DEPARTMENTAL CALENDAR 2001-2002

 

 

Conference Archive

[ CONFERENCES 2001-2002]

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Nation & Representation
A Film Conference
UC Berkeley

MONDAY , 6 MAY, 2-5 pm, room 282 Dwinelle

I. Colonial Contacts

David Gramling: F.W. Murnau’s Traffic in Tabu

Jim Ramey: Werner Herzog's Representational Imperialism

Gerrit Hoche: "Long Arrows are Gaining Fashion": Targeting the Colonial Gaze in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre

II. Mediated Travel

Richard Ascarate: Mirages of Documentary: Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana

Darlene Pursley: Capturing Nostalgia: Video Images in the Films of Wim Wender

Lee Roberts: Tokyo-Ga or Images of Germany? Mediated Memories of Forgotten Fathers

Johanna Jacobsen: Germans and Turks: Cinematic Encounters of the Travelling Kind

MONDAY , 13 MAY, 2-5 pm, room 282 Dwinelle

III. Strangers in the Nation

Robert Peckerar: The Vampire Writes Back: Icons of Eastern European Jews

June Hwang: Locating the Wandering Jew

Joel Freeman: Death and the Grounds of Nationalism in Triumph of the Will

Alexander Klemm: Staging Racism in R.W. Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul

IV. Staging Identities

Mariah Larsson: "An Impossible Homecoming". Mai Zetterling's Questioning of the Swedish Imagined Community

Meg Dahlgren: Nationalist Lampoon: H.J. Syberberg's Parsifal

Mike Allan: Image and Nation at War:Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges

Susanne Hoelscher-Whiting: Lola on the Run: Trafficking Identity in Synthesized Berlin

Sponsored by the Department of German and the Program in Film Studies, in conjunction with German 214/Film 240 (Profs. Göktürk and Kaes).

 

Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable

The Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable meets biennially in even-numbered years. In 2002 it will meet on Friday/Saturday, April 5-6.

2002 BERKELEY GERMANIC LINGUISTICS ROUNDTABLE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY PROGRAM

Friday, April 5
8:30 Registration (Faculty Club: Seaborg Room)

Morning Session John H. McWhorter (UC Berkeley)

9:00 Sang Hwan Seong (Univ. of Bonn): "Transitive Constructions and Prominence Typology in English, Dutch, and German"

9:25 Gergely Toth (UC Berkeley): A Strong West Germanic MP Competitor: The Case of Hungarian"

9:50 Anatoly Liberman (Univ. of Minnesota): "Some General Principles of Etymology"

10:15 Lee M. Roberts (UC Berkeley): "When Form Defines Content"

10:40 Roland Willemyns (Free Univ. Brussels): "Corpus Planning in 19th Century Flanders and its Consequences on Public Language Usage in the Administration"

11:05 Caroline Féry (Univ. of Potsdam): "Information Structure: Intonation and Prosodic Structure in a Typological Perspective"

12:00 - 1:30 Lunch

Afternoon Session Roland Willemyns (Free Univ. Brussels)

1:30 Werner Abraham (UC Berkeley): "Pronomina im Diskurs: deutsche Personal- und Demonstrativpronomina unter Zentrierungsperspekitive: Grammatische Überlegungen zu einer Teiltheorie der Textkohärenz

1:55 Jeremy Bergerson (Univ. of Minnesota): "The formative element -s in West Germanic"

2:20 Suin Shin (UC Berkeley): "Why der E-mail or die Team sounds Odd: Gender Assignment of English Loan Words in German"

2:45 Livio Gaeta (Univ. of Turin): "On the Relation between Primary and Secondary Umlaut"

3:10 Dorian Roehrs (Indiana Univ.): "Case Fluctuation of Some Middle-reflexive Predicates in Icelandic"

3:35 Michael Wagner (MIT): "Opaque Complementation and German Word Stress"

4:00 Bay Area German Linguistic Fieldwork Project (UC Berkeley): On the German Language of Civility/Vulgarity: Evidence from Bonn"

7:00 Dinner (Faculty Club: Howard Lounge)

Theo Vennemann (Univ. of Munich): "Semitic Influences on Germanic Language and Society"

 

Saturday, April 6

Morning Session (Seaborg Room) Werner Abraham (UC Berkeley)

9:00 Ari Hoptman (Univ. of Minnesota): "Possible Remnants of Proto-Germanic Stress in West Germanic Alliterative Verse"

9:25 Donald Steinmetz (Augsburg College): "An OT Approach to German Plurals: Default Hierarchies for Gender and Plural"

9:50 Daniel Richards (Univ. of Michigan): "Compound Numeral Inversion in English"

10:15 Jiri Janko (UC Berkeley): "Delimiting the Dependent Clause Constituency in Old High German"

10:40 Ye-Ok Oh (Chungnam National Univ.): "Untersuchungen der polysemen Ableitungen in der kognitiven Semantik"

11:05 Wayne Harbert (Cornell Univ.): "Toward a Grammar of Germanic: A Status Report"

12:00-1:30 Lunch

 

Afternoon Session Robert G. Hoeing (SUNY Buffalo)

1:30 Hans Boas (Univ. of Texas): : "The Role of Semantic classes in Determining Verbal Alternation Patterns: Evidence from English and German Locative Alternations"

1:55 Andre Meinunger (ZAS Berlin/Univ. of Leipzig): "Speech Act Adverbials and a Curiosity with the German 'Vorfeld'"

2:20 Geoffrey Barker (UC Berkeley): "Intonation in Tyrolean German: A Typological Study of Nuclear Contours"

2:45 "Theres Grüter (McGill Univ.): "How Thomas became 'Tömu' and Alfons "Fönsu': An OT Account of Hypocoristics in Bernese Swiss German"

3:10 John H. McWhorter (UC Berkeley): "What Happened to English?

3:35 Christopher D. Sapp (Indiana Univ.): "The Origins of the Scandinavian s-Passive""

4:00 Irmengard Rauch (UC Berkeley): "Muscular Gothic"

Cocktails

 

Contact Information:

Irmengard Rauch
Department of German
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720

irauch@socrates.berkeley.edu
Phone (510) 642-2003
phone/fax (707) 746-7480

Lodging:

Reservations can be made at
The Faculty Club
(510) 642-1993 / (510) 540-5678,
UC Berkeley,
Berkeley CA 9472

or

The Durant Hotel
(510) 845-8981
2600 Durant Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94704

 

The Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Roundtable is supported by the University of California Berkeley Center for German and European Studies and the Max Kade Foundation, Inc.

 

Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference

Each year the graduate students of the department organize and host a two-day conference on a specific interdisciplinary theme. The conference offers students and faculty from the U. S. and abroad an opportunity to present their research on such diverse topics as: "Self-Made Germans: Authenticity, Authority and Self-Fashioning" (2001), "The German Soldier" (2000), "Reading Turn-of-the-Century Culture at the Turn of the Century" (1999), "Building Memory: City Space and Urban Experience" (1998), and "Conquering Women: Gender and War" (1997). Our recent conferences have received great praise from faculty and students both at Berkeley and around the country. They familiarize students with all phases of the conference process and provide unique insight into what constitutes an effective abstract and academic presentation.

 

Tenth Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference
at the University of California at Berkeley
April 5-6, 2002

FINITE SUBJECTS:
MORTALITY AND CULTURE IN GERMANY
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: KARL S. GUTHKE

370 Dwinelle Hall Conference Room

Conference Schedule

Friday, April 5th

8:45 Breakfast

9:30 Opening Remarks: Joel Freeman, UC Berkeley

9:50 - 11:10 Aesthetics of Finitude
Moderator: Micheal Cowan

Michele Ricci, Stanford University: "The Sacramentalization of Maximin: Literary Modernism and Stefan George's Poetics of Mortality"

Bruce Barnhart, University of California, Irvine: "Jazz and the Pathos of Distance: Adorno's Use of Nietzsche"

Sam Ishii-Gonzales, New York University: "Death in Fassbinder, or What Remains to be Thought"

11:20 - 12:40 The Sublime made Finite
Moderator: Joel Freeman, UC Berkeley

Timothy Frawley, Georgetown University: "The Death of the Sublime: Kafka and Kant"

Eric Baker, University of Minnesota: The Epicurean Sublime of Equipoise: "The Hedonist Undercurrent of 18th-Century Aesthetic Discourse"

Arthur Strum, Stanford University: "Finitude through Transcendence: the Ambivalent Legacy of Kant's Critical "Tribunal"

Lunch 12:40 - 1:40

1:40 - 2:40 Keynote Speaker
Karl S. Guthke, Harvard University, Kuno Franke Professor of German Art and Culture "Memory Culture in the Cemetary: Talking Stones or Silent Tombs?"

3:00 - 4:20 Homicide
Moderator: June Hwang, UC Berkeley

Jessica Wood, University of California, Irvine: "Life Unworthy: Power over Life, Death, and Reproduction in Wolfgang Liebeneiner's "Ich klage an!"

Sace Elder, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: "Death in the City: Murder and Modernity in Weimar Germany"

Michael S. Bryant, Ohio State University: "Finding Oneself in Death: On the Uses of Mass Murder in Identity Formation"

Saturday April 6th

9:20 - 10:40 Death and the Nation
Moderator: Jennifer Kapzynski, UC Berkeley

Chad Wellmon, UC Berkeley: "Thinking a (Given) Nation"

Wendy C. Nielsen, UC Santa Barbara: "Romantic Death: Nationalism and Gender Trouble in Kleist and Günderrode"

Robyn Marasco, UC Berkeley: "Violence, Fear and Death in Hegel's 'Lordship and Bondage'"

10:50 - 12:20 Transcending Transcendence
Moderator: Christina Gerhardt, University of Wisconsin

Ingo Zechner, Holocaust Victims Information and Support Center: Vienna, Austria: "Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland - Heideggers Todesfuge"

Noga Wizansky, University of California, Berkeley: "Re-enchanting Finitude - Rationalizing Infinity in Weimar Germany: Lotte Reiniger's Silhouette Film, 'The Adventures of Prince Achmed' (1923-1926)"

Brendan Quigley, University of California, Irvine: "Das Sein zum Tode: Dasein's Tragic Heroism and The Aporetic Structure of Death in Being and Time"

12:30 - 1:30 Lunch

1:40 - 3:00 Plenary Speaker
Eric Santner, University of Chicago, Department Chair and Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History, Jewish Studies: "Death and the Neighbor: A Reading of Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption".

3:00 - 4:40 Apparitions

Sabine Kriebel, UC Berkeley: "Memory and Mourning: the Legacy of Mass Death in John Heartfield's Photomontages"

Maren Witte, Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin: "Und nenn es nicht Stillstand" - Gedanken zur Bedeutung von Ruhe und Tod im Tanz des 20. Jahrhunderts."

Maya Maxym, Emory University: "The Fertility of Loss: Paul Celan's 'Sprich auch du' und 'Vor einer Kerze.'"

Evening Reception

Semiotic Circle of California

The Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Circle of California was held in the Faculty Club, UC Berkeley on Saturday and Sunday, January 26-27, 2002. As customary, the meeting was an open topic research paper meeting.

registration 8:45 am (coffee/tea breaks, luncheon, closing pastry / wine): students $20; others $40

Morning Session Winfried Kudszus (UC Berkeley), Chair

9:00 am Denis J. Brion (Washington & Lee Law School): "Illegitimate Politics in Bush v. Gore"

9:30 am Richard John Ascarate & Tonya Kim Dewey (UC Berkeley): "Cracking the Nut: The Translation of Prose to choreography and Gesture in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales"

10:00 am Scott Simpkins (Univ. of North Texas): "The Romantic Pause" 10:30 am William A. Pencak (Penn State Univ.): "Q. 'Who's the Illegal Alien, Pilgrim?' --A.'The Man who Shot Liberty Valence'"

11:00 am Werner Abraham (UC Berkeley: "Sociopathology and Bateson's 'Double Bind'" 11:30 am Alain J.-J. Cohen (UC San Diego): "Semiotics of the Filmic Dissolve in Scorsese's 'Taxi Driver'"

luncheon

Afternoon Session Alain J.-J. Cohen (UC San Diego), Chair

1:00 pm Ellen McCracken (UC Santa Barbara): "Argentina is Burning: Ostensive Communication and Semiotic Struggle in the Current Socio-Economic Crisis"

1:30 pm Norbert Wiley (UC Berkeley): "The Linguistics of Inner Speech"

2:00 pm Llana Barber (UC Berkeley): "Framing the Avant-Garde: White Oak's Reconstruction of the Work of the Judson Dance Theater"

2:30 pm Sasha Krivonosov (Penn State Univ.): "Eh-wa-ua-wau-aoooow! The Post-World War II USSR: A Tarzan Generation"

3:00 pm William Watt (UC Irvine)"Writing is a parasitic Representation of Speech, Write?"

3:30 pm Jean-Jacques Boutaud & Pascal Lardellier (Information Science & Communication, UniversitŽ de Bourgogne, Dijon): "A Semiotic Approach to the Rituals of 'CommensalitŽ'"

 

Lecture Archive

[ BONWIT - HEINE LECTURE SERIES 2001-2002]

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Thanks to funds bequeathed to the University of California by Professor Marianne Bonwit in memory of her father, Hugo Bonwit, and in honor of the German nineteenth-century author, Heinrich Heine, the department is able to sponsor lectures by scholars and authors dealing specifically with German language and literature or, generally, with German culture and history.

Spring 2002

May

3 (Friday) Barbara Wolbert, Museum Wars: Art and Memory in the New Germany

Barbara Wolbert is a cultural anthropologist, working on the anthropology of art and visual culture. She has conducted fieldwork in Germany and Turkey, specializing on the analysis of narration, photography and video practices in the context of migration studies. In this field she has published two books, MigrationsbewŠltigung [Coping with Migration] (1984) and Der getštete Pa§ [Killing the Passport] (1995), as well as various radio documentaries and articles. She is currently pursuing a study on art, politics and alterity. Her talk will focus on the 1999 Weimar exhibition "The Rise and Fall of Modernism" and forms part of a larger project on art exhibitions in Germany since 1945. She will analyze this controversial show as a case study of nation building processes in the unified Germany. Barbara Wolbert is affiliated with the European University Viadrina at Frankfurt on Oder, where she completed her habilitation in Comparative Cultural and Social Anthropology at the College of Cultural Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Cologne and taught at the Free University, the Humboldt University and the University of the Arts in Berlin. Since 1997 she has been a visiting professor in German studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

April

26 (Friday) Duvarlar -Mauern - Walls, a film screening and discussion with Can Candan
2000; USA/TURKEY; 83 min.; Turkish, German, English (with subtitles)


Duvarlar-Mauern-Walls, is a trilingual (Turkish, German, English) documentary about a moment in the recent history of the largest minority in re-unified, post-Wall Berlin, the immigrant community from Turkey, as witnessed by a Turkish filmmaker from the United States. In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of the two Germanys, 1991 was the year when anti-foreigner violence in Germany was becoming too visible to ignore. 1991 was also the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the migration from Turkey to Germany. In this film, immigrants from Turkey talk about their past, present, and possible future, reflecting on what the opening of the Wall and the unification of the two Germanys meant for them and how increasing hostilities are affecting their sense of belonging in the new Germany. Duvarlar-Mauern-Walls, is the view from the periphery by a filmmaker who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider.
For more information contact Can Candan: can@bilgi.edu.tr

12 (Friday) Stephan Jaeger, The Artistic Writing of History: Performances of the Past on the Edge between Historiography and Literature.

Stephan Jaeger has studied German and English literature at the University of Bielefeld and written his dissertation with Karl Heinz Bohrer on the theory of poetry. He has taught at the universities of Bielefeld, Giessen, and Szczecin (formerly Stettin, Poland), and he is spending this academic year as research fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His current research deals with the aesthetics of writing history in 18th century British and German historiography. In addition to his dissertation, he has co-edited a book on the performativity of language around 1800 and published several articles dealing with historical narrativity.

4 (Thursday) Theo Vennemann, Why are German and English different?

German and English are different languages; as such they may be expected to be different. The real question--and the question to be addressed in the presentation--is: Why are German and English so very different? After all, English is, like Dutch and Low German, genetically a variety of Coastal West Germanic and thus very closely related also to Inland West Germanic, i.e. High German; and Dutch and Low German are entirely within the limits of linguistic similarity or dissimilarity that is to be expected for varieties of "the same language" after less than two millennia: They all reflect the same structural language type and share almost all of the inherited Germanic vocabulary. But English is of a different structural language type, and its inherited Germanic words do not amount to more than a meagre fourth of its entire vernacular vocabulary. The explanation proposed in the presentation will rest on the following theses: (1) German continues nearly undisturbed the Germanic structural and lexical language type. (2) By contrast, English was structurally and lexically transformed into something entirely new, owing (a) to the original (and dialectally continuing) substratal Celtic influence which approximated the Coastal West Germanic Anglo-Saxon to the Semitic-Celtic structural type, and (b) to the forced superstratal Norman-French contact which severely disrupted the Germanic word-formation behavior, destroying in particular its loan-formation capacities, and approximated the Germanic Anglo-Saxon to the Romance lexical type.

Theo Vennemann gen. Nierfeld, born in Oberhausen-Sterkrade (Rhineland) in 1937, studied mathematics, physics, Germanic philology, Indo-European, and philosophy in Goettingen, Marburg, and Los Angeles. He received his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1968 and, after a year on the Irvine campus, taught at UCLA as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor of Linguistics until 1974. Since then he has held the Chair of Germanic and Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Munich. He lives in the village of Ried, between Munich and Augsburg, where he has been a member of the Community Council since 1996. In the Bavarian communal elections a month ago he was reelected for a second six-year term. Vennemann's research interests include phonology, word order, metrics, the theory of language change, the history of German and other Indo-European languages, and the linguistic prehistory of Europe as reflected in external influences on Indo-European.

http://www.theo-vennemann.com/

February
6 (Wednesday) Transnational Travels in Black: Afro-Germans and the Crowded Space of Diaspora by DR. TINA CAMPT, Assistant Professor, Women's Studies, University of California @ Santa Cruz

 

Fall 2001

November
1 (Thursday) READING: LiteraTour of three German authors sponsored by the Goethe Institute: Tobias Huelswitt, David Wagner, Maike Wetzel (time & place TBA)

30 (Friday) LECTURE: Stephen Hinton (Chair of the Department of Music, Stanford University), "From Whisky Bar to Lonely House: Kurt Weill's Music of the City", 4 pm, room 370 Dwinelle Hall, UCB

 

October
24 (Wednesday) Discussion with Peter Sloterdijk (Philosopher) 2 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall, UCB

29 Peggy Piesche WORKSHOP "Literature and Hiphop: Black Art in Germany", 4 p.m., room 370 Dwinelle Hall, UCB

September
27 Lydia Miklautsch (Universität Wien), "Das Mädchen Achilles. Crossdressing und Homosexualität in der mittelalterlichen Literatur"

 

[ NOON COLLOQUIA]

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This series provides a regular forum for graduate students and faculty from the Berkeley campus to present their current work in German literary and cultural studies. The Colloquium is organized and run by graduate students.

Spring 2002

April

12 (Friday) Kevin Wiliarty, How in the World: Could Grammar Entail Culture?

18 (Thursday) Werner Abraham, topic TBA

26 (Friday) Claire Kramsch, Metaphor and the Subjective Construction of Belief.

March

13 (Wednesday) Tanja Nusser, Solange wir uns an ihre Gesetze halten, stehen wir unter ihrem Schutz: Die Begegnung mit den Anderen in Ulrike Ottingers Film

19 (Tuesday) Niklaus Largier, Cultures of Arousal and the Control of the Imagination

 

Fall 2001

December

3 (Monday) Jennifer Kapczynski, speaking on: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and the Roots of the German Diseas.

November

26 (Monday) Christina Gerhardt, speaking on "National History in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory"

October

23 (Tuesday) Dr. Hartmut Winkler, Visiting Professor University of Paderborn, Germany speaking on Bilderkrise und Computer. Vorstellung des Buchs: 'Docuverse'
in German.

 

[SPECIAL PRESENTATION]

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A History of German Techno Music

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, techno has emerged as a musical style that has defined a reunified Germany. Join us in this unique multimedia presentation which will explore the theories and trends behind the success of this culture. The lecture (in English) will be followed by a deejay set which will cover the important styles that emerged in Germany during the past ten years.

Tueday, April 16
room 155 Dwinelle (450 seats)

Doors open at 5:30 pm
6-7 pm lecture
7-9 pm deejay set

Presented by Sean Nye: Known as dj either/or in the Bay Area, Sean Nye has a residence at club tantra in San Francsico. He is acquainted with numerous German deejays and producers, including Dr. Motte, the founder of the Love Parade. Sean graduated from UC Berkeley with high honors in philosophy and comparative literature, with a focus on the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard.

With special guest Peter Ziegelmeier: Famous as the man behind Kode IV, Peter Ziegelmeier is one of the premier psychedelic trance deejays and producers in the United States. He is the founder of the pioneering Ceiba records label and owner of the Ceiba record store, both based in San Francisco. He performs around the world, including such places as Mexico, India, Hungary, and Zambia. Originally from the Boden See region of Germany, Peter immigrated to the US in 1989.