| Past Events & Lectures |
2008-09 Lectures and Events:Thursday, April 23rd, 5:00 p.m. Professor Irving Wohlfarth was educated at Cambridge, Yale and Frankfurt. He has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Oregon, and the University of Reims, France. He is currently a Lowenstein Fellow in the Political Science Department at Amherst College, where he is teaching a course on “Marx, Benjamin and a possible politics.” His most recent publications are on Walter Benjamin and W.G Sebald, on the myths and uncertainties surrounding Benjamin’s death, and a three part article in “Radical Philosophy” on Benjamin and the German Red Army Faction. He is working on several books on Walter Benjamin, including No Man's Land: Essays on Walter Benjamin and Anarcho-Messianis: On Benjamin's politics. Benjamin’s politics will also be the subject of his talk. Thursday, February 26th, 5:00 p.m. Since Dante's Divine Comedy, readings, writings, letters, paintings and music have been central in the construction of novels of adultery. The media capacities of transmission and storage - such as young Werther reading Ossian's verses to Lotte on the sofa, or Emma Bovary's and Effi Briest's unfortunate passions with papers - build up the drama of "Liebesverrat" ("betrayal of love"). The same capacities can conversely deflate the drama of betrayal; Wagner's music looses its spell in a parody of the adultery scene in Thomas Mann's novelette. This lecture will present a crossreading of narratives by Goethe, Flaubert, Dostojevsky, Fontane, and Thomas Mann. Klaus R. Scherpe, Visiting Kade Professor in the department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, and professor emeritus of Humboldt-University in Berlin, is a historian of literature and culture, and literary critic. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Columbia, Washington University, St. Louis, UNSW at Sydney, and USPE at São Paulo. He has received grants from the Fulbright Commission and the Rockefeller Foundation, in addition to many other grants and fellowships. From 2003-2006, he was director of the Berlin Graduate School for Violence and Media Studies and is currently director of the George L. Mosse Lecture Program at Berlin's Humboldt University. He is the editor of "Mit Deutschland um die Welt". Recent publications include: "Stadt. Krieg. Fremde. Literatur und Kultur nach den Katastrophen" (2002), "How German is it, and how American?" (2005). Dr. George J. Wittenstein Lecture Series Events for additional information, see http://www.gss.ucsb.edu/index.php/news-a-events/wittenstein-lectures March 3, 2009, 5:00 p.m. April 28, 2009, 5:00 p.m. May 19, 5:00 p.m. |
