Presenter's Bios and Paper's Abstracts
Steve Bartels
Graduate student at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He holds a law degree from New York University and a master’s degree in history from the University of Texas, where he currently works as a language instructor in the Department of Germanic Studies.
Presentation Title: Sprachfest! Exploring Culture through Cliche at High School Foreign Language Competitions
Screening of Bartel’s documentary short film “Deutschfest!” (running time: 10 minutes) followed by a brief discussion. “Deutschfest!” records the excitement at the 2014 Texas State German Contest, where over a thousand high school students vied for glory in a variety of cultural events (including dance, theater, and music).The film explores the ways in which common cultural stereotypes persist in foreign language education, while providing an important source of motivation for young learners.
The stereotypes reflect generally benign qualities of the target cultures (e.g. classical music and folk dance) while avoiding their more negative aspects (e.g. xenophobic strains in contemporary political discourse). What are the consequences if we reimagine German culture as a perpetual Oktoberfest (without the alcohol)? Is the resort to cliché an acceptable compromise if it leads young adults to pursue other opportunities to engage with foreign cultures later in life, be it through travel, study abroad, or continued language study in college?
Daniel Bowman
First year of a doctorate program in Modern French Studies at the University of Maryland. He completed a MA in French from Virginia Tech in 2013, where he also earned a BA in 2010. Areas of interest include nineteenthcentury music and literature.
Presentation Title: Bizet in Africa: The Localization of Narrative in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï
Mérimée’s “Carmen” has been a popular inspiration for adaptation to other forms of media. Georges Bizet notably used it as the foundation to the libretto of his influential opera of the same name. More than a century after its premiere, this version of “Carmen” inspired a new project by Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka. Ramaka’s 2001 Karmen Geï updates the story of “Carmen,” translating it both figuratively and literally to suit the new context of modern Senegal. The film, presented in French and Wolof, retains the musical nature of Bizet’s work by taking cues from Hollywood musicals. While significant similarities exist between the film and the opera from which it takes its inspiration, Ramaka localizes the work to fit its national context. Rather than resting in the archetype of the seductress as in Bizet’s opera, the character of Karmen is central to the film’s narrative. Ramaka shifts the narrative focus to the tragic fate of Karmen, and uses her story to demonstrate the perceived threat a strong female character poses to a restrictive society. The qualities that define Bizet’s character of Carmen are taken to their extreme for the film’s titular protagonist. She is stronger, freer and more audacious than the version found in the opera. Lamine, the film’s equivalent to the character of Don José, is weakened and reduced to the point where his entire identity in the film hinges upon his relation to Karmen. The tragic arc of Karmen’s character is underlined with use of the Habanera, the famous aria from Bizet’s opera, which has been translated Wolof and updated musically to match the context of contemporary Senegal. In presenting the powerful, dynamic character of Karmen, one who is ultimately doomed to death, Ramaka shows the threat posed by strong women to a traditional, patriarchal society.
Andrzej Brylak
PhD student of Polish program at the Slavic and Baltic Literatures and Languages Department at UIC. His dissertation project focuses on dynamics between Polish Jewish and Ukrainian Literatures and their role in creating those three national identities. He holds an MA degree in Jewish Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He worked as a Program Assistant of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland Foundation and collaborated with Galicia Jewish Museum and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He is also a freelance journalist specializing in Eastern Europe, actively involved in the events of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.
Presentation Title: Jews and Poles on the Ukrainian Barricades? A Transnational Perspective on “Maidan” Counterculture.
The “Maidan” revolution in Ukraine may be seen not only as a social and political phenomenon but also as a cultural movement that brought to the fore new perspectives on Ukrainian literature, art and theater. Maidan Square itself became cultural center which produced its own cultural and symbolic codes, slang, pop culture, and literature. “Maidan” as countercultural movement was not only a domestic affair, however to the present paper analyzes two key texts that explore the role of Jews and Poles in the Maidan revolution, and that were either created or re-interpreted within the context of Maidan counterculture.
Two of such texts are the focus of the present discussion. I focus first on the phenomena of “Jewish Banderivtsi”- essentially Jewish Ukrainian nationalists - analyzing the origins of the term “Zydo-Banderovtsi” , and symbolism created around it that includes images of the Ukrainian national emblem wearing sidelocks, or Jewish symbols, like Menorah or Star of David drawn in the colors of Ukrainian nationalistic movement.
A 1931 poem by Oleksandr Oles entitled Remember becomes the centerpiece of my discussion of Polish role in Maidan. The poem itself speaks about the historical indifference of Western Europeans toward the fate of Ukraine, while the commentary made by students states that Poland unlike “Europe”, is not silent.
Presented texts of culture can serve as premises of change in Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish relations on many different levels. Polish and Jewish engagement in “Maidan” and Ukrainian reaction to it can lead to another completely unexpected revolution, revolution in relations between those three nations.
Dylan Burns
MS in Library and Information Science student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MA in Humanities from New York University, BA in History from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Current digital projects GA in The Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Presentation Title: “This Poverty is Hurtin’ My Pride:” British Post-Imperial Identity and Working Class detachment in the Music of Ray Davies.
In his autobiography The Kinks’ songwriter Ray Davies writes “I finally realized I was not a king that night my dad came home and said he was out of a job.” Growing up poor, Davies’s music has always expressed a strong working class ethos. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his 1969 concept album Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)1 which traces the end of the British Empire through one English working class family. Weaving the fall of the Empire with the collapse of working class pride, the album explores traumatic recollection and nostalgic longing. Chronologically, we see at first an English working class encouraged by their “dominant” position in the Imperial order only to have their pride dashed in the wake of its passing. Pride, political and cultural, (or lack thereof) becomes central to understanding Davies’s conception of post‐Imperial working class consciousness. This geopolitical context has been neglected in economic interpretations of The Kinks’ music. My paper will place Ray Davies in this new context in part through the lens of what sociologist Paul Gilroy terms, Post‐Colonial Melancholia, that being the deep sadness and guilt felt in Britain in the wake of Empire.2 The satirical tone of these songs, as shown in the lyrics above, illuminates the disconnection formed between the working class Briton and Imperial identity as the end of the Empire removes the metaphorical curtains hiding the more traumatic elements of working class Imperial expectations. Working class Britons die in the factories, in the mines, and in the fields of Flanders; protecting a system that ultimately is as exploitative and as exclusionary to their own needs as it was to the subaltern outside of Britain.
Amalia Cantisán Muñoz
About to graduate from MA in Hispanic Literature and Culture at University of Illinois at Chicago, her academic interests have been informed by a non-degree year at Cornell University and a study abroad at University of Warsaw. She holds a BA from the University of Sevilla. Her long term research questions processes of fictionalization of history and how different modes of narrativizing national/personal trauma facilitate national/personal mourning. Broader areas of interest include formal approaches to postmodernity and theory of the novel.
Presentation Title: Haunted by History: transatlantic first person narratives in Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile and Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina.
I will be exploring how different approaches to first person narrative challenge the official historiographical discourse articulated by authoritarian political regimes. Whereas Bolaño's interior monologue shows the inevitability of "the horror of history" and the necessity to dig in the imaginarium of collective memory to arrive at a unifying narrative of history that radically subverts that which the regime supported; Cercas's narrator's quest for the "real story" that cannot possibly come to end in sight of the evidence he manages to collect shows the ambiguity of historiography and its nature as a literary artifact. This essay will focus on the literary techniques that allow the first person narrative to push a different ideological stand to the concept of history and its relation to political institutions.
Priscilla Charrat
PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focuses on postmemory and the rupture of family communication in French and Francophone literature related to the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence. She organizes the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies Reading Group.
Presentation Title: Words, Faces, Images: Giving the Nation's "Mohammeds" More Than a Voice.
Yamina Benguigui's 1997 prized documentary Immigrant Memories legitimized North African immigrant testimonies and became a stepping-stone for the study of Beur1 identity in France. The filmed personal testimonies, which contested the national narrative of decolonization and immigration, became part of a new canon, redefining questions of national belonging, subaltern identity, and migrant narratives across generations. Benguigi's documentary project was dual: along with the film, a book gathered narrativized adaptations of these testimonies.
In 2011, Jerome Ruiller, who has no North African heritage, adapted Benguigui's work into a graphic novel entitled Les Mohammed. His project is anything but a simple transcription of Benguigui's work into a new format. Rather, the graphic novel builds on the postmemorial dimension of Benguigui's work, by adding Ruiller's own positionality as the son of a French soldier fighting French decolonization, alongside his own sympathy towards those his father contributed to subjugate. The graphic novel brings back these minority narratives within mainstream French culture while still countering the official nation-state narrative of the historical events at play, therefore complicating the linearity of cultural transmission.
This paper will show how the three works (documentary, book, and graphic novel) highlight different dynamics between witnesses, interviewer/writer, and audience, implicating the latter in perspectival shifts across a mosaic of positionalities, all revolving around North African immigration in France. The three works use their respective medium to implicate the audience in the memory of an immigrant experience they have not lived, inviting them to reconsider the cross-sections of national, societal, cultural, and personal identities. The three narratives converge towards representations of more dynamic historical positions and postmemorial affects, proposing solidary countermemories to the national canon.
Renata Fuchs
Graduate student at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation, “‘Dann ist und bleibt eine Korrespondenz lebendig’: Romantic Dialogue in Letters and Works of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, and Karoline von Günderrode,” investigates connections between the letter, conversation, and women as authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She argues that a new model for conversation emerges in the late eighteenth century and manifests itself in these women’s letters and other texts. This new model is a phenomenon that borrows creatively from contemporary practices, including salon conversation and the Romantic concept of Symphilosophie.
Renata Fuchs’s research in Romanticism translates into a love of teaching that period; however, her scholastic interests include a broad range of literature, culture, and language itself. She has written and presented on contemporary German literature thematizing such issues as, migration, Heimat, alterity, hybridity, neo-nomadism as well as depression. Her area of research and interests go beyond the Romantic era and encompass the Enlightenment period, Contemporary German literature, German-Jewish literature, Holocaust Studies, Women’s Studies, Literary Multilingualism, Minority Literatures, and Transnational Studies.
Presentation Title: Global Dis/Connections through Literal and Metaphorical Borders in Terézia Mora’s Das Ungeheuer.
Terézia Mora’s writing brings to life a reflection on her own circumstances as the Other, an experience marked by the use of a minority language in a majorityspeaking context. Mora herself felt excluded: a bilingual speaker of German and Hungarian, she was classified as a member of a minority group in her old homeland, Hungary, as well as in her new home, Germany since neither Hungarian nor German critics were willing to describe her as their own. Although Mora’s newest novel Das Ungeheuer does not explicitly thematize the predicament of a minority group, it presents a striking portrayal of an individual in an age of transnationalism and globalization marked by migration and mobility. Flora, the main protagonist of Das Ungeheuer, arrives in Germany from a Hungarian village. She might have freed herself from the corrupt milieu of her old country; nonetheless, she cannot liberate herself from her mental illness of bipolar disorder. The novel thus problematizes not only the actual but also mental borders that define people’s lives. The author uses the postmodern form of a pastiche by interweaving two different text forms: the story told by Flora’s husband and her diary entries. The double form of the narrative – which creates a visual art form because of the way the book was edited – reflects the double life of Flora and her bipolar depressive symptoms, while the double plot creates a unique narrative commenting on postmodern situations. Mora’s pastiche evokes the chaotic, pluralistic, informationdrenched aspects of postmodern society consisting of various forms of literal and metaphorical borders, involving metafiction and temporal distortion. Metafiction systematically draws attention to the text’s status as an artifact (it is a story about a reader/husband reading his wife’s diary) in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, as Das Ungeheuer.
Elvira Godek-Kiryluk
PhD student in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds degrees from UCLA and UNLV. Her research in American and Russian Modernism focuses on politics in literature conceived as an aesthetic project.
Presentation Title: Platonov’s The Foundation Pit: The Politics of Superfluity in the Soviet State.
The audacity of The Foundation Pit (1930) results from Platonov’s representation of labor and of the ensuing social relations in a way that denies to the Soviet State the capacity to resolve the contradiction of alienated labor described by Marx in his labor theory of value. Nevertheless, the superfluous are necessary to the capital for the optimal extraction of surplus value. What is the meaning of the superfluous individual in the nation building project represented in TheFoundation Pit? A politics of superfluity cavalierly describes the mechanism of an economic system, but becomes radically subversive when it applies to the foundational principles not only of a state with declared commitments to the worker, but of any modern state. When, in the opening pages of the novel, Voshchev rouses himself from a contemplation of “shared, general life” to go and “defend his unneeded labor” before a committee, he produces personal and experiential evidence that the prophesied shift of dialectical materialism has not been realized. But, absent the shift motivated by historical inevitability, what is the status of the October Revolution and what can distinguish it from a coup d'état other than rational justification? I argue that Voshchev’s search for meaning mobilizes the legacy of the transnational Enlightenment project, which requires that the state justify its authority. Platonov pits the ethos of the Enlightenment against the Soviet theoreticians for whom the legitimacy of the Communist state is beyond the requirement of justification on the ideological grounds of dialectical materialism. I investigate the aesthetics of estrangement in The Foundation Pit, but contend that the devices that produce it are deployed with a formal commitment to meaning and that Platonov rehabilitates the meaning makers who are dislocated to the superstructure bereft of causality. In other words, Platonov vindicates a poet’s place in a republic.
David Hullinger
Graduated magna cum laude from Loyola University Chicago. At Loyola, he conducted research on the sonnet form as a Provost Fellow and presented at the 2014 National Conference on Undergraduate Research. He is interested in English-language poetry, the political novel, and heroism in literature.
Presentation Title: Every Man A King: Personal Responsibility in All the King’s Men
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s masterful novel on American politics, tells the story of Southern governor Willie Stark and his rise to power. Yet this overtly political storyline is interspersed with seemingly nonpolitical elements, such as lengthy sections on the biography of the narrator. To reconcile this apparent contradiction, I will argue that these disparate passages form an integrated whole by examining the issue of personal responsibility. This concept is studied from a societal perspective, as men contend against larger historical forces, and from an individual perspective, as they deal with other people. As a result, All the King’s Men proposes that the acceptance of personal responsibility for certain events is key to the exercise of power and is, ultimately, an inescapable part of the human condition. This study of personal agency possesses increased importance in a transnational world where historical and organizational factors play an ever-more-prominent role in intellectual discourse.
Catherine Kirchman
Catherine is completing a Master’s degree in Social Sciences from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, alongside a Master’s program in Library and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Her research interests are digital libraries in democratic societies and Critical Theory.
Presentation Title: "Europeana and the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek: EU Cultural Policy through Digital Libraries"
As the ‘Local’ becomes more globalized, through Information Communication Technologies and the digitization of information, cultural heritage sites, such as libraries and museums, are digitizing their collections and adapting to users in a network society. Looking more closely at the national and European digital library projects – Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Europeana, respectively –cultural artifacts are being virtually transformed and representing cultural identity through a politically-directed project. These projects are simultaneously transcending boundaries through a virtual network, while representing the geo-political boundaries of national (German) and collective (European) culture and knowledge. The curation and collection themselves of cultural artifacts by libraries and museums, is a political act, based on what is chosen and how information and objects are represented. Europeana is to be the European Union-funded library of “European culture”, collecting items from national library projects, such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek for Germany, and as such is explicitly a public-funded and political form of cultural policy.
Max McKenna
Second-year PhD student at the University of Chicago, where he studies 20th century American literature with specific interests in cityscapes and transatlantic postwar culture. He has published essays on modern and contemporary literature in The Journal of Modern Literature, The Millions, and Full Stop, among others.
Presentation Title: “Zigzagging in the Motor Age: Automobility and Errant Mobility in The Crying of Lot 4”
Broadly, this paper asks: what kind of problem does the automobile pose to critical and cultural theory? The mass popularization of the private car during the Cold War, as well as the immense infrastructural projects undertaken to make American cities more automobile-friendly, found various discourses—architectural, political, and literary—attempting to articulate the aesthetic and affective experiences of driving, specifically driving at unprecedented speeds on the rapidly-developed Eisenhower Interstate System. However, such an automobile subjectivity has largely eluded spatial theories of culture, which instead continue to emphasize the act of walking and the figure of the flâneur as heuristics.
This paper rereads Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as a suburban narrative that locates the disorienting cultural climate of the Cold War precisely in the increasingly common and necessary experience of driving on the freeway. In the novel, driving and walking figure not as diametrically opposed spatial practices, but rather as symbiotic and equally strange practices. Such a symbiosis provides us new means to think about the constructedness of agency and mobility, and the forms of subjectivity and resistance they make possible. Further, this paper proposes that the banalization of the new modes of experience and signification that the automobile produced—as well as the way that its ubiquity has changed how we “walk in the city,” to paraphrase Michel de Certeau—is a defining feature of postmodernity and postmodernism.
Mark Moll
PhD Candidate in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His dissertation traces the intersection of social democracy and nationalism among the Estonian-speaking intelligentsia and its international dimensions in the quarter century leading to the revolution of 1905.
Presentation Title: "The Disillusionment of an Arbeiterdichter: The Two Lives of Maurice Reinhold von Stern"
Alongside his former classmates Ernst Bark and Andres Dido, Maurice Reinhold von Stern was among the first writers from the Estonian-speaking lands of Russia's Baltic Provinces to become famous for works composed published entirely outside his homeland. This literary emigrant experience would be repeated during the forced exiles in the years after the 1905 revolution and World War II, but these three paved the way in the 1880s. Recently Bark and Dido have seen renewed scholarly interest in their lives, but the same cannot be said for Stern. During his life he was among the most prominent German poets of fin de siècle Naturalismus; nowadays he is all but unknown.
He was the son of a Baltic German nobleman and writer and volunteered for service in the Russo-Turkish Wars as a 16-year-old. He left four years later as an active member of the German socialist and anarchist community and the founder of his own newspaper, the New Jersey Arbeiter-Zeitung. By the turn of the century, however, he'd settled for good in Austria, and his turn towards German nationalism was already evident. His association with National Socialism, whether actually warranted or not, has tainted his work ever since.
Using Stern's autobiographical novel Walter Wendrich (1895), Von jenseits des Meeres: Amerikanische Skizzen (1890) and his later poetry, I seek to explain the transition of his thought not in terms of a distinct break from the internationalist and social democratic to nationalist, but a gradual evolution of style that remained true to his core beliefs.
Kristina Pilz
Second year PhD student at the University of Washington, and recipient of the prestigious Max Kade Graduate Fellowship. She currently prepares for her PhD qualifying exams in Winter Quarter 2015. Prior to joining UW, Ms. Pilz worked as an instructor for German at the Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Kristina Pilz holds two M.A. degrees, one in German from Texas Tech University and one in German as a Foreign Language from Dresden University of Technology, Germany.
Presentation Title: BlackWhite Narratives: Reading Afro-German Configurations of Cultural Identity.
My paper explores new configurations of cultural identity emerging in poetry by German-language writers of the African diaspora. It offers a close reading of Chantal-Fleur Sandjon poems bln zu rädern, gedicht für juli löwenherz, as well as Samy Sorge’s (Samy Deluxe) works Poesie Album and SchwarzWeiss, as part of the 2011 album SchwarzWeiss. I will illustrate how their innovative signifying process can narrate identity outside a nationalized and marginalized existence.
Albeit in different ways, Sandjon in form of classic poetry and Sorge in form of Hip Hop lyrics, which will be treated here as a form of konkrete Poesie, these texts do not only engage with the exploration of cultural identity, but in particular with the significance of emerging identity formations that transgress marginalization. Consequently, they focus on a poetic style in which African, African-American and German elements are not mutually exclusive but rather two interwoven strands that bring together the texture of the identity as Black Germans concerned with issues of a global diasporic culture.
This paper will illustrate how this poetic work presents a compelling model of intercultural dialogue between different modes of communication. It will show how layers of verbal, visual and musical communication lay the groundwork for a broadened definition of German identity that opens up towards an identity that is embedded within a global diasporic culture.
Jessica Schook
Second year of her Ph.D in Hispanic Studies at UIC. Her primary research interest is transnational representations of Africans in Spanish Cinema and the politics of representation. She is also interested in visual representations of marginalization and 'otherness' and their relation to aesthetics of the grotesque and monstrous in contemporary Iberian culture.
Presentation Title: Reading Melancholy into la Movida: Counter-Culture Identity Loss in Alberto García-Alix’s No “Me Sigas... Estoy Perdido” and “Tres Videos Tristes”
Although Alberto García-Alix’s photography is frequently read as an empowered play on identity formation and individualism, I posit a new reading of his work that considers a loss of agency over one’s identity construction, othering, exclusion and a subsequent melancholic onset. I will compare two concurrent exhibitions in Madrid from 2006, “No me sigas... Estoy perdido” held at Fundación Canal, which presents 100 of the artist’s images taken between 1976 and 1986 and “Tres Videos Tristes” made between 2003 and 2006 at Depósito Isabel II. I consider how the compilation of images in “No Me Sigas...Estoy Perdido,” taken at height of la Movida and chosen for this exhibition decades later, explore private spaces and identity constructions against a social backdrop that first “othered” the rocker’s behavior at the onset of AIDS, and later swept aside the undesirable pieces, to scavenge for a image they could use to showcase Spain’s progressiveness on the world stage. I will outline how the experience of belonging trouble is exposed in García-Alix’s early photography considering that the collection was aggregated by looking at images of the past, perhaps suggesting that García-Alix himself has a re-reading of la Movida after having lost friends to AIDS and overdose and watching the counter culture identity that he worked to create during the movement usurped by the mainstream and edited for their purposes. I then consider García-Alix’s aesthetic in “Tres Videos Tristes” as an affect of identity loss and spatial depravation within society, which manifests a melancholic condition in an extremely privatized experience.
Christina Schultz
A Chicago native, she started learning German in high school and moved to Bonn in 2006, where she
finished her BA in German Studies in 2007. She remained in Bonn as an English teacher until she
returned to the US to receive her MA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010
in German and Translation Studies. She is now working on her PhD in German at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. Her interests are in the history of the German language,18th century plays
and contemporary literature, film and cultural studies, German music from classical to pop, and
the Grimms’ fairy tales and older Germanic legends and myths. She is writing her dissertation on
contemporary German comedic films and TV shows and their reception in Germany and abroad.
Presentation Title: “There’s No Place Like Home: Globalization and Rootedness in Modern Society”.
In a globalizing world, notions of home are constantly shifting. The resistance to identification with one nation or home is generally lauded by cultural theorists of globalization and transnational identities. The loss of a traditional link to “nation” or “home” can, however, lead to a crisis of identity. Must we remain where we came from or fully adopt the new home to which we travel in order to avoid this crisis? There are four theorists to which I will turn in my paper: Ulrich Beck’s utopian concept of the polygamy of place, Georg Lukacs’ nostalgic concept of the transcendental homelessness of modernity and Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s optimistic model for understanding post-national identities. Despite the often enthusiastic embrace of bi- or multiculturalism as a desired product of (post)modernity amongst cultural theorists, I will look to the moments when these multi-national identities produce anxiety and tension. We can have an adopted home or enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle, but I would like to explore contemporary works that push back against this mode of living, reflecting the desire to root oneself. I would like to use two films from the multicultural director Fatih Akin, Auf der anderen Seite and Gegen die Wand, to serve as examples of the need to root ourselves. The films, interestingly enough, can be read as reverse Heimatfilme because the protagonists are Turkish immigrants living in German, and the homeland to which they return is Turkey. Akin takes a traditional viewpoint to this issue and his films show that try as the characters might to negotiate between different homes, the characters in the films choose to root themselves within a traditional Heimat.
Gokce Tekeli
Ph.D. candidate and a Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. Prior to her studies in the doctoral program, she earned an MA, also in English, at the University of Vermont. Her research centers on woman, gender and sexuality in American women’s literature.
Presentation Title: “The Quest for the “I” in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”
“I am a lesbian,” declares Alison Bechdel – in her autobiographical graphic narrative, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – after long years of research in familial, personal and public archives. In this paper, I draw on feminist autobiography studies, locational feminism, and queer theory in order to conceptualize the “I.” I explore the hybridity and multidimensionality of the graphic memoir to unveil multitudinous bodies of Bechdel that are constructed within dominant discourses of public and private sites. As Piepmeier points out, “the body can demonstrate and enact the fluidity of boundaries…the body ‘moves’ through and is constructed by discourses.” By focusing on locations portrayed in Fun Home, this paper will inquire into complexities of identity construction. Therefore, it is strategically intentional that I center my research on an individual claim of lesbian identity. In her study of Bechdel, Valery Rohy aptly inquires: “What sort of people, after all, must research who they are? Those whose difference is antifamilial, somatically unmarked, culturally veiled, and potentially shaming are drawn to lonely stacks and secret research, where the archive enables self-definition.” At the heart of this paper is the exploration of the construction and promotion of the “I” in Bechdel’s work -- Not just as a subjective declaration, but as a social, environmental and historical construction. I center my inquiry on Bechdel’s true life story as a way to understand “the assumptions in which we are drenched,” in Adrienne Rich’s terms. While focusing on Bechdel’s personal/ familial story, this study aims to knit feminism, queer archive and literature together. The questions I ask in this paper include: How do dominant heteronormative discourses, built around spaces, limit and enable Alison’s self/gender-identification? How are multiple bodies (textual, graphic and physical) utilized to construct the “I”? What are some of the ways in which the “I” dis/appears in the graphic narrative?
Serhii Tereshchenko
Second-year Master's student at UIC interested in Soviet and post-Soviet national identity, paramilitary forces and gender trouble. He has got his BA in Philology in 2013 from National University of 'Kyiv-Mohyla academy' and was an exchange student in University of Geneva (2013). He is currently teaching Russian and assisting in the Lithuanian Culture course at UIC.
Presentation Title: “Russian misogyny and Western homosexuality: What is to live around idiots?”
Viktor Erofeyev’s Life with an idiot ridicules general definitions of such things as madness, sexual transgression, life and death. With bitter irony, the author makes Western and Russian literary celebrities, such as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, compete for the most persuasive answers to these questions.
In his Life with an idiot, Erofeyev creates a world of nonsense, violence, and perversion being equal to norm. His characters don’t solely belong to a certain national culture. They are almost anonymous and nameless. More precisely, they are hallucinatory reflection of books the narrator has read. One day the narrator learns that he’s punished by having to adopt an idiot. After the idiot appears in the narrator’s family, he grows stronger, rapes the narrator’s wife and then with narrator. The ritualistic murder of the wife by the idiot gives creative insight for the narrator but also makes him crazy. Although the story is only 20 pages long, it has plenty reminiscences. For instance, the narrator kills his wife as Dostoyevsky’s Rogozin from Idiot, begs for tortures as Sacher-Masoch’s Severin from Venus in Furs, and dreams of love as Proust’s tender boys. Erofeyev’s project discloses the conflict within our contemporary vision of happiness and meaning of life. With my analyses, I am going to show how ideologies from times of tribal patriarchy to modern Soviet punitive psychiatry coexist in the text and what is the outcome of their visceral struggle for being the ultimate truth. In other words, I will talk about big narratives in times of fragmentary post-modernism. For that, I use Jameson, Kristeva, and Deleuze.
Jonathan Tillotson
PhD candidate in the Germanic Studies department at UIC. His research interests include: medicine and literature, autobiography, and eighteenth-century topics. He is currently in the midst of his dissertation, in which he is exploring the relationship between the literary image of smallpox, subjectivity and interiority in European autobiographies of the late eighteenth century.
Presentation Title: Smallpox and the Narrative of Conversion in the Autobiographies of Giacomo Casanova and Franz Xaver Bronner
In the autobiographies of Giacomo Casanova (Story of My Life, compiled between 1792 - 1798) and Franz Xaver Bronner (A Monk’s Life in the Age of Sensibility, first published 1795 - 1797), the narrator undergoes an inner transformation through smallpox illness. Through this transformation, both Casanova and Bronner obtain an awareness of their individual identity, marking their respective autobiography as “modern” through an emphasis on their unique inner development. Furthermore, the smallpox “transformation” in both Casanova and Bronner strongly resemble Augustine’s conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s Confessions, considered the first Western autobiography and perhaps the first evidence of literary interiority, stands as a template for a plethora of religious confessional literature, such as the Pietist autobiography, which imitates Augustine’s inner conflicts as he struggles to embrace God’s mercy. My paper will explore connections between the smallpox episodes in Casanova’s Story of My Life and Bronner’s A Monk’s Life and the Augustinian narrative of conversion, in hopes of ascertaining how these autobiographies make use of the classic narrative of conversion in presenting the formation of the “modern” autobiographical subject.
Jenna Veren
University of Illinois at Chicago, German Studies.
Presentation Title: Punished or Chosen?: Freud's Castration Anxiety and Circumcision.
This paper will look at how Freud uses circumcision as a metonym for castration, a phenomenon that produces castration anxiety. I will argue that Freud sees circumcision as the marked otherness of the Jews, and this gives anti-Semitism a visible cause. I will look at Freud’s understanding of castration and castration anxiety as it morphs from a psychoanalytical model for sexual development to a historical narrative about the Jews. I argue that in his early psychoanalytical works Freud sees castration anxiety as a fear of punishment imposed by the mother or the father and as a symbol of the unconscious, which is repressed. I then move to a historical model with the approaching Nazism, understanding castration anxiety via circumcision. In this model, circumcision is both a punishment and a sign of choseness. I will ask questions such as the following: To what extent do Freud’s theories of castration/castration anxiety and of circumcision contradict one another, and to what extent do they overlap? How is this understanding of the Jew as the other marked by circumcision productive, and to what extent does it promote a ‘self-othering’ further alienating the Jews from the rest of society? I will look specifically at Freud’s correspondences with Max Graf in his case study Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben (1909) and contrast this to Freud’s final work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. In doing so, I hope to show how Freud moves from the psychoanalytical theory of castration to a historical model of circumcision as a form of castration, a move that reflects Freud’s growing concerns with Nazism and anti-Semitism.
Irina Yakubovskaya
Graduate of the Saratov State University (B.A. in French, Literature, Linguistics, 2008) and Colorado State University (M.A. in French Literature and Theatre, 2012). Currently she is a PhD student at Tufts University (department of Drama and Dance). Her research interests include but are not limited to: cognitive psychology in theatre education, history of Russian theatre, women in la Belle epoque, issues of translation and adaptation.
For more see http://dramadance.tufts.edu/people/graduate.htm
Presentation Title: Devalued trophy of the Tsarist era: the return of Alexander Vertinsky to the Soviet land.
The following research focuses on the Soviet period of life of Alexander Vertinsky, but also introduces and historically contextualizes earlier chapters of his biography. Vertinsky was one of the most well-known music hall performers of the Silver Age. His melodramatic and philosophical songs were popular for invoking intense emotions and for embodying the unsettled, perpetually lost nature of the Russian soul in the late tsarist era. After leaving Russian bohemian circles, Vertinsky became the singer of nostalgia. Despite his increasing popularity in the Russian émigré community in Europe, the USA and the Far East, Vertinsky always tried to return to his motherland. In 1943, he finally succeeded. However, the Soviet life and career did not meet his expectations. An idealized image of his native country inspired Vertinsky, but it had little to nothing in common with the ‘new’ Soviet socio-cultural space. The national redefined his personal story and his remembrance in a unique way. His artistry, recognized as fresh and unique during the Silver Age, has been challenged throughout his career and life in the émigré exile. Upon his long awaited return to the motherland, Vertinsky was “caught in a cage”- the Soviet system, - where he was treated like a bird with clipped wings, and his old songs were all he was claimed to be needed for. Of course, in the USSR artists were often the victims of ideological repression. However, ambiguous and mysterious secrecy around Vertinsky’s persona make his case intriguing. Available materials on his life are limited in number and often controversial, therefore they need to be approached considering the historical context; lacunae in the historiographical evidences of his performances are worth exploring. The form of transcultural usage of Vertinsky and his art by the Soviet government is another example of selective and manipulative propaganda of xenophobia. It is certainly echoed in some Russian cultural and political trends today.
Szymon Zuberek
Graduate student at UIC. He is currently working on a two M.A. degrees, one in German (Language Acquisition) and the other one in Applied Linguistics. In addition to foreign languages he is interested in Central European literature and culture.
Presentation Title: Amerika, du hast es besser? - The image of America in the post-second world war German poetry"
The tragic tides of the Second World War have left both Germany and Austria devastated. The deep wounds of National Socialism estranging the German-speaking people from their collective cultural heritage made the task of healing the wounded national spirit daunting. One of the remedies to that predicament was poetry. The language of the verse has very quickly become the language of the new German Geist echoing the grim reality of life in an occupied country. Out of the four occupying powers, it was America that seemed to touch the German cultural imagination in the most profound way. This essay takes a look at the representation of Uncle Sam in the post-second world war German verse. It focuses on the first decade following the defeat of the Third Reich, and the subsequent occupation wherein it critically approaches both the positive and the negative imagery of the United States as painted by the German-speaking poets of the period. Thus the essay attempts to show a balanced portrait of the United States by consulting its positive as well as its critically negative poetic representations.
Graduate student at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He holds a law degree from New York University and a master’s degree in history from the University of Texas, where he currently works as a language instructor in the Department of Germanic Studies.
Presentation Title: Sprachfest! Exploring Culture through Cliche at High School Foreign Language Competitions
Screening of Bartel’s documentary short film “Deutschfest!” (running time: 10 minutes) followed by a brief discussion. “Deutschfest!” records the excitement at the 2014 Texas State German Contest, where over a thousand high school students vied for glory in a variety of cultural events (including dance, theater, and music).The film explores the ways in which common cultural stereotypes persist in foreign language education, while providing an important source of motivation for young learners.
The stereotypes reflect generally benign qualities of the target cultures (e.g. classical music and folk dance) while avoiding their more negative aspects (e.g. xenophobic strains in contemporary political discourse). What are the consequences if we reimagine German culture as a perpetual Oktoberfest (without the alcohol)? Is the resort to cliché an acceptable compromise if it leads young adults to pursue other opportunities to engage with foreign cultures later in life, be it through travel, study abroad, or continued language study in college?
Daniel Bowman
First year of a doctorate program in Modern French Studies at the University of Maryland. He completed a MA in French from Virginia Tech in 2013, where he also earned a BA in 2010. Areas of interest include nineteenthcentury music and literature.
Presentation Title: Bizet in Africa: The Localization of Narrative in Joseph Gaï Ramaka’s Karmen Geï
Mérimée’s “Carmen” has been a popular inspiration for adaptation to other forms of media. Georges Bizet notably used it as the foundation to the libretto of his influential opera of the same name. More than a century after its premiere, this version of “Carmen” inspired a new project by Senegalese director Joseph Gaï Ramaka. Ramaka’s 2001 Karmen Geï updates the story of “Carmen,” translating it both figuratively and literally to suit the new context of modern Senegal. The film, presented in French and Wolof, retains the musical nature of Bizet’s work by taking cues from Hollywood musicals. While significant similarities exist between the film and the opera from which it takes its inspiration, Ramaka localizes the work to fit its national context. Rather than resting in the archetype of the seductress as in Bizet’s opera, the character of Karmen is central to the film’s narrative. Ramaka shifts the narrative focus to the tragic fate of Karmen, and uses her story to demonstrate the perceived threat a strong female character poses to a restrictive society. The qualities that define Bizet’s character of Carmen are taken to their extreme for the film’s titular protagonist. She is stronger, freer and more audacious than the version found in the opera. Lamine, the film’s equivalent to the character of Don José, is weakened and reduced to the point where his entire identity in the film hinges upon his relation to Karmen. The tragic arc of Karmen’s character is underlined with use of the Habanera, the famous aria from Bizet’s opera, which has been translated Wolof and updated musically to match the context of contemporary Senegal. In presenting the powerful, dynamic character of Karmen, one who is ultimately doomed to death, Ramaka shows the threat posed by strong women to a traditional, patriarchal society.
Andrzej Brylak
PhD student of Polish program at the Slavic and Baltic Literatures and Languages Department at UIC. His dissertation project focuses on dynamics between Polish Jewish and Ukrainian Literatures and their role in creating those three national identities. He holds an MA degree in Jewish Studies from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He worked as a Program Assistant of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland Foundation and collaborated with Galicia Jewish Museum and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He is also a freelance journalist specializing in Eastern Europe, actively involved in the events of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine.
Presentation Title: Jews and Poles on the Ukrainian Barricades? A Transnational Perspective on “Maidan” Counterculture.
The “Maidan” revolution in Ukraine may be seen not only as a social and political phenomenon but also as a cultural movement that brought to the fore new perspectives on Ukrainian literature, art and theater. Maidan Square itself became cultural center which produced its own cultural and symbolic codes, slang, pop culture, and literature. “Maidan” as countercultural movement was not only a domestic affair, however to the present paper analyzes two key texts that explore the role of Jews and Poles in the Maidan revolution, and that were either created or re-interpreted within the context of Maidan counterculture.
Two of such texts are the focus of the present discussion. I focus first on the phenomena of “Jewish Banderivtsi”- essentially Jewish Ukrainian nationalists - analyzing the origins of the term “Zydo-Banderovtsi” , and symbolism created around it that includes images of the Ukrainian national emblem wearing sidelocks, or Jewish symbols, like Menorah or Star of David drawn in the colors of Ukrainian nationalistic movement.
A 1931 poem by Oleksandr Oles entitled Remember becomes the centerpiece of my discussion of Polish role in Maidan. The poem itself speaks about the historical indifference of Western Europeans toward the fate of Ukraine, while the commentary made by students states that Poland unlike “Europe”, is not silent.
Presented texts of culture can serve as premises of change in Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish relations on many different levels. Polish and Jewish engagement in “Maidan” and Ukrainian reaction to it can lead to another completely unexpected revolution, revolution in relations between those three nations.
Dylan Burns
MS in Library and Information Science student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MA in Humanities from New York University, BA in History from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Current digital projects GA in The Rare Books and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Presentation Title: “This Poverty is Hurtin’ My Pride:” British Post-Imperial Identity and Working Class detachment in the Music of Ray Davies.
In his autobiography The Kinks’ songwriter Ray Davies writes “I finally realized I was not a king that night my dad came home and said he was out of a job.” Growing up poor, Davies’s music has always expressed a strong working class ethos. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his 1969 concept album Arthur (or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)1 which traces the end of the British Empire through one English working class family. Weaving the fall of the Empire with the collapse of working class pride, the album explores traumatic recollection and nostalgic longing. Chronologically, we see at first an English working class encouraged by their “dominant” position in the Imperial order only to have their pride dashed in the wake of its passing. Pride, political and cultural, (or lack thereof) becomes central to understanding Davies’s conception of post‐Imperial working class consciousness. This geopolitical context has been neglected in economic interpretations of The Kinks’ music. My paper will place Ray Davies in this new context in part through the lens of what sociologist Paul Gilroy terms, Post‐Colonial Melancholia, that being the deep sadness and guilt felt in Britain in the wake of Empire.2 The satirical tone of these songs, as shown in the lyrics above, illuminates the disconnection formed between the working class Briton and Imperial identity as the end of the Empire removes the metaphorical curtains hiding the more traumatic elements of working class Imperial expectations. Working class Britons die in the factories, in the mines, and in the fields of Flanders; protecting a system that ultimately is as exploitative and as exclusionary to their own needs as it was to the subaltern outside of Britain.
Amalia Cantisán Muñoz
About to graduate from MA in Hispanic Literature and Culture at University of Illinois at Chicago, her academic interests have been informed by a non-degree year at Cornell University and a study abroad at University of Warsaw. She holds a BA from the University of Sevilla. Her long term research questions processes of fictionalization of history and how different modes of narrativizing national/personal trauma facilitate national/personal mourning. Broader areas of interest include formal approaches to postmodernity and theory of the novel.
Presentation Title: Haunted by History: transatlantic first person narratives in Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile and Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina.
I will be exploring how different approaches to first person narrative challenge the official historiographical discourse articulated by authoritarian political regimes. Whereas Bolaño's interior monologue shows the inevitability of "the horror of history" and the necessity to dig in the imaginarium of collective memory to arrive at a unifying narrative of history that radically subverts that which the regime supported; Cercas's narrator's quest for the "real story" that cannot possibly come to end in sight of the evidence he manages to collect shows the ambiguity of historiography and its nature as a literary artifact. This essay will focus on the literary techniques that allow the first person narrative to push a different ideological stand to the concept of history and its relation to political institutions.
Priscilla Charrat
PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation focuses on postmemory and the rupture of family communication in French and Francophone literature related to the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence. She organizes the Future of Trauma and Memory Studies Reading Group.
Presentation Title: Words, Faces, Images: Giving the Nation's "Mohammeds" More Than a Voice.
Yamina Benguigui's 1997 prized documentary Immigrant Memories legitimized North African immigrant testimonies and became a stepping-stone for the study of Beur1 identity in France. The filmed personal testimonies, which contested the national narrative of decolonization and immigration, became part of a new canon, redefining questions of national belonging, subaltern identity, and migrant narratives across generations. Benguigi's documentary project was dual: along with the film, a book gathered narrativized adaptations of these testimonies.
In 2011, Jerome Ruiller, who has no North African heritage, adapted Benguigui's work into a graphic novel entitled Les Mohammed. His project is anything but a simple transcription of Benguigui's work into a new format. Rather, the graphic novel builds on the postmemorial dimension of Benguigui's work, by adding Ruiller's own positionality as the son of a French soldier fighting French decolonization, alongside his own sympathy towards those his father contributed to subjugate. The graphic novel brings back these minority narratives within mainstream French culture while still countering the official nation-state narrative of the historical events at play, therefore complicating the linearity of cultural transmission.
This paper will show how the three works (documentary, book, and graphic novel) highlight different dynamics between witnesses, interviewer/writer, and audience, implicating the latter in perspectival shifts across a mosaic of positionalities, all revolving around North African immigration in France. The three works use their respective medium to implicate the audience in the memory of an immigrant experience they have not lived, inviting them to reconsider the cross-sections of national, societal, cultural, and personal identities. The three narratives converge towards representations of more dynamic historical positions and postmemorial affects, proposing solidary countermemories to the national canon.
Renata Fuchs
Graduate student at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her dissertation, “‘Dann ist und bleibt eine Korrespondenz lebendig’: Romantic Dialogue in Letters and Works of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Bettina Brentano von Arnim, and Karoline von Günderrode,” investigates connections between the letter, conversation, and women as authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She argues that a new model for conversation emerges in the late eighteenth century and manifests itself in these women’s letters and other texts. This new model is a phenomenon that borrows creatively from contemporary practices, including salon conversation and the Romantic concept of Symphilosophie.
Renata Fuchs’s research in Romanticism translates into a love of teaching that period; however, her scholastic interests include a broad range of literature, culture, and language itself. She has written and presented on contemporary German literature thematizing such issues as, migration, Heimat, alterity, hybridity, neo-nomadism as well as depression. Her area of research and interests go beyond the Romantic era and encompass the Enlightenment period, Contemporary German literature, German-Jewish literature, Holocaust Studies, Women’s Studies, Literary Multilingualism, Minority Literatures, and Transnational Studies.
Presentation Title: Global Dis/Connections through Literal and Metaphorical Borders in Terézia Mora’s Das Ungeheuer.
Terézia Mora’s writing brings to life a reflection on her own circumstances as the Other, an experience marked by the use of a minority language in a majorityspeaking context. Mora herself felt excluded: a bilingual speaker of German and Hungarian, she was classified as a member of a minority group in her old homeland, Hungary, as well as in her new home, Germany since neither Hungarian nor German critics were willing to describe her as their own. Although Mora’s newest novel Das Ungeheuer does not explicitly thematize the predicament of a minority group, it presents a striking portrayal of an individual in an age of transnationalism and globalization marked by migration and mobility. Flora, the main protagonist of Das Ungeheuer, arrives in Germany from a Hungarian village. She might have freed herself from the corrupt milieu of her old country; nonetheless, she cannot liberate herself from her mental illness of bipolar disorder. The novel thus problematizes not only the actual but also mental borders that define people’s lives. The author uses the postmodern form of a pastiche by interweaving two different text forms: the story told by Flora’s husband and her diary entries. The double form of the narrative – which creates a visual art form because of the way the book was edited – reflects the double life of Flora and her bipolar depressive symptoms, while the double plot creates a unique narrative commenting on postmodern situations. Mora’s pastiche evokes the chaotic, pluralistic, informationdrenched aspects of postmodern society consisting of various forms of literal and metaphorical borders, involving metafiction and temporal distortion. Metafiction systematically draws attention to the text’s status as an artifact (it is a story about a reader/husband reading his wife’s diary) in posing questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, as Das Ungeheuer.
Elvira Godek-Kiryluk
PhD student in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds degrees from UCLA and UNLV. Her research in American and Russian Modernism focuses on politics in literature conceived as an aesthetic project.
Presentation Title: Platonov’s The Foundation Pit: The Politics of Superfluity in the Soviet State.
The audacity of The Foundation Pit (1930) results from Platonov’s representation of labor and of the ensuing social relations in a way that denies to the Soviet State the capacity to resolve the contradiction of alienated labor described by Marx in his labor theory of value. Nevertheless, the superfluous are necessary to the capital for the optimal extraction of surplus value. What is the meaning of the superfluous individual in the nation building project represented in TheFoundation Pit? A politics of superfluity cavalierly describes the mechanism of an economic system, but becomes radically subversive when it applies to the foundational principles not only of a state with declared commitments to the worker, but of any modern state. When, in the opening pages of the novel, Voshchev rouses himself from a contemplation of “shared, general life” to go and “defend his unneeded labor” before a committee, he produces personal and experiential evidence that the prophesied shift of dialectical materialism has not been realized. But, absent the shift motivated by historical inevitability, what is the status of the October Revolution and what can distinguish it from a coup d'état other than rational justification? I argue that Voshchev’s search for meaning mobilizes the legacy of the transnational Enlightenment project, which requires that the state justify its authority. Platonov pits the ethos of the Enlightenment against the Soviet theoreticians for whom the legitimacy of the Communist state is beyond the requirement of justification on the ideological grounds of dialectical materialism. I investigate the aesthetics of estrangement in The Foundation Pit, but contend that the devices that produce it are deployed with a formal commitment to meaning and that Platonov rehabilitates the meaning makers who are dislocated to the superstructure bereft of causality. In other words, Platonov vindicates a poet’s place in a republic.
David Hullinger
Graduated magna cum laude from Loyola University Chicago. At Loyola, he conducted research on the sonnet form as a Provost Fellow and presented at the 2014 National Conference on Undergraduate Research. He is interested in English-language poetry, the political novel, and heroism in literature.
Presentation Title: Every Man A King: Personal Responsibility in All the King’s Men
All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s masterful novel on American politics, tells the story of Southern governor Willie Stark and his rise to power. Yet this overtly political storyline is interspersed with seemingly nonpolitical elements, such as lengthy sections on the biography of the narrator. To reconcile this apparent contradiction, I will argue that these disparate passages form an integrated whole by examining the issue of personal responsibility. This concept is studied from a societal perspective, as men contend against larger historical forces, and from an individual perspective, as they deal with other people. As a result, All the King’s Men proposes that the acceptance of personal responsibility for certain events is key to the exercise of power and is, ultimately, an inescapable part of the human condition. This study of personal agency possesses increased importance in a transnational world where historical and organizational factors play an ever-more-prominent role in intellectual discourse.
Catherine Kirchman
Catherine is completing a Master’s degree in Social Sciences from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, alongside a Master’s program in Library and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Her research interests are digital libraries in democratic societies and Critical Theory.
Presentation Title: "Europeana and the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek: EU Cultural Policy through Digital Libraries"
As the ‘Local’ becomes more globalized, through Information Communication Technologies and the digitization of information, cultural heritage sites, such as libraries and museums, are digitizing their collections and adapting to users in a network society. Looking more closely at the national and European digital library projects – Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and Europeana, respectively –cultural artifacts are being virtually transformed and representing cultural identity through a politically-directed project. These projects are simultaneously transcending boundaries through a virtual network, while representing the geo-political boundaries of national (German) and collective (European) culture and knowledge. The curation and collection themselves of cultural artifacts by libraries and museums, is a political act, based on what is chosen and how information and objects are represented. Europeana is to be the European Union-funded library of “European culture”, collecting items from national library projects, such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek for Germany, and as such is explicitly a public-funded and political form of cultural policy.
Max McKenna
Second-year PhD student at the University of Chicago, where he studies 20th century American literature with specific interests in cityscapes and transatlantic postwar culture. He has published essays on modern and contemporary literature in The Journal of Modern Literature, The Millions, and Full Stop, among others.
Presentation Title: “Zigzagging in the Motor Age: Automobility and Errant Mobility in The Crying of Lot 4”
Broadly, this paper asks: what kind of problem does the automobile pose to critical and cultural theory? The mass popularization of the private car during the Cold War, as well as the immense infrastructural projects undertaken to make American cities more automobile-friendly, found various discourses—architectural, political, and literary—attempting to articulate the aesthetic and affective experiences of driving, specifically driving at unprecedented speeds on the rapidly-developed Eisenhower Interstate System. However, such an automobile subjectivity has largely eluded spatial theories of culture, which instead continue to emphasize the act of walking and the figure of the flâneur as heuristics.
This paper rereads Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 as a suburban narrative that locates the disorienting cultural climate of the Cold War precisely in the increasingly common and necessary experience of driving on the freeway. In the novel, driving and walking figure not as diametrically opposed spatial practices, but rather as symbiotic and equally strange practices. Such a symbiosis provides us new means to think about the constructedness of agency and mobility, and the forms of subjectivity and resistance they make possible. Further, this paper proposes that the banalization of the new modes of experience and signification that the automobile produced—as well as the way that its ubiquity has changed how we “walk in the city,” to paraphrase Michel de Certeau—is a defining feature of postmodernity and postmodernism.
Mark Moll
PhD Candidate in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. His dissertation traces the intersection of social democracy and nationalism among the Estonian-speaking intelligentsia and its international dimensions in the quarter century leading to the revolution of 1905.
Presentation Title: "The Disillusionment of an Arbeiterdichter: The Two Lives of Maurice Reinhold von Stern"
Alongside his former classmates Ernst Bark and Andres Dido, Maurice Reinhold von Stern was among the first writers from the Estonian-speaking lands of Russia's Baltic Provinces to become famous for works composed published entirely outside his homeland. This literary emigrant experience would be repeated during the forced exiles in the years after the 1905 revolution and World War II, but these three paved the way in the 1880s. Recently Bark and Dido have seen renewed scholarly interest in their lives, but the same cannot be said for Stern. During his life he was among the most prominent German poets of fin de siècle Naturalismus; nowadays he is all but unknown.
He was the son of a Baltic German nobleman and writer and volunteered for service in the Russo-Turkish Wars as a 16-year-old. He left four years later as an active member of the German socialist and anarchist community and the founder of his own newspaper, the New Jersey Arbeiter-Zeitung. By the turn of the century, however, he'd settled for good in Austria, and his turn towards German nationalism was already evident. His association with National Socialism, whether actually warranted or not, has tainted his work ever since.
Using Stern's autobiographical novel Walter Wendrich (1895), Von jenseits des Meeres: Amerikanische Skizzen (1890) and his later poetry, I seek to explain the transition of his thought not in terms of a distinct break from the internationalist and social democratic to nationalist, but a gradual evolution of style that remained true to his core beliefs.
Kristina Pilz
Second year PhD student at the University of Washington, and recipient of the prestigious Max Kade Graduate Fellowship. She currently prepares for her PhD qualifying exams in Winter Quarter 2015. Prior to joining UW, Ms. Pilz worked as an instructor for German at the Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Kristina Pilz holds two M.A. degrees, one in German from Texas Tech University and one in German as a Foreign Language from Dresden University of Technology, Germany.
Presentation Title: BlackWhite Narratives: Reading Afro-German Configurations of Cultural Identity.
My paper explores new configurations of cultural identity emerging in poetry by German-language writers of the African diaspora. It offers a close reading of Chantal-Fleur Sandjon poems bln zu rädern, gedicht für juli löwenherz, as well as Samy Sorge’s (Samy Deluxe) works Poesie Album and SchwarzWeiss, as part of the 2011 album SchwarzWeiss. I will illustrate how their innovative signifying process can narrate identity outside a nationalized and marginalized existence.
Albeit in different ways, Sandjon in form of classic poetry and Sorge in form of Hip Hop lyrics, which will be treated here as a form of konkrete Poesie, these texts do not only engage with the exploration of cultural identity, but in particular with the significance of emerging identity formations that transgress marginalization. Consequently, they focus on a poetic style in which African, African-American and German elements are not mutually exclusive but rather two interwoven strands that bring together the texture of the identity as Black Germans concerned with issues of a global diasporic culture.
This paper will illustrate how this poetic work presents a compelling model of intercultural dialogue between different modes of communication. It will show how layers of verbal, visual and musical communication lay the groundwork for a broadened definition of German identity that opens up towards an identity that is embedded within a global diasporic culture.
Jessica Schook
Second year of her Ph.D in Hispanic Studies at UIC. Her primary research interest is transnational representations of Africans in Spanish Cinema and the politics of representation. She is also interested in visual representations of marginalization and 'otherness' and their relation to aesthetics of the grotesque and monstrous in contemporary Iberian culture.
Presentation Title: Reading Melancholy into la Movida: Counter-Culture Identity Loss in Alberto García-Alix’s No “Me Sigas... Estoy Perdido” and “Tres Videos Tristes”
Although Alberto García-Alix’s photography is frequently read as an empowered play on identity formation and individualism, I posit a new reading of his work that considers a loss of agency over one’s identity construction, othering, exclusion and a subsequent melancholic onset. I will compare two concurrent exhibitions in Madrid from 2006, “No me sigas... Estoy perdido” held at Fundación Canal, which presents 100 of the artist’s images taken between 1976 and 1986 and “Tres Videos Tristes” made between 2003 and 2006 at Depósito Isabel II. I consider how the compilation of images in “No Me Sigas...Estoy Perdido,” taken at height of la Movida and chosen for this exhibition decades later, explore private spaces and identity constructions against a social backdrop that first “othered” the rocker’s behavior at the onset of AIDS, and later swept aside the undesirable pieces, to scavenge for a image they could use to showcase Spain’s progressiveness on the world stage. I will outline how the experience of belonging trouble is exposed in García-Alix’s early photography considering that the collection was aggregated by looking at images of the past, perhaps suggesting that García-Alix himself has a re-reading of la Movida after having lost friends to AIDS and overdose and watching the counter culture identity that he worked to create during the movement usurped by the mainstream and edited for their purposes. I then consider García-Alix’s aesthetic in “Tres Videos Tristes” as an affect of identity loss and spatial depravation within society, which manifests a melancholic condition in an extremely privatized experience.
Christina Schultz
A Chicago native, she started learning German in high school and moved to Bonn in 2006, where she
finished her BA in German Studies in 2007. She remained in Bonn as an English teacher until she
returned to the US to receive her MA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010
in German and Translation Studies. She is now working on her PhD in German at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. Her interests are in the history of the German language,18th century plays
and contemporary literature, film and cultural studies, German music from classical to pop, and
the Grimms’ fairy tales and older Germanic legends and myths. She is writing her dissertation on
contemporary German comedic films and TV shows and their reception in Germany and abroad.
Presentation Title: “There’s No Place Like Home: Globalization and Rootedness in Modern Society”.
In a globalizing world, notions of home are constantly shifting. The resistance to identification with one nation or home is generally lauded by cultural theorists of globalization and transnational identities. The loss of a traditional link to “nation” or “home” can, however, lead to a crisis of identity. Must we remain where we came from or fully adopt the new home to which we travel in order to avoid this crisis? There are four theorists to which I will turn in my paper: Ulrich Beck’s utopian concept of the polygamy of place, Georg Lukacs’ nostalgic concept of the transcendental homelessness of modernity and Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider’s optimistic model for understanding post-national identities. Despite the often enthusiastic embrace of bi- or multiculturalism as a desired product of (post)modernity amongst cultural theorists, I will look to the moments when these multi-national identities produce anxiety and tension. We can have an adopted home or enjoy a cosmopolitan lifestyle, but I would like to explore contemporary works that push back against this mode of living, reflecting the desire to root oneself. I would like to use two films from the multicultural director Fatih Akin, Auf der anderen Seite and Gegen die Wand, to serve as examples of the need to root ourselves. The films, interestingly enough, can be read as reverse Heimatfilme because the protagonists are Turkish immigrants living in German, and the homeland to which they return is Turkey. Akin takes a traditional viewpoint to this issue and his films show that try as the characters might to negotiate between different homes, the characters in the films choose to root themselves within a traditional Heimat.
Gokce Tekeli
Ph.D. candidate and a Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. Prior to her studies in the doctoral program, she earned an MA, also in English, at the University of Vermont. Her research centers on woman, gender and sexuality in American women’s literature.
Presentation Title: “The Quest for the “I” in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic”
“I am a lesbian,” declares Alison Bechdel – in her autobiographical graphic narrative, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic – after long years of research in familial, personal and public archives. In this paper, I draw on feminist autobiography studies, locational feminism, and queer theory in order to conceptualize the “I.” I explore the hybridity and multidimensionality of the graphic memoir to unveil multitudinous bodies of Bechdel that are constructed within dominant discourses of public and private sites. As Piepmeier points out, “the body can demonstrate and enact the fluidity of boundaries…the body ‘moves’ through and is constructed by discourses.” By focusing on locations portrayed in Fun Home, this paper will inquire into complexities of identity construction. Therefore, it is strategically intentional that I center my research on an individual claim of lesbian identity. In her study of Bechdel, Valery Rohy aptly inquires: “What sort of people, after all, must research who they are? Those whose difference is antifamilial, somatically unmarked, culturally veiled, and potentially shaming are drawn to lonely stacks and secret research, where the archive enables self-definition.” At the heart of this paper is the exploration of the construction and promotion of the “I” in Bechdel’s work -- Not just as a subjective declaration, but as a social, environmental and historical construction. I center my inquiry on Bechdel’s true life story as a way to understand “the assumptions in which we are drenched,” in Adrienne Rich’s terms. While focusing on Bechdel’s personal/ familial story, this study aims to knit feminism, queer archive and literature together. The questions I ask in this paper include: How do dominant heteronormative discourses, built around spaces, limit and enable Alison’s self/gender-identification? How are multiple bodies (textual, graphic and physical) utilized to construct the “I”? What are some of the ways in which the “I” dis/appears in the graphic narrative?
Serhii Tereshchenko
Second-year Master's student at UIC interested in Soviet and post-Soviet national identity, paramilitary forces and gender trouble. He has got his BA in Philology in 2013 from National University of 'Kyiv-Mohyla academy' and was an exchange student in University of Geneva (2013). He is currently teaching Russian and assisting in the Lithuanian Culture course at UIC.
Presentation Title: “Russian misogyny and Western homosexuality: What is to live around idiots?”
Viktor Erofeyev’s Life with an idiot ridicules general definitions of such things as madness, sexual transgression, life and death. With bitter irony, the author makes Western and Russian literary celebrities, such as Dostoyevsky, Proust, Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, compete for the most persuasive answers to these questions.
In his Life with an idiot, Erofeyev creates a world of nonsense, violence, and perversion being equal to norm. His characters don’t solely belong to a certain national culture. They are almost anonymous and nameless. More precisely, they are hallucinatory reflection of books the narrator has read. One day the narrator learns that he’s punished by having to adopt an idiot. After the idiot appears in the narrator’s family, he grows stronger, rapes the narrator’s wife and then with narrator. The ritualistic murder of the wife by the idiot gives creative insight for the narrator but also makes him crazy. Although the story is only 20 pages long, it has plenty reminiscences. For instance, the narrator kills his wife as Dostoyevsky’s Rogozin from Idiot, begs for tortures as Sacher-Masoch’s Severin from Venus in Furs, and dreams of love as Proust’s tender boys. Erofeyev’s project discloses the conflict within our contemporary vision of happiness and meaning of life. With my analyses, I am going to show how ideologies from times of tribal patriarchy to modern Soviet punitive psychiatry coexist in the text and what is the outcome of their visceral struggle for being the ultimate truth. In other words, I will talk about big narratives in times of fragmentary post-modernism. For that, I use Jameson, Kristeva, and Deleuze.
Jonathan Tillotson
PhD candidate in the Germanic Studies department at UIC. His research interests include: medicine and literature, autobiography, and eighteenth-century topics. He is currently in the midst of his dissertation, in which he is exploring the relationship between the literary image of smallpox, subjectivity and interiority in European autobiographies of the late eighteenth century.
Presentation Title: Smallpox and the Narrative of Conversion in the Autobiographies of Giacomo Casanova and Franz Xaver Bronner
In the autobiographies of Giacomo Casanova (Story of My Life, compiled between 1792 - 1798) and Franz Xaver Bronner (A Monk’s Life in the Age of Sensibility, first published 1795 - 1797), the narrator undergoes an inner transformation through smallpox illness. Through this transformation, both Casanova and Bronner obtain an awareness of their individual identity, marking their respective autobiography as “modern” through an emphasis on their unique inner development. Furthermore, the smallpox “transformation” in both Casanova and Bronner strongly resemble Augustine’s conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s Confessions, considered the first Western autobiography and perhaps the first evidence of literary interiority, stands as a template for a plethora of religious confessional literature, such as the Pietist autobiography, which imitates Augustine’s inner conflicts as he struggles to embrace God’s mercy. My paper will explore connections between the smallpox episodes in Casanova’s Story of My Life and Bronner’s A Monk’s Life and the Augustinian narrative of conversion, in hopes of ascertaining how these autobiographies make use of the classic narrative of conversion in presenting the formation of the “modern” autobiographical subject.
Jenna Veren
University of Illinois at Chicago, German Studies.
Presentation Title: Punished or Chosen?: Freud's Castration Anxiety and Circumcision.
This paper will look at how Freud uses circumcision as a metonym for castration, a phenomenon that produces castration anxiety. I will argue that Freud sees circumcision as the marked otherness of the Jews, and this gives anti-Semitism a visible cause. I will look at Freud’s understanding of castration and castration anxiety as it morphs from a psychoanalytical model for sexual development to a historical narrative about the Jews. I argue that in his early psychoanalytical works Freud sees castration anxiety as a fear of punishment imposed by the mother or the father and as a symbol of the unconscious, which is repressed. I then move to a historical model with the approaching Nazism, understanding castration anxiety via circumcision. In this model, circumcision is both a punishment and a sign of choseness. I will ask questions such as the following: To what extent do Freud’s theories of castration/castration anxiety and of circumcision contradict one another, and to what extent do they overlap? How is this understanding of the Jew as the other marked by circumcision productive, and to what extent does it promote a ‘self-othering’ further alienating the Jews from the rest of society? I will look specifically at Freud’s correspondences with Max Graf in his case study Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben (1909) and contrast this to Freud’s final work Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion. In doing so, I hope to show how Freud moves from the psychoanalytical theory of castration to a historical model of circumcision as a form of castration, a move that reflects Freud’s growing concerns with Nazism and anti-Semitism.
Irina Yakubovskaya
Graduate of the Saratov State University (B.A. in French, Literature, Linguistics, 2008) and Colorado State University (M.A. in French Literature and Theatre, 2012). Currently she is a PhD student at Tufts University (department of Drama and Dance). Her research interests include but are not limited to: cognitive psychology in theatre education, history of Russian theatre, women in la Belle epoque, issues of translation and adaptation.
For more see http://dramadance.tufts.edu/people/graduate.htm
Presentation Title: Devalued trophy of the Tsarist era: the return of Alexander Vertinsky to the Soviet land.
The following research focuses on the Soviet period of life of Alexander Vertinsky, but also introduces and historically contextualizes earlier chapters of his biography. Vertinsky was one of the most well-known music hall performers of the Silver Age. His melodramatic and philosophical songs were popular for invoking intense emotions and for embodying the unsettled, perpetually lost nature of the Russian soul in the late tsarist era. After leaving Russian bohemian circles, Vertinsky became the singer of nostalgia. Despite his increasing popularity in the Russian émigré community in Europe, the USA and the Far East, Vertinsky always tried to return to his motherland. In 1943, he finally succeeded. However, the Soviet life and career did not meet his expectations. An idealized image of his native country inspired Vertinsky, but it had little to nothing in common with the ‘new’ Soviet socio-cultural space. The national redefined his personal story and his remembrance in a unique way. His artistry, recognized as fresh and unique during the Silver Age, has been challenged throughout his career and life in the émigré exile. Upon his long awaited return to the motherland, Vertinsky was “caught in a cage”- the Soviet system, - where he was treated like a bird with clipped wings, and his old songs were all he was claimed to be needed for. Of course, in the USSR artists were often the victims of ideological repression. However, ambiguous and mysterious secrecy around Vertinsky’s persona make his case intriguing. Available materials on his life are limited in number and often controversial, therefore they need to be approached considering the historical context; lacunae in the historiographical evidences of his performances are worth exploring. The form of transcultural usage of Vertinsky and his art by the Soviet government is another example of selective and manipulative propaganda of xenophobia. It is certainly echoed in some Russian cultural and political trends today.
Szymon Zuberek
Graduate student at UIC. He is currently working on a two M.A. degrees, one in German (Language Acquisition) and the other one in Applied Linguistics. In addition to foreign languages he is interested in Central European literature and culture.
Presentation Title: Amerika, du hast es besser? - The image of America in the post-second world war German poetry"
The tragic tides of the Second World War have left both Germany and Austria devastated. The deep wounds of National Socialism estranging the German-speaking people from their collective cultural heritage made the task of healing the wounded national spirit daunting. One of the remedies to that predicament was poetry. The language of the verse has very quickly become the language of the new German Geist echoing the grim reality of life in an occupied country. Out of the four occupying powers, it was America that seemed to touch the German cultural imagination in the most profound way. This essay takes a look at the representation of Uncle Sam in the post-second world war German verse. It focuses on the first decade following the defeat of the Third Reich, and the subsequent occupation wherein it critically approaches both the positive and the negative imagery of the United States as painted by the German-speaking poets of the period. Thus the essay attempts to show a balanced portrait of the United States by consulting its positive as well as its critically negative poetic representations.