Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

Graduate Student / Faculty Colloquium Series

THE DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES

presents The Student / Faculty Colloquium Series with Nick Theis and Vanessa Ogle 

Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 4:30 pm
in the Max Kade German Culture and Media Center, 3401 Walnut St.,
Room 329, A Wing
(entrance next to Starbucks)

Autonomy and “hidden theology”

Aesthetic education in Bodmer’s Pygmalion und Elise (1747-1749)

Nick Theis, University of Pennsylvania

The eighteenth century witnessed a large-scale revival of the ancient myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor whose desperate love for the statue he chiseled is fulfilled with her transformation into human flesh. Adaptations of the myth gave literary expression to problems occupying discourses in metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. The animated statue served as a figure on which thinkers projected their positions regarding the distinction between dead matter and living being and the relationship of sensation to thought. The themes of the artist who creates a work so beautiful it surpasses nature, and of that work being so mimetically perfect that even its own creator believes it is real, made the myth fruitful for discourses concerning the status, value, and role of art. This paper investigates Johann Jakob Bodmer’s Pygmalion und Elise (1747-1749) in light of these discourses and reads the adaptation as a rehabilitation of Martin Opitz’s “hidden theology” principle of literature. I argue that through Biblicizing ancient myth and mythologizing Leibniz’s theodicy, this allegory for the autonomy of art exemplifies a program of cultural production that is critical for the development of aesthetic education in the Enlightenment.  

 ~AND~

Globalization and the Reorganization of Time, 1880-1930

 The Case of Germany and German Colonies 

Vanessa Ogle, University of Pennsylvania

Around 1900, the increasing interconnectedness of the world led people all across the globe to think differently about time and space. Steamships, railways, and telegraphs seemed to make distances irrelevant. Imperialism and colonialism brought even far-flung overseas territories within reach. Simultaneity became the new frame for capturing the proximity of distance. As a consequence, time was not only experienced differently but also politically and socially organized in new ways: beginning in 1884, Greenwich Mean Time provided a universal standard for measuring time. A religiously and culturally neutral world calendar was supposed to achieve the same for calendar time. Clocks and watches spread far beyond just Europe and North America. But despite these interactions between societies and cultures, European attempts to impose their understandings of uniform homogenized and standardized time initially failed. Irregularities and anomalies in time-keeping, counting time, and understanding time persisted long into the twentieth century. This talk follows the twists and turns of reorganizing time as a story that evolved between international conferences, nation states like France, imperial possessions like British India, and peripheries like the late Ottoman provincial capital of Beirut. Special attention will be paid to the role of Germany and German colonies in Africa in this process.