Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Literaturwissenschaft für das Leben

ROUND TABLE WITH JULIKA GRIEM, JOHN GUILLORY AND LOTHAR MÜLLER

I love literature, but hate literary criticism. These words were once spoken - it's not clear by whom, when, or why - here at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Though their author is unknown, their meaning is unmistakable: we turn to literature for the pleasure we derive from it - yet critical discourse either ignores pleasure, or defines it so abstrusely as to annihilate it. Whence the title for our evening, borrowed from the early Nietzsche: what is the point of a knowledge that does not recognize the very raison d'être of its object? This is the question that the Wissenschaftskolleg's first Observatorium poses to our panelists, and indeed to literary studies as a whole.

INTRODUCTION: BARBARA STOLLBERG-RILINGER, Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg

CHAIR: CARLOS SPOERHASE

PANEL:

JULIKA GRIEM, Director of the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen and author of Monkey Business: Affen als Figuren anthropologischer und ästhetischer Reflexion 1800-2000, 2010.

JOHN GUILLORY, Professor of English Literature at New York University, author of Cultural Capital, The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, 1993.

LOTHAR MÜLLER, Journalist and Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in 2008/2009. His latest book is Adrien Proust und sein Sohn Marcel. Beobachter der erkrankten Welt, 2021.

CARLOS SPOERHASE, Professor of German Literature at Bielefeld University and author, most recently, of Das Format der Literatur: Praktiken materieller Textualität zwischen 1740 und 1830, 2018.

The panel discussion will be in English.

Hinweis:

Die Veranstaltung wird im Rahmen der 2-G-Regel durchgeführt.

Für weitere Informationen zur Veranstaltung wenden Sie sich bitte an Petria Saleh (psa(at)wiko-berlin.de).