Leo Lensing at the Akademie für gesprochenes Wort

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

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.

Die Einrichtung der Literatur

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.

Björn oder die Hürden der Behörden

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.

GuteKunst: Goethe-Institut announces Prize for Young Translators

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

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

The Scene of Writing, Non-Writing

Uli Plass and Arne Höcker organized two panels on “The Scene of Writing, Non-Writing” at last week’s Conference of the German Studies Association in Oakland. The panels examined the “scene of writing, non-writing” as the writing scene that constitutes the law of modern literature insofar as it refers to a crisis of writing in which questions of authorship and subjectivity return to the foreground. Arne Höcker’s talk focused on Adalbert von Chamisso’s 1814 novella of Peter Schlemihl (the man who sold his shadow); Uli Plass discussed the two recent books by Rainald Goetz (“Klage” and “Loslabern”).

German Movie Night

On October 3, Germany celebrates its 20th year of reunification. In order to remember this historic date, we are showing director Wolfgang Becker’s social satire Good Bye Lenin.

Join us on Monday, October 4 at 7:00 PM  in Fisk 413.

Authority, Responsibility, and Creative Writing: Arne Höcker on Scientific Authorship

Arne Höcker’s article on Scientific Authorship appeared in the compendium Experiment und Literatur. Themen, Methoden, Theorien (ed. Michael Gamper, Wallstein Verlag). The compendium discusses topics, methods, and theories for the analysis of the relations of literature and scientific experiments, and focuses particularly on epistemological and poetological dimensions of the exchange between literature and the sciences. Arne Höcker’s contribution discusses problems of authorship in scientific discourse in regard to questions of scientific creativity, authority, and copyright.

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Regensburg But Were Afraid To Ask

Friday, October 1, 2010, at the German Haus, 65 Lawn Ave at 4:30pm

The German House is hosting an information session for students who are interested in studying at Regensburg University. Wesleyan students who participated in this program last semester will be attending this meeting and will talk about their experiences. Also invited are German students from Regensburg who are studying at Wesleyan this year. German Studies faculty will also be there tow answer questions.

Teaching German with Short Films

On September 25, 2010, Iris Bork-Goldfield was invited by the American Association of German Teachers, New York Central to conduct a teacher development workshop at Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY. She spoke about how short films can enhance German language instruction, and gave examples on how to integrate these films into the curriculum. Participants were graduate students, high school teachers and university professors.

On one page …

… of today’s FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Nr. 220, 22. September 2010):

Leo A. Lensing’s article on Karl Kraus in “Fotogeschichte” (see earlier post) inspires the German Professor Martin Stingelin to write about the use of photographies by Karl Kraus: “Echt medial”

On the same page:
the review of the conference “Die amerikanischen Götter”. Transatlantische Prozesse in der deutschsprachigen Popkultur seit 1949, to which Uli Plass contributed a talk titled “Totalschaden: Zur Dialektik von Adornos Pop-Kritik” last weekend at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau.

Here it is (on one page):

Pop 2010 Artikel FAZ Sept 2010