.

Ulrich Plass’s article “Schreibpult, Lampe, Uhr” examines Eduard Mörike’s poetic techniques of writing in the context of a world of disenchanted objects. It compares those of Mörike’s thing-poems that address pieces of furniture. Three aspects are of central concern: the relationship between text and title; the inclusion of the seemingly absent observer into the thing-space of the poem; the technique of inscription as potential dissolution of the rigid duality of frame and framed object. The latter, however, falls short in determining the inscribed object and instead leads to an intertextual opening of the text.

Arne Höcker’s contribution “Artistische Dinge oder Wie man lyrische Gedichte macht” analyzes Gottfried Benn’s scene of writing. In a short autobiographic prose piece from 1952, Benn condenses his writing scene to the technical formula of three desks. Against the backdrop of the artistic program that Benn developed in his famous lecture „Problems of Lyric Poetry“ a year earlier, the article focuses on the instrumental techniques of writing, in which artistic things are shaped and formed and can realize themselves as lyric poetry.

The complete table of contents is available at the journal’s website.

On November 20th, Iris Bork Goldfield presented at the American Council of  Teachers of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) conference in Boston, MA. She talked about  how to successfully integrate Andi Niessner’s  German film Björn und die Hürden der Behörden (Björn or the Hurdles of Bureaucracy) into the German language classroom.

Krishna Winston’s translation of Günter Grass’s The Box: Tales From the Darkroom (published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was recently reviewed in the New York Times Sunday Book Review.