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Conference

From Ego to Eco. Imagining Ecocentrism in Literature, Film and Philosophy

Galway, 10^th -  11^th  June, 2011

Hosts: School of Languages Literatures and Cultures NUI Galway / German Department ( Dr. Tina-Karen Pusse, Sabine Lenore Müller M.A.)

For many centuries, anthropocentric world views were crucial for the implementation of nature toward man's ends and played a part in creating the multifarious imbalances that today threaten ecosystems on a global scale. In film, literature and critical thought alternatives to anthropocentrism are being outlined, sensitivities awakened towards a global eco-consciousness that pays attention to the interdependence of species and ecosystems. A shift from imagining homo sapiens at the top of a hierarchy of existence or, alternatively, at the centre of global concerns to imagining a unity of being is taking place in literature and art through the ages. It is being tested and contested in this century increasingly also in the medium film. A unique and different inventory of artistic techniques, modes of expression, structures of realising this shift towards ecocentrism go hand in hand with an academic shift of focus. . Aim of this conference is to bring together scholars from various disciplines within the Arts and Sciences/ the Humanities to reflect on these changes, to reflect on ways in which works of art and mind break free from anthropocentric paradigms. Artistic visions and theoretical concepts that place humans in neighbourly relations with the 30 million surrounding species shall be central but also the discontents and possible dangers inherent in ecocentrism. We invite abstracts of no more than 250 words. Responding to one or more of the following questions: How is earth, not the individual, as the prime metaphor for life realised in literature and film? How is ecocentrism justified or contested in philosophy and theory? Which ethical and political questions do arise? How are religion and science linked into the topic of ecocentrism and which modes and techniques of representation are used to express ecocentric matters? And finally, thinking about a shift to ecocentrism from and within Ireland: Which traditions, genealogies of thought or works of art link Ireland – artistically, philosophically – to green thinking?

January 2011: NUI Galway Lecturers have been awarded for promoting German in Ireland

The Business German in Ireland Working Group has been announced as the winner of the Kuratorium Award for 2010. The group includes three NUI Galway lecturers from the School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, Doris Devilly, lecturer and coordinator of the B.Comm (German) programme at NUI Galway; Dr. Deirdre Byrnes (Law and German) and Aine Ryan (German).

This award is presented annually by the Kuratorium (Board of Trustees) of the German-Irish Chamber of Commerce to groups, individuals or organisations that have made a special contribution to the furthering of German-Irish relations in Ireland. This year’s recipients are a group of third level teachers of Business German with representatives from most Irish universities (including NUI Galway), institutes of technology and other third level colleges as well as the Goethe Institute.

They were presented with the award for their ongoing work of promoting German in Ireland and the importance of language learning in such an export dependent economy. Doris Devilly, lecturer and coordinator of the B.Comm (German) programme in NUI Galway and one of the founding members of the Business German in Ireland Working Group, commented: “Graduates who have completed a combined degree programme with Commerce and German are highly employable, even in the current job market. In the larger European context it is clear that high quality graduates with an excellent knowledge of German language and business culture can make significant contribution to German-Irish relations and are essential to Ireland’s economic recovery.”

According to one graduate of NUI Galway’s Commerce and German degree: “Germany is the economic powerhouse within the EU and plays an important part in the Irish economy. I feel that having studied Commerce with German, I now have a greater professional scope and more career opportunities than general Commerce graduates. German is currently one of the most wanted business languages internationally and by being able to speak it a greater variety of job offers is now available to me. I am more than happy to have chosen Commerce with German and would advise any business student with an interest in a language to consider the same course.”

 

February 2011: Book on Monika Maron Launched at NUI Galway  

A book written by Dr Deirdre Byrnes, who teaches German in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, was launched in the Moore Institute on Thursday, 10 February. Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context was launched by Professor Hugh Ridley, Emeritus Professor of German, University College Dublin.

Monika Maron’s biography charts a complex relationship with the German Democratic Republic, from initial ideological identification with the state to sustained, radical rejection. In her book, Dr Byrnes charts the development of a number of seminal themes in Maron’s work: the search for an authentic form of expression; the writing and the rewriting of history; memory transmission and generational forgetting; the rupture and the ultimate refashioning of biographies in a post-GDR age.

According to Dr. Byrnes: “Monika Maron’s writing articulates salient aspects of her generation’s social and historical experience, in particular the caesura caused by the collapse of the GDR in 1989. In my book, I set out to demonstrate the significance of her contribution to contemporary German literature.”

Launching the book, Professor Hugh Ridley highlighted Monika Maron’s “representative function for a whole generation” and described her work as being “focused on pain, the sense of loss, the need to face up to the world.”

Rereading Monika Maron: Text, Counter-Text and Context is published by Peter Lang in the series British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature. It can be ordered at http://www.peterlang.com/.

Further information is available from Dr. Deirdre Byrnes at 091 492014 or deirdre.byrnesnuigalway.ie.

22 October 2009: Public Reading 

Ulrich Peltzer, winner of Berlin Literary Award for lifetime achievement in 2008. Public reading from his Berlin novel Teil der Lösung (2007).

5th and 6th of June 2009:

Conference

Precarious Parenthood - the Performativity of ’Family’ in Literature and Film

O' Tuathail Theatre (Arts Millennium Building)

Host: German Department, Organisers: Dr. Tina-Karen Pusse, Katharina Walter

This conference has been funded by the German Embassy, the Millennium Conference Hosting Assistance Fund, and The College of Arts.

We all experience parenthood; if not as parents, then by way of being parented or, in the face of the ubiquity of images of idyllic family life, in the longing for being parents or being parented. Nevertheless, ’parenthood’ is a contingent social construct. Early myths of changelings, literary fairy tales about children accidentally growing up with the ’wrong’ parents, as well as the numerous enlivenments of artificial bodies from mediaeval literature to science fiction ultimately, and probably above all, construct ’families.’ Those families are not only a substitution for real families, but also retroactively show that families are never ’real’; that family, like gender or race, is not only a social or biological entity, but something that has to be ’acted out.’ Arguably, the rules for the construction of ’family’ are changing. Despite the fact, that for instance, the collective phantasm of the Holy Family, is still a potent and vivid projection space a discursive revision of ’family’ has taken place.
Recent societal transformations have particularly affected women. In the past, women’s subordination to men has, at the same time, fostered highly idealized images of motherhood in the Western world – be it due to biologism, romanticism or the Catholic reverence for a motherhood of immaculate conception. Dispossessing and deconstructing  maternity cleared the way to apprehend that families are rather virtual than biological entities.
In this conference, various configurations of family as they are represented in literature, film or other audio- visual arts will be analyzed across different societies and academic disciplines.

PROGRAMME:

Friday, 5 June 2009

9.00-9.30: Registration, Coffee, Welcoming Remarks

9.30-11.15: Panel 1: Medieval Literature

Chair: Tina-Karen Pusse

Cathy La Farge, NUI Galway, Ireland	The Family in the Arthurian Tales of Sir Thomas Malory
Lisa Padden, NUI Galway, Ireland	Mapping Margery’s Motherhood: How a Mystic Found a New Family
Jessica Quinlan, University of Würzburg, Germany	Letting Go: The Conflict Surrounding Fathers, Daughters and Sons-in-Law in French and German Arthurian Fiction
Michael Shields, NUI Galway, Ireland	Mother, Daughter, Maid? – Thirteenth-century Discourses of Incest in the German and Latin Versions of Heinrich Frauenlob’s Marienleich

11.15-11.30: Coffee Break

 11.30-13.15: Panel 2:  ’Doing Family’ in German Literature

Chair: Berit Carmesin

Nora Hoffmann, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Germany	Deficient Families in Theodor Fontane’s Novels: The Antithetic Roles of Father and Mother in Parent-Child Relationships
Tina-Karen Pusse, NUI Galway, Ireland	’As Regards My Mother: Don’t Look at Her!’: Disarranged Love Letters in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher
Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, NUI Galway, Ireland	Adoption in the Works of Adalbert Stifter
Gabi Behrens, NUI Galway, Ireland	Childhood in Ruins: On Wolfgang Koeppen’s Tauben im Gras

13.15-14.30 Lunch

14.30-15.30: Plenary Lecture 1: Prof. Barbara Vinken, German Department, University of Munich, Germany:
“Mother State: Germany’s Sonderweg in Western Europe”

15.30-16.00 Coffee Break

16.00-17.45: Panel 3: Irish Literature and Film

Chair: Róisín Ní Neill

E. Guillermo Iglesias, Universidad de Vigo, Spain	Contemporary Re-Constructions of Family Life in Irish Films
Siobhán O’Gorman, NUI Galway, Ireland	Staging Parenthood in the Plays of Marina Carr and Suzan-Lori Parks
Katharina Walter, NUI Galway, Ireland	The Maternal Muse in Contemporary Irish Women’s Poetry

17.45-18.00 Wine Reception

18.00-19.00: Plenary Lecture 2, Prof. Catherine Nash, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom:
“ ’Sick to death of family’: New Perspectives on Relatedness”

Saturday, 6 June 2009

9.00-9.30 Coffee

9.30-11.00: Panel 4: Family Politics: GDR and Soviet Literature and Film

Chair: Katja Wachold

Deirdre Byrnes, NUI Galway, Ireland	Confronting Vater Staat: Politics and Paternity in the Writing of Monika Maron
Jenny Kaminer, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom	The Abandoning Mother as Positive Role Model in the Soviet 1920s
Anna Maria Mullally, Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin	Family in DEFA Film of the 70s and 80s

11.00-11.30 Coffee Break

11.30-13.00: Panel 5: Medical Discourses

Chair: Katharina Walter

Alison Harnett, National Federation of Voluntary Bodies Providing Services to People with Intellectual Disabilities, Ireland	Passing on News about Disability to Parents
Ornaith Rodgers, NUI Galway, Ireland	Construction of Pregnancy and the Self in the Discourse of Pregnancy Advice Literature
Jameson Bell, ETH Zurich, Switzerland	Children as ’Living Brains’: Reading from a Novel in Progress

Keynote speakers:

Barbara Vinken is professor of comparative literature / French literature  at University of  Munich (and has already held professorships in Yale, New York University, EHESS Paris, Zürich, Hamburg and Humboldt University Berlin). In Spring 2007 she taught at Johns Hopkins University. She has published numerous monographs and articles in the field of literature and cultural studies, such as Fashion - Zeitgeist. Trends and Cycles in the Fashion System (2005), Die deutsche Mutter - Der lange Schatten eines Mythos [The German Mother – The Big Shade of a Myth]  (2001).

Catherine Nash is professor of geography at Queen Mary, University of London. She has written a monograph, Of Irish Descent: Origin Stories, Genealogy, and the Politics of Belonging (2008), as well as numerous articles in the fields of feminist cultural geography, geographies of relatedness, and Irish studies.

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9th of May 2009

-Launch of the German City-Guide to Galway, guided tour through Galway.

       

9. – 20. February 2009: Writer in Residence Programme

We were happy to welcome Dr. Jürgen Lodemann – award winning author, literary critic and journalist - as Writer in Residence. For more than 30 years, Jürgen Lodemann has had a close relationship with Galway, both personally and professionally. His novel Paradies irisch is set in Galway in the Middle Ages and depicts the dramatic events surrounding the murder in the Lynch family. In the 1988 documentary Columbus: Wir haben in Galway Bemerkenswertes gesehen, Lodemann takes up this topic again and at the same time conveys a lively and fascinating portrayal of Galway through the centuries right up to the 1980s.

Thursday, 12. February, 6 p.m. (NUIG, Arts Millennium Building, Mairtin O’Tnuthail Theatre, AM 150)

Public Screening of the documentary Columbus: Wir haben in Galway Bemerkenswertes gesehen in German with an English commentary by the director

Monday, 16. February, 2-3 p.m.  (NUIG, Arts Millennium Building 109)

Public Reading from Paradies irisch

As well as these public events, Jürgen Lodemann gave workshops in several classes from first to final year.

Please find out more about Jürgen Lodemann on his homepage: http://www.jürgen-lodemann.de/

We would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for the financial support of the Writer in Residence Programme.

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2008: Workshop: Dream - Film - Literature

Lydia Marinelli (Director of the Sigmund-Freud-Museum, Vienna):

Freudian and Pre-Freudian Dreams in Early Films ,

Dreams as Literature? Remarks on the History of a Neglected Literary Genre

(Sponsored by the Austrian Embassy) 

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2006: Teaching German in Ireland. Politics and Perspectives

(Conference  of the Association of Third-Level Teachers of German in Ireland)

Lectures and Discussions:

-Michael Cronin (School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies, DCU):
Glocal Denizens: Languages and the Right to Know

-Pol O’Dochartaigh (University of Ulster/ Committee for Modern Language, Literary and Cultural Studies, Royal Irish Academy):
German and the Languages Challenge in Ireland

-Kristin Brogan (IT Tralee): 
Presentation on the IT  Language Policy Network

Supported by the German Embassy

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2005: Borders and Margins: (Re)defining Space and Place in European Literary and Cultural Discourses

Conference Programme

Panel A      The Melting Pot of Europe

( Chair: Dr. Niall O'Dochartaigh, Department of Political Science and Sociology, NUIG )

Henrike Rau:"They're Here to Stay": Promoting Long-Termism as an Essential  Part of Cultural Integration into Irish Society

Brendan Flynn: "An Invasion of Paradise!": The Shifting Sands of Italian State Responses to Illegal Migrants

Adrienne Montgomery & Siobhán Smyth: The Challenge and Awakening of Cultural Diversity and Universality within Healthcare Today in Ireland

Panel B        Physical and Metaphysical Borders

(Chair: Dr. Hermann Rasche, Department of German, NUIG)

Lindsay Myers: From England to Italy: Reflections on and between Massimo Bontempelli's La Scacchiera davanti allo Specchio and Lewis Carroll's Alice Books

Deirdre Byrnes: "Mit dem Kopf durch die Wand gehen": Physical and Imaginary Spaces in Monika Maron's novel Die Überläuferin

Jochen Bedenk:  Intricacies - Aesthetic Transgressions in Hogarth's "The Bathos" and Jean Paul's "Speech of the Dead Christ From the Universe Saying There is No God"

Panel A            Borders and the Nineteenth Century

(Chair: Róisín Ní Neill, Department of German, NUIG)

Anne O'Connor: Rituals of Unity: The 1865 Dante Festival

Sebastian Stumpf: Thomas Moore and the German Vormärz

Panel B            The Thin Line: Crime and Conflict

(Chair: Dr. Lorna Shaughnessy, Department of Spanish, NUIG)

Niall Ó Dochartaigh: "Whitecity under attack": Territorial Conflict at an Online Interface

Kate Quinn: Race, Place and Identity in Contemporary European Crime Narrative 

Keynote Address: Professor Michael Cronin, DCU : Holograms, Cosmopolites and Tipping Points: Windows on Europe

Guest Speaker: Dr. Richard Robinson, University of East Anglia: European Border Space in the Interwar Fction of D.H. Lawrence, Italo Svevo and Joseph Roth

Literary and Cultural Exiles

(Chair: An tOllamh Mícheál MacCraith, Roinn na Gaeilge, Ollscoil na hÉireann, Gaillimh)

Petra Hellmuth:The Concept of the "Highland Line" in the Literary Output of  Contemporary Scotland

Peter Geoghegan: Positioned Beyond the Pale: Exile in the Life and Work of Francis Stuart

Panel A               Crossing Over: Translating and Translations

(Chair: Dr. Jane Conroy, Department of French, NUIG)

Mícheál MacCraith:James Macpherson's Ossian: A reluctant bestseller

Michael Shields: Moving Language Boundaries Around: SomeThoughts on the Eminent Translatability of W.G. Sebald's Fiction

Mel Boland: Of Marginal Importance?: Blanco-White and Translation Tradition in Spain

Panel B               Cultural Spaces: Sport and the Construction of Identity

(Chair: Dr. Phil Dine, Department of French, NUIG)

Ruadhán Cooke: Pushing Back the Boundaries in Ever Increasing Circles: Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a donkey in the Cévennes (1878) and Tim Moore's French Revolutions (2001)

Éamon Ó Cofaigh:Shifting Gears: Motor Sport Pushing Back the Borders in Continental Europe

Marie Mahon: Protecting Local Identities and Embracing Change: The GAA in the Urban Fringe

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