Ninth annual Columbia University German graduate student conference; Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Columbia University New York (Web)
Zeit::05.-06.03.2010
Ort: Deutsches Haus, 420 W116th St.
Deadline: 01.01.2010
Keynote Speaker: Prof. Jennifer Kapczynski (Washington University)
Narratives of decline and degeneration have long pervaded political, cultural, and aesthetic discourses in the West. Alongside utopian fantasies of technological progress, the gradual perfection of mankind, and teleological philosophies of history, modernity in particular has frequently inspired conceptualizations of art, culture, and the human being, articulated in terms of contamination, regression, and decay. Such accounts are typically coupled with nostalgic romanticizations of the past that devalue the future, or regard it merely as a path to inevitable extinction, while perceiving in the present only that which has disappeared or been lost over the course of history. Yet, pessimistic pronouncements of cultural decline and the assumption that things are, for the most part, perpetually getting worse have also been understood as a productive and necessary precondition for theorizing and engaging with the present. In this way, the boundary Continue reading