Events
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Sep 17Maxi Obexer, Reading in German, “Odysseus‘ Hund” and “Unter Tieren”
Maxi Obexer, Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+.
336 Ingraham
This talk will be held in German. A year before Maxi Obexer published her novel Unter Tieren (Among Animals, 2023), she wrote a widely acclaimed essay titled “Über Tiere schreiben, über Tiere sprechen” (Writing About Animals, Speaking About Animals, 2022). In it, Obexer grapples with what it means to write about animals in a language deeply shaped …
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Sep 17“A Voice in the Wilderness: The Vita Nova Publishing House and Its Anti-Nazi Program,” a lecture by Michael Wachtel
Michael Wachtel, Princeton University
206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive CREECA Event Page
Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies, the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+, and the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies. About the lecture: The talk is based on approximately 800 pages of unpublished correspondence between the Jewish philosopher and musician Evsei Davidovich Shor and the Protestant writer and publisher Rudolf Roessler. After leaving …
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Sep 18A talk on the book “Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life”
Michael Wachtel (Princeton U)
1312 Van Hise
Michael Wachtel (Princeton U), will discuss his recent book “Viacheslav Ivanov: A Symbolist Life”.
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Sep 24“Witold Gombrowicz’s Theatrophobia: The Playwright and His Double,” a lecture by Allen Kuharski
Allen Kuharski, Professor Emeritus, Swarthmore College
206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive CREECA Event Page
This lecture is co-sponsored by the Lapinski Family Fund and the Polish Heritage Club of Madison. About the Lecture: Witold Gombrowicz is Poland’s most produced playwright around the world—and more performed abroad than in Poland itself. His first play Ivona, Princess of Burgundia is the most-produced Polish play of all time outside of Poland. Gombrowicz’s theater leads a …
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Oct 1Maxi Obexer, Documentary Radio Play and Discussion: Im Auge des Sturms. Das Kapitol im Januar 2021 (2024)
Maxi Obexer, Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +.
Probably everyone is familiar with the images of the attack on the United States Capitol in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021. But what happened inside the building on that day? In her award-winning documentary radio play Im Auge des Sturms, Maxi Obexer shifts the lens away from the mob outside to focus on the lawmakers …
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Oct 5Afropean: Black People and Blackness in Europe
Discovery Building, UW-Madison Department of African American Studies Event Page
Panelists and Moderators Michelle Moyd is Red Cedar Distinguished Associate Professor of History at MSU. Her book,Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa, was published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Radical History Review, International Labor and Working Class History, and Slavery and Abolition. She is currently at …
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Oct 8Hilldale Lecture: Defining Enlightenment: Kant, Mendelssohn, Arendt
Liliane Weissberg, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Arts and Science emerita and Professor of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies
Pyle Center Rm 226
What is Enlightenment? In 1783 Berlin monthly Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its readers to submit answers to this question, and both Immanuel Kant and Moses Mendelssohn sent essays to the journal. Their submissions, both published in 1784, offered very different responses. In 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, Hannah Arendt also reflected on Enlightenment. She would implicitly refer to Kant …
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Oct 12Catastrophic Belatedness (Celan, Darwish, Derrida)
Peter Makhlouf
Ingraham 206
Declarations on the fate of poetry after mass violence—enshrined most notably in Theodor Adorno’s indictment of “poetry after Auschwitz”—have tended to stress poetry’s impotence in the face of representing past destruction. Arriving too late to catastrophe constitutes the primordial belatedness of any poetics of witness. But what happens when we shift the locus of poetry from …
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Oct 15Maxi Obexer (trans. Neil Blackadder), “The Daughters of Oresteia” Dramatic Reading (English)
Maxi Obexer and Neil Blackadder, Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+.
332 Pyle Center
First performed in 458 BCE, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is traditionally viewed as the depiction of a society transitioning from chaotic blood vengeance to structured, democratic justice. Yet this foundational drama of democracy also marks the birth of the tragic hero: Orestes, who slays his mother as commanded, only to be consumed by remorse. Maxi Obexer …
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Oct 16Casting Weimar: Selection, Surplus, and the Film Actor
Paul Dobryden
Van Hise Room 1418
This presentation tracks modern discourses of human selection as they converged in discussions of film acting in Weimar Germany. In the early years of narrative cinema and beyond, the question of how to select actors for films—the question of casting, in other words—preoccupied filmmakers, actors, critics, and audiences. I trace this question to features of …