ÌÇÐÄTV

In recent years, discussions of travel narratives have examined the creation of the diaspora, highlighting themes of loss and exile using the centre-periphery framework. This symposium seeks to develop discussions through a focus on feminism in travel narratives, examining how centre-periphery discourses are complicated, challenged, subverted, or reinforced through gendered accounts of migration, ethnicity, identity conflicts and political connections. The Symposium will explore how migration and diaspora formations are gendered to develop a centre-periphery narrative which juxtaposes traditional and conventional discourses often associated with the marginalised experience. Questions to be addressed include: how does travel through forced or voluntary migration create new opportunities to liberate or oppress women? How do women of different socio-cultural and historical locations/parameters formulate their relationship to feminism? We also invite papers to reflect anew on the “centre” and “periphery”. Where (if anywhere) are they located and what is at stake in mapping these spaces today? What does peripheral status imply? How can we re-imagine the centre-periphery dynamic for the current age?

Colleagues from ÌÇÐÄTV, Durham and Nottingham Universities, as well as leading international researchers from North America and the EU, are coming together 11-12 July in Nottingham for another milestone meeting in the Critical Time Project. The conference marks a continuation of events held in ÌÇÐÄTV, GB (2013) and Konstanz, DE (2014), which have centred on questions regarding the temporality of art, the aesthetics of slowness, the intellectual history of time, the temporality of literary genres, the cross-mapping of time and space, the ethics of time and the politics of memory, and the poetics of time in contemporary German culture. For more details, follow the link: 

Time and temporality have been defining concerns of modernity since the emergence around 1800 of the modern sense of critical time that Koselleck defined as the progressive “Verzeitlichung” (temporalisation) of all areas of human knowledge: subjectivity, history and nature. The digital age with its revolution of conventional and modern conceptions of time and space on a global scale has given the modern sense of critical new virulence in critical discourse as well as cultural production. This international and interdisciplinary conference covers a full range of aspects in the philosophical, literary and cultural study of time and temporality: the temporality of art, the aesthetics of slowness, the intellectual history of time, the temporality of literary genres, the cross-mapping of time and space, the ethics of time and the politics of memory, and the poetics of time in contemporary German literature. Guests are welcome subject to registration.

Conference Programme

 Friday, 11 July 2014

From 1 pm: reception, registration, refreshments

14:00 Welcome and introduction (Dirk Göttsche)

The Temporality of Art

14:15 Jonathan Tallant (Nottingham): “Time in Renaissance Art”

15:00 Karen Lang (ÌÇÐÄTV): “The Problem of Historical Time (Simmel, Benjamin, Panofsky)”

15:45 coffee break

The Aesthetics of Slowness

16:15 Jerome Carroll (Nottingham): “‘Acceleration’ and ‘Retardation’: Temporality, Modernist Poetics and Modernity in Hans Blumenberg and Viktor Shklovsky”

16:45 Lutz Koepnick (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee): “Slowness as a Strategy of the Contemporary”

17:30 coffee break

The Intellectual History of Time

17:45-19:15 Maike Oergel (Nottingham): “‘The Grand Poem of our Time’: Carlyle, Zeitgeist and his History of the French Revolution”

Catherine Moir (Cambridge): “Untimely Histories: Ernst Bloch, Utopia and the Politics of Progress”

Brian Elliott (Portland State University, Oregon): “Benjamin and Sloterdijk on Time, Revolt and Redemption”

20:00 Dinner (location tbc)

Saturday, 12 July 2014

The Temporality of Literary Genres

9:00 Dirk Oschmann (Leipzig): “Zur Konstitutionsphase des modernen Formbewußtseins als eines Zeitbewußtseins”

9:45-10:40 Eva Axer (Frankfurt/Main): “The ‘inexorable law of perpetual mutation’: Theories on Generic Development and Tradition (Motherwell/Goethe)”

Dirk Göttsche (Nottingham): “Zeitpoetik in Kleiner Prosa der Gegenwart“

10:40 coffee break

Chronotopes: Time and Space

11:10 Ralf Simon (Basel): “Die Zeiten des Gastes”

11:50 Simon Ward (Durham): “Time and the Postmodern City: Berlin after 1975”

12:20 buffet lunch

Time and the Politics of Memory

13:30 Iulia-Karin Patrut (Paderborn): “Zeitlichkeit und zeitgeschichtliche Zäsur in der Literatur nach 1989

14:15 Ulrich E. Bach (Texas State University): “Memories of Lost Possiblities: Christoph Ransmayr’s and Thomas von Steinaecker’s Postmodern Colonialism”

14:50 coffee break

The Poetics of Time in Contemporary Literature

15:20-16:50 Sabine Zubarik (Erfurt): “The Ethics of Time: Stasis and Dilation in Thomas Lehr’s 42 and Svend Age Madsen’s Days with Diam”

Tomislav Zelic (Zadar): “Snapshots, Ekphrasis and Palimpsest: The Discourse of Crisis in W. G. Sebald’s Travelogue Ringe des Saturn”

Sascha Seiler (Mainz): “The End of All Time: The Disappearance of the World in Recent Literary Texts”

17:00 final discussion and end of symposium

Contact:

Professor Dirk Göttsche

Department of German Studies, Nottingham

Tel. 0044-115-8466297

Email: dirk.goettsche@nottingham.ac.uk