Humboldt-Kolleg: "Writing Democracy: Literature and Democratic History", New Haven
Writing Democracy: Literature and Democratic History
Humboldt-Kolleg at Yale University, March 31–April 1, 2023
organized by Tilman Venzl, Jennifer Allen, and Kirk Wetters
FRIDAY, March 31
9:00–9:30 Coffee and breakfast
9:30–10:00 Tilman Venzl, Kirk Wetters, Jennifer Allen: Welcome and Introduction
Panel 1 – Democratic Literature before Democracy
10:00–12:15
Patrick Fortmann (University of Illinois Chicago): Tribunals of Sovereignty: Democratizing Drama in the German Enlightenment
Vanessa Gubbins (Cornell University): Hölderlin’s Democratic Proposal: A People Only in a Poem
Martin Schneider (Hamburg University): Against or With Each Other: Liberal Aesthetics in Popular German Drama, 1789–1848
Moderation: Sophie Schweiger
12:15–13:30 Lunch Break
Panel 2 – Literature and the First Wave of Democracy
13:30–15:45
Hedwig Richter (University of the Bundeswehr Munich): Solidarity and Democratization: The Scandalization of Poverty in German Literature and the Press in the Mid-19th Century
Tilman Venzl (LMU Munich): The “Democratic Worldview” in Theodor Fontane’s The Stechlin
Margarete Tiessen (TU Chemnitz): Staging ‘German Freedom’: Wilhelmine Democrats and the Theatres of Berlin, 1894–1912
Moderation: Kirk Wetters
15:45–16:15 Coffee Break
Panel 3 – Literature and the First Wave of Democracy, beyond Germany
16:15–18:30
Leander Møller Gøttcke (University of Southern Denmark Odense): Henrik Pontoppidan and the Democratization of Denmark
Joseph Haydt (University of Chicago): The Democratic Personality: Origins, Ideals, and Virtues in Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee
Joel A. Johnson (Augustana University Sioux Falls): Polishing Imperial Floors with Republican Feet: William Dean Howells’s Fictional Travelogue of Wilhelmine Germany
Moderation: Carlos Spoerhase
19:30 Conference Dinner
SATURDAY, April 1
9:00–9:30 Coffee and Breakfast
Tilman Venzl and Kirk Wetters: Presentation of funding opportunities of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
Panel 4 – Unsettled Democracy in Literature
9:30–11:45
Carlos Spoerhase (LMU Munich): Heinrich Heine’s Politics of Suspicious Reading
Matthias Löwe (Leipzig University): Plural Self: Thomas Mann’s Democratic Writing Before and After First World War
Benedikt Wintgens (Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties Berlin): Somber Reflections: Wolfgang Koeppen’s Treibhaus Novel and West German Democracy
Moderation: Tilman Venzl
11:45–13:00 Lunch Break
Panel 5 – Democracy on the March or in Crisis?
13:00–15:15
Heinz Drügh (Goethe University Frankfurt): The Systematic Intersection of Aesthetics and the Democratic ‘Lebensform’
Kirk Wetters (Yale University): The Chariot of Plutus: Power and Plutocracy in Sokurov’s Faust
Oluwole Coker (Potsdam University): “The Owners of Nigeria”: Portraits of Post-Military Democrats in Recent Nigerian Fiction
Moderation: Jennifer Allen
15:15–15:45 Coffee Break
Panel 6 – Activism and Democratic Practice
15:45–18:00
Cecilia Sebastian (Yale University): On Democracy’s Dialectic: Dissident Legacies of the Frankfurt School
Jürgen Brokoff (FU Berlin): Conversation, Dialogue, Dispute: Christa Wolf’s Concept of the Democratic Public Sphere
Jennifer Allen (Yale University): A Politics of Small Steps: The Art of Grassroots Democracy in Late Twentieth-Century Germany
Moderation: Rüdiger Campe
18:00 End of the Humboldt-Kolleg