A16: Metamorphosis: Cultural Imaginations of the Hybrid

Seminar Leader: Bianca Theisen, Johns Hopkins University

Friday, April 16, 8:15 – 10:15 AM, Crowne Plaza Room 159

Michel Chaouli, Indiana University: “Becoming Human: Anthropomorphis as Metamorphosis”

Jocelyn Holland, University of California – Santa Barbara: “Bildung und Bildungstriebe: Metamorphosis in Scientific Theory and Anthropology around 1800”

Klaus Peter Muller, Gutenberg University, Mainz: “ History as Metamorphosis in Historical Novels”

Paolo Bartoloni, University of Sydney: “Translating as the Metamorphosis of Language: A Reflection Via Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator and Agamben’s Infancy and History”

Saturday, April 17, 8:15 – 10:15 AM, Crowne Plaza Room 159

Dorothea von Mücke, Columbia University: “Metamorphosis in Goethe’s Morphology”

Stefani Engelstein, University of Missouri: “Echoes of Narcissus: The Natural Human and Goethe’s Elective Affinities”

Stephan Schindler, Washington University: “The Hybrid as Libertin and Analyst: Goethe’s Mephistopheles”

Andreas Gailus, University of Michigan: “Metamorphosis of Desire: Symbolic Transmission and Sibling Incest in Goethe, Melville, and Musil”

Sunday, April 18, 8:15 – 10:15 AM, Crowne Plaza Room 159

Karsten Gogolin, John Hopkins University: “Becoming-Animal: Mystic Unions in Robert Musil’s Early Prose”

Rochelle Tobias, John Hopkins University: “A Life That Was Not: The Metamorphosis of the Autobiographical Genre in Robert Walser’s Work”

Justus Fetscher, Zentrum fur Literaturforschung, Berlin: “Othering the Power of Language: Versions of Medea in Ovid and Jahnn”

Bianca Theisen, Johns Hopkins University: “‘The Last World’: Christoph Ransmayr’s Transformation of Ovid”