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From: kizer walker <kw33@cornell.edu>
Subject: CFP: Thinking Culture (Ithaca, 7.-8.11.97)
Date: Friday, June 6, 1997 15:37:07 MET


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"Thinking Culture: Literature and Beyond"

Graduate Student Conference of the Cornell University Department of German Studies
Sponsored by the Institute for German Culture Studies
November 7-8, 1997 at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

We welcome submissions pertaining to any of the following topics. One need not strictly adhere to the five themes listed, which should be considered jumping-off points for presentations. We encourage abstracts which address areas of overlap between panels. 1-2 page abstracts for approximately 20 minute presentations are due by September 17, 1997. All abstracts will be read without consideration of the author's name or institution.

  1. Der, die oder das?
    Thinking Genders and Sexualities How does the emergence of such fields as "gender studies" and "queer theory" affect the way we practice "German studies"? Can American visions of feminism and lesbian/gay culture and politics be "translated" into German(y)?-what might some key differences be? What is at stake in "queer readings" of canonical literary texts? How might we rethink masculinity-how is it constructed in German cultural productions? What are the discursive legacies of late 19th and early 20th century German theories of gender and sexual identity (e.g., those of Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Freud, Weininger)? How do particular moments in German culture challenge us to fine-tune our working notions of gender and sexuality?
  2. Culture (Re)Viewed: Performing German
    How is German culture defined, represented, and critiqued by the visual and performing arts-how is German culture performed, onstage and off? What does "German" look like? In what sense are representations of German culture and identity dependent on representations of the non-German. Does filmic language communicate something about German culture that written language cannot? From medieval iconography to the Brechtian gestus, how do gesture and movement, physical presence (or absence) describe, inscribe, or proscribe German culture in a particular way?
  3. Postmark Germany: Contextualizing Postcolonialism
    What are the historical or conceptual constraints on the paradigms of postcolonialism and Orientalism in German Studies? How is Germanness racialized and gendered? How can one employ such categories as minority literature without reifying notions of the margin and the center? What happens to representations of the body and sexuality in the colonial and postcolonial condition? How do "hybrid identities" trouble conceptions of Germanness? How do texts reconcile postmodern subjectivity and ethnic identity?
  4. Psychoanalytic Culture, Cultural Psychoanalysis
    How can psychoanalysis (which psychoanalysis?) enrich concepts of self and internal psychic life? How can it (or should it?) help us recuperate the notions of "depth" and interiority jettisoned in Marxist, postmodernist, or Foucauldian theories? How might the concept of the phantasmatic elucidate and complicate the relationship between internal psychic life and politics? In concrete terms, for example, how might the phantasmatic enable us to rethink orientalist fantasy in the German context? How do political fantasies relate to forms of political engagement? What might German studies contribute to the study of the writings of Freud and psychoanalytic theory?
  5. Thinking History, Memory, Identity
    Do historians have an "ethical" relationship to their mode of representation? How have particular events in German history changed shape in their various representations? What are the "proper" uses of history, and what are its abuses? What role does or should trauma play in historical representation? What are the connections between history, memory, and identity? How might we understand German attempts at Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung, both in "historical" texts and in literature and film? What is the status of pre-modernity-what are the cultural stakes in studying pre-modern, as opposed to "recent," history?
  6. Open Topic
    We welcome any contributions to German studies, particularly those with interdisciplinary themes.

Please send abstracts to:

Christopher Clark
Department of German Studies
183 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-3201
E-mail: <cmc22@cornell.edu>
Fax: (607) 255-1454


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