21st Annual Graduate Student Symposium
“Emotion, Affekt, Gefühl: Imagining Feeling in the German Context”
Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures
Washington University in St. Louis
March 3, 2012; 9 am – 6 pm, Hurst Lounge in Duncker Hall
Website: Emotion, Affekt, Gefühl: Imagining Feeling in the German Context
The graduate students in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington
University invite submissions for their annual symposium “Emotion, Affekt, Gefühl: Imagining
Feeling in the German Context.” Over the last decade, questions of ‘affect’ have emerged as a
highly productive field of inquiry in literary studies, film studies, history, art history, philosophy,
and beyond, raising new methodological questions and offering new insights into long-examined
objects.
The symposium seeks to address how cultural products represent and guide feeling: How does
reader or viewer empathy function? What does affect theory teach us about our relationship to art
and art form in the German cultural context? How can we analyse the emotions of the past?
Possible paper topics can include, but are not limited to the following:
● Performance of feeling
● Gender and emotions/Gendering emotions
● Theories of emotion as represented in literary texts (for example, humoral theory)
● Political rhetoric and affect
● Constructing community through emotion norms
● Neurogermanistik
● Anthropologie
● Ethics of feeling
● etc.
We will consider and discuss these questions and insights as well as pose new possibilities for
thinking about feeling and German culture. We invite graduate students from universities across
the Midwest to join us and either present their work on questions of feeling/affect/emotion in the
German context or attend, contributing to discussions of the panelists’ works.
Please send an abstract of 250-300 words to germangradwustl@gmail.com by January 31, 2012.
We encourage submissions from students doing work pertinent to the topic from various fields
in the humanities, especially those working in German Studies, History, Philosophy, Film and
Media Studies, Comparative Literature, English, Musicology, Art History, and Anthropology. Paper
presentations should be 20 minutes in length.