GSA Seminar
Abstract
When Timothy Snyder published “Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin” (Basic Books 2010), it meant in many respects a shift of perspective. Snyder focused on what had happened in Eastern Europe since World War One, but also made clear that these historical facts necessitated a different kind of approach to reflect on the experiences of a wide range of multi-ethnic nations and cultural, ethnic, and religious transnational communities present in the area, and the mobility and migration caused by these events. Our GSA seminar proposes to study German-language literary texts that reflect on history and cultural memory in and along Europe’s eastern border zones (from the Baltic states to Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia) since WWI. The seminar’s conveners are interested in literary texts that help us understand better the historical events that constitute Europe’s violent twentieth-century history, the multidirectional memory work happening when writing or reading about these events, and the methodologies that can help us analyze these literary texts, for instance by Ulrike Draesner, Nino Haratischwili, Josef Haslinger, Katja Petrovskaja, Tanya Piankova, Joseph Roth, Saša Stanišić, and Natascha Wodin.
Format:
Conveners will ask participants to write papers (12 pages) in advance (by 15 August). We will circulate before the conference. Knowledge of Timothy Snyder's “Bloodlands” (2nd. ed., 2022) is expected, and we will pre-circulate a few short methodological texts (Aleida Assmann, Marianne Hirsch, Michael Rothberg, a.o., no longer than 10 pages each).
Conveners:
PD Dr. Aura Heydenreich
Akademische Oberrätin, Germanistik und Komparatistik
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
E-Mail: aura.heydenreich@fau.de
and
Carl Niekerk
Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Jewish Studies
University of Illinois
E-Mail: niekerk@illinois.edu
To submit a proposal, go to https://www.thegsa.org/blog/cfa-seminar-participant-applications-gsa-2023
The deadline is Friday, March 3rd at 11:59 p.m. PST.
Please let the conveners know if you have any questions by contacting: niekerk@illinois.edu or aura.heydenreich@fau.de.