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

Leo Lensing at the Akademie für gesprochenes Wort

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Leo Lensing took part in a celebration of the 75th 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

Krishna Winston on the Art of Translation

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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.