German Studies Association of Australia Conference 2007
Erinnerungskrisen / Memory Crises
26th – 29th September 2007
Graduate Centre "1888 Building"
Grattan Street, The University of Melbourne
Hosted jointly by the University of Melbourne and Monash University
Links:
Keynote Speakers
Stuart Taberner
is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture and Society at the University of Leeds (UK). He is currently Head of Department and Director of the Leeds Humanities Research Institute and Director of the Graduate School of the Faculty of Arts.
He is chief investigator on a AHRC research grant on “Discourses on German Wartime Suffering”. His research focuses on the relationships between politics and writing, the role of the German intellectual after 1945, and literature after 1989. He has worked extensively on Martin Walser, Bernhard Schlink, Uwe Johnson and Günter Grass.
His most recent books include Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), German Literature of the 1990s and Beyond (Camden House, 2005), Recasting German Identity(Camden House, 2002) (co-edited with Frank Finlay), German Literature in the Age of Globalisation (Birmingham UP, 2004) and German Culture, Politics and Literature into the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Normalization (Camden House, 2006) (co-edited with Paul Cooke).
Nicolas Pethes
is Professor for European Literature and Media History at the FernUniversität Hagen.
His research interests span the theory of memory, media history, literature and science studies, literary anthropology and documentary realism. The authors he has focused on include Johann Karl Wezel, Georg Büchner and W.G. Sebald.
His recent book publications include Zöglinge der Natur. Der literarische Menschenversuch des 18. Jahrhunderts (Wallstein 2007), Mnemographie. Poetiken der Erinnerung und Destruktion nach Walter Benjamin (Niemeyer 1999), Spektakuläre Experimente. Allianzen zwischen Massenmedien und Sozialpsychologie im 20. Jahrhundert (VDG 2004) and Literarische Experimentalkulturen. Poetologien des Experiments im 19. Jahrhundert (Königshausen & Neumann 2005). He is the co-author of a lexicon on memory: Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, Reinbek bei Hamburg (Rowohlt 2001).
About the conference
The 2nd German Studies Association of Australia Conference to be held in Melbourne, is jointly hosted by the German programs in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and German in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.
The topic of the conference is on memory crises / Erinnerungskrisen in the areas of literary studies, cultural studies and linguistics. Papers may deal with crises of media and techniques of archiving, crises in canon formation and traditions, national moments of crises in remembrance, crises in cultural memory caused by historical ruptures (e.g. by catastrophes such as war, revolution, epidemics) or personal moments of crisis in individuals’ lives (such as adolescence, sickness, death), the problem of false memory and post-memory etc.
A common theme in recent literature on memory is the idea of crisis. Aleida Assmann speaks of a current “crisis of cultural memory,” Pierre Nora of the disappearance of memory and Doris Laub and Shoshana Felman see the Holocaust as representing a “radical historical crisis of witnessing.” Similarly, discussions of the decline of traditional forms of knowledge such as Bildungsgedächtnis and rote learning and the impact of the shift from analogue to digital technologies also draw on this rhetoric of crisis.
But do moments of crisis necessarily mean loss and forgetting? What are the possibilities for remembering in “moments of danger,” as Benjamin once remarked? Can crises be prompters for new practices of remembering, new inscriptions and transformations of the past? How do “memory communities” and individuals enable the constant “actualization of the past in the present” (Vergegenwärtigung) in their interests? Can crises in memory mark the beginnings of new media or genres of remembrance and alternative communities of remembering?
Areas discussed
Literary Studies:
• Memory and canon formation
• Crises in literary movements
• Transformations in genres of memory
• Literary forms of memorialisation and commemoration
• Poetics of memory
• Memory and historical crises (such as 1789, 1848, 1945, 1989)
• Testimonial literature and post-memory
Cultural Studies:
• Sites and places/spaces of memory
• Memorial politics
• Medial transformations in remembrance practices
Linguistics:
• language contact and memory
• memory, the archive and language variations
• language, memory and identity