2007-2008 News and Events
Alice Kuzniar, May 1, 2007
Susan Buck-Morss, December 5, 2006
Michael W. Jennings, November 28, 2006
Dirk Oschmann, November 2, 2006
Christoph König, October 5, 2006
Dirk Oschmann to serve as Kade Professor Fall 2006
Fredric Jameson on March, 3, 2008
Noted literary scholar and political theorist Fredric Jameson, the William A. Lane Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, will visit UC Davis on Monday, March 3rd, 2008. Jameson will deliver a public lecture entitled "Globalization and Totality" at 5:00 pm at the University Club. His many books include Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (1990), Brecht and Method (1998), and Valences of the Dialectic (2008).
Alexander García Düttmann to visit UC Davis February 13-15, 2008
The distinguished German philosopher, critic, and cultural theorist Alexander García Düttmann (Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK) will visit UC Davis from February 13-15, 2008. He will offer a three-day seminar for interested students and faculty entitled "Four Readings of Kant's Critique of Judgment: Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, Cavell." In addition, he will present a public lecture, "Come and Go: On the Very Concept of Late Style." Times and locations to be announced.
Organized by Professor Gerhard Richter for the Department of German and co-sponsored by Anthropology, Art History, CHSC, Classics, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, English, French and Italian, History, the Davis Humanities Institute, Spanish, and Technocultural Studies. For more information contact Gerhard Richter at grichter @ucdavis.edu.
Seminar Readings:- Reading outline
- Martin Heidegger (1)
- Martin Heidegger (2)
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Stanley Cavell
- Jacques Derrida
- Fairfield Porter
Gert Kaiser to serve as Kade Professor Fall 2007
Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Gert Kaiser is the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of German in Fall, 2007. Professor Kaiser was Rektor (Chancellor) of the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, for twenty years (1983-2003) and is currently President of the Center for Advanced Study in the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. Professor Kaiser is the recipient of numerous national and international awards, including the Bundesverdienstkreuz of the Federal Republic of Germany (1991 and 2004, the latter first-class), and medals presented by France, Italy, and Japan for his promotion of intellectual and cultural relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and these countries. In 1996, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Reading. Professor Kaiser is an internationally recognized expert in the field of medieval German literature with an emphasis on medieval love lyrics and the theme of "Death and the Maiden." He has also published extensively in the area of cultural history. During Fall, 2007, he will offer an introductory undergraduate course on "Medieval German Literature" and a graduate seminar on the "Tristan" theme as set down in the work of Gottfried von Strassburg (ca. 1210). Professor Kaiser will also present a lecture, open to the public, on "Death and the Maiden" on November 7, 2007 at 5pm in 922 Sproul Hall.
Derrida Symposium to be held at UC Davis on November 9, 2007
The conference "Thinking After Derrida: Davis Derrida Day" will take place on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at the University Club Conference Center of the University of California, Davis from 10:00 a.m.-6:15 p.m. Organized by Gerhard Richter for the UC Davis Graduate Program in Critical Theory, the event will include lectures by Karen Embry, Martin Jay, Peggy Kamuf, Gerhard Richter, Scott Shershow, and David Simpson. The event is free and open to the public.
Paul Reitter will visit UC Davis on Thursday, November 8, 2007
Paul Reitter, Associate Professor of German from the Ohio State University, will give a talk on "Zionism and the Rhetoric of Jewish Self-Hatred," on November 8th in Olson 53A at 5pm.
The history of the term "Jewish self-hatred" has been presented rather loosely. Scholars-for instance, Sander Gilman-tend to argue that the discourse of "Jewish self-hatred" dates back to the late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria, where to a large extent it emerged as a way of critically describing the excessively "self-critical Jew," i.e., the hyper-acculturated Jew who saw his or her own Jewishness as a blight. In the words of the historian Shulamit Volkov, fin-de-siècle German Jews developed the discourse of "Jewish self-hatred" as a vehicle for carrying out a "self-criticism of self-criticism." Hence, for her, it was the period before the First World War, a period of intense self-examination within German-Jewish culture, which gave rise to the idea that would later be known as "Jewish self-hatred." By the time Theodor Lessing popularized that term in 1930, German Jews had turned their attention elsewhere: to the external threat of Nazism. The phrase "Jewish self-hatred" began to loom on cultural scene, according to Volkov, as a sort of afterthought.
In effect, then, Gilman, Volkov and other scholars have sidestepped the issues: Why 1930? What historical contingencies played a role in the formation of the specific label "Jewish self-hatred," which was not coined until 1921? How and why did this particular phrase supplant older synonyms, like "Jewish antisemitism," and rise to predominance? My talk offers answers to these questions. It traces a non-linear, highly agonistic terminological development that began with the coining of "Jewish antisemitism" in 1896, and that was driven forward by both large factors-e.g., the new divide between Zionists and anti-Zionists-and a series of idiosyncratic personalities-e.g., the German-Jewish critics Anton Kuh and Theodor Lessing.
I show how "Jewish self-hatred" was in part formulated as a serious alternative to the label "Jewish antisemitism," which both Zionists and anti-Zionists had been using with brazen disingenuousness. Yet I also reveal the semantic complexity and irony embedded in the original meaning of the term "Jewish self-hatred." Theodor Lessing's Jewish Self-Hatred book of 1930 offers as its "case studies" several decidedly non-Zionist German-Jewish intellectuals, whom Lessing admonishes to "harden themselves in Palestine by helping to pave the road to Jerusalem." One of those intellectuals had earlier coined the line "Jewish self-hatred," as a way of parodying just the kind of analysis to which Lessing would later subject him. So even the roots of "Jewish self-hatred" are curiously tangled. The phrase began as a satirical representation of what it had not yet come to denote. By bringing such convolutions to light, my genealogy helps to explain the diverse significance of "Jewish self-hatred," which has long served, and which continues to serve, as both a powerful term of opprobrium and an effective punch line.
Gert Kaiser Lecture on Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Professor Gert Kaiser, as this year's Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor, will be presenting a lecture entitled "Death and the Maiden" on Wednesday, November 7, 2007 in Olson at 5:15pm. All are welcome and light refreshments will be served. **Please note that place and time have been changed.
Dr. Kaiser is Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Nordrhein/Westfalen, Germany and a former Rektor of the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf.
Monika Treut on October 11, 2007
Distinguished German filmmaker Monika Treut will visit UC Davis on October 11. Her film "Tigerwomen Grew Wings" will be screened at 6 p.m., followed by a discussion. Treut's film, shot in Taiwan, will be shown as part of a Taiwanese Film Festival, a multi-campus event visiting UC Davis Oct 10-13, 2007. For more information on the Taiwanese Film Festival please visit 2007tff.blogspot.com. For info on the local UC Davis program and schedule, please contact Vince at vvwalzberg @ucdavis.edu