Abstract

Frank Witzel's My literary history of the 20th century (2024) is a history of forgotten and abandoned authors, which will be set in relation to Witzel's The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a manic-depressive teenager in 1969 and the seven hour audio play Stahnke*. I’ll mainly speak about the conditions for contemporary literature (a) in the German context, and (b) as Witzel envisages them, recount some of the narrative threads of the audio play Stahnke, and discover common themes in his works.

https://www.br.de/mediathek/podcast/stahnke-die-hoerspielserie/alle/786

About the speaker

Dr Stephan Atzert is Senior Lecturer in German Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures. To date Dr Atzert has contributed two monographs to the study of the reception of Schopenhauer's philosophy. His first book Schopenhauer in the works of Thomas Bernhard. The critical appropriation of Schopenhauer's philosophy in Thomas Bernhard's late novels was published in German in 1999 (Rombach). Since then, Dr Atzert contributes to the international scholarship on Schopenhauer with journal articles and book chapters, with a focus on Schopenhauer's role in the development of psychoanalysis and for the understanding of Buddhism in Europe. His second monograph in German Im Schatten Schopenhauers (Königshausen & Neumann 2015, 209 pp, available in English translation: Schopenhauer's Legacy, K&N 2023) investigates the role of Schopenhauer's philosophy in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Deussen and Sigmund Freud. At present (2024) he is developing a monograph on K.E. Neumann's reception of Schopenhauer in his translations of the Pali discourses into German. In addition, Dr Atzert has translated and revised translations of works by selected Buddhist authors.

About Studies in Culture Events

Through the scholarly analysis of many different kinds of cultural products, texts and phenomena, Studies in Culture brings together researchers who seek to understand how the world is understood differently by people coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Researchers in this cluster work on literature, film, music, theatre, the visual arts, intangible heritage, testimonies and historical narratives.

Research in Studies in Culture within the School centres around four broad sub-themes of Heritage, memory and trauma studies; Intellectual and cultural history; Literature; and Film and visual cultures.

To view more on the research and interests of the Studies in Culture cluster, please click here.

Venue

Gordon Greenwood Building, Room 316, or Zoom (https://uqz.zoom.us/j/7680088381)