Events

Jenseits der Stille (Beyond Silence)

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American Sign Language and German Movie Night with an introduction by Sheila Mullen and Iris Bork-Goldfield

April 6, at 4:30 p.m. – Fisk 302

Beyond SilenceBeyond Silence (1998) directed by Caroline Link. Starring Sylvie Testud, Tatjana Trieb, Howie Seago is a German movie with English subtitles. Acclaimed by critics and audiences everywhere, BEYOND SILENCE is the powerful Academy Award-nominated story of a young woman’s battle for independence and her deaf parents’ struggle to understand her gift for music. Given a clarinet by her free-spirited aunt, Lara is immediately consumed by a new passion her parents cannot share. Determined to follow her dreams, Lara’s ongoing pursuit of music creates an ever-widening rift that eventually threatens to tear apart her once close-knit family.

Law and Literature: Who Owns It? – A Lecture by Eva Geulen (Bonn University, Germany)

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Friday, April 1, 4:30, Russell House

Organized by the Program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. Co-sponsored by German Studies, History, COL, Sociology, English, the Dean of the Social Sciences, and the Center for the Humanities

Eva Geulen’s talk will examine the historically and conceptually fraught relationship between law and literature from four points of view: 1. The common history and shared heritage of law and literature; 2. law as literature; 3. literature vs. law; 4. literature in law.

Eva Geulen received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University and has taught at the University of Rochester and at New York University. Currently, she is professor of modern German literature at Bonn University. She has published widely in the areas of modern narrative prose, discourses of education, gender studies, and aesthetics. Her books include The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel (Stanford UP 2006) and Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung [Introducing Giorgio Agamben] (Junius 2005; second, revised edition 2009).

Prize-winning Austrian novelist Andrea Grill to read at Wesleyan

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The German Studies Department and the Shapiro Creative Writing Center invite you to meet Andrea Grill on Monday, February 21, 2011, at 4:30 p.m. in Downey House Lounge. Come listen to her stories and participate in the discussion to follow.

Andrea Grill will read from her latest novel Das Schöne und das Notwendige (Beauty and Necessity), and other stories in German and English.

In her latest novel, published in 2010, Andrea Grill discovers a new aesthetic for transnational capitalism. In her story two poor but clever friends have an idea how to turn “straw into gold.” Their scheme has only one problem, they need an Asian civet cat. But where can they find one, and will it survive in a small apartment on the fifth floor?

Andrea Grill was born in Bad Ischl in 1975 and studied in Salzburg before earning her doctorate in Biology at the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation on “The Evolution of Butterflies Endemic to Sardinia.” She writes prose, poems and essays and translates from Albanian. In 2010, she was a Max Kade Scholar at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

Kurzfilme im Deutschunterricht

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AATG-CT President Christine Dombrowki

Iris Bork-Goldfield conducted a workshop on “The Use of Short Films in the German Language Classroom”  for German teachers at Wesleyan University on January 29, 2011. The workshop was sponsored by the American Association of Teachers of German (AATG).

Renare Ringstadt, Christi Kochefko
Julia Assaiante, Anna Huber, Vera Grant, Krishna Winston

GuteKunst: Goethe-Institut announces Prize for Young Translators

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The Goethe-Institut New York is pleased to invite applications for the first Frederick and Grace Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators. The purpose of the prize is to identify and encourage outstanding students of translation and of the German language and assist them in establishing contact with the translation and publishing communities.

The prize, which comes with a cash award of $2,500, is open to all college students and translators under the age of 35 who, at the time the prize is awarded, have not yet published nor are under contract for a book-length translation from the German. Applications will be accepted only from candidates who live in the United States.

To get more information and to find out how to participate, please follow this link:

Gutekunst Prize for Young Translators

Hänsel und Gretel und die tapferen Flöhe Incorporating the Fairy Tale into the 21st-Century German Classroom

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Iris Bork-Goldfield presented at the 2010 Connecticut Council Of Language Teachers (CT COLT) Fall Conference on October 25th. In their two-hour workshop for secondary and post-secondary German educators, Christine Kochefko (Ridgefield HS) and Iris Bork-Goldfield discussed the teaching of “traditional” Grimm’s fairy tales with new media. They presented creative student projects using Photostory and VoiceThread and showed how these media tools helps with the assessment of student oral performance.  The presentation concluded with a discussion of multicultural themes in fairy tales by the Syrian-born German author Rafik Schami