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Please join us for the next BASF Lecture by:
Synopsis: After a stormy night of reading German ghost stories at the Villa Diodati in Summer 1816, Lord Byron proposed to his guests that ‘each write a ghost story’. It is well known that Mary Shelley wrote her famous novel Frankenstein as her submission for this ghost-storytelling contest. Lesser known is how these German ghost stories inspired the composition of Mary Shelley’s famous novel. This talk explores three areas of German inspiration and influence on Shelley’s Frankenstein: 1) the collection of now-mostly-forgotten German ghost stories read by the Byron-Shelley circle; 2) the German origins of the popular magic lantern ghost-shows that inspired this collection, and; 3) the Schauerliteratur scenes of Mary Shelley’s own ‘waking nightmare’ that opened her eyes ‘in terror’ and inspired her to pick up her quill and write her English literary masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Bio: Maximiliaan van Woudenberg is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Coleridge and Cosmopolitan Intellectualism 1794–1804: The Legacy of Göttingen University (2018), as well as articles and chapters on Romanticism, book history, library and reception history, Anglo-German print culture, and such Romantic-era figures as Austen, Beddoes, Byron, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley. Along with Professor Anthony Mandal, Maximiliaan is a co-editor of the online journal Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840. His current research interests focus on British and German print culture and sites of information interchange and knowledge networks during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Please register HERE.
The Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations is delighted to invite to:
Tuesday, 11th February 2020
TIME: 18:00 - 20:00
ArtsOne Lecture Theatre, Mile End campus, Queen Mary University of London
Professor Helmut J. Schneider (University of Bonn)
The Allure of the Supernatural: Heinrich von Kleist's Romantic Challenge to Enlightment Reason
Please register HERE.
On 27 November 2019, the third Thomas Mann Lecture took place at the ETH Zurich. The lecture, given by Professor Rüdiger Görner, focused on the visual media that Thomas Mann used very early and consciously for his self-representation in public as an author.
For more information and to watch the lecture (in German), please click HERE.
21 January 2020: Maximiliaan van Woudenberg (Cambridge): – Anglo-German Cosmopolitanism at the Villa Diodati in 1816
18 February 2020: Uwe Schütte (Aston University in Birmingham) – The Swastika, Autobahn and Trans Europa Express – Kraftwerk in English Perspectives
10 March 2020: Mara Delius (Die Welt, Berlin) – The meaning of reviewing literature in Britain and Germany
31 March 2020: Maike Oergel (University of Nottingham) – Britain, Germany and Brexit: The Legacy of the 19th-century ‘Germanic’
21 May 2020: Philip Oltermann (The Guardian London/Berlin) – Working as an Anglo-German ‘foreign’ correspondent
Venue: Lockkeeper’s Cottage
Time: 4-6 pm
25th October: Encountering W. Lewis’s Tarr
15th November: British Romanticism in Germany around 1910
6th December: Presentations from Research Students
31st January: Oscar Levy Nietzsche Forum. (JT)
14th February: Anglo-German transfers in the Visual Arts & Music around 1900
27th March: British-German Philosophical Discourses around 1900
22nd May: Oscar Levy Forum/Presentation from Research Students
Dr Kaltërina Latifi: Research Fellow (The Aesthetics of the Fragment)
Dr Franz Fromholzer, Forms of Literary and Discursive Styles
Dr Cecilia Muratori, Jakob Böhme Reception in the UK
Nicolas von Passavant, Poetry of the Baroque
Professor Marko Pajevic (Tartu)
Dr Heidi Liedtke, Travel Writing in the Victorian Era
Rüdiger Görner im Gespräch mit Anja Reinhardt (Deutschlandfunk Köln/Berlin)
Rücktritte, mögliche Neuwahlen und ein Gesetz gegen einen No-Deal-Brexit: Die letzte Woche sei der vorläufige Gipfel einer Implodierung der britischen Regierung gewesen, sagte der Literaturwissenschaftler Rüdiger Görner im Dlf. Vieles sei gewollt und herbeigeführt worden, auch von Premierminister Boris Johnson.
To listen click HERE.
Wie könnte ein gutes "Europa" aussehen? Antworten gibt der Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaftler Rüdiger Görner, er nimmt den Philosophen Nietzsche zur Hilfe, um sich mit dessen Bild vom guten Europäer auf Identitätssuche zu begeben.
Professor Rüdiger Görner discusses the question of European identity, the future of Europe, and its boundaries and divisions in light of the upcoming elections and political developments. Reflecting on Nietzsche's untimely philosophy - that is once again, timely - he discusses the concept of the 'good European' in relation to contemporary concerns in Europe.
[30 mins - in German]
The Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations (CAGCR) was inaugurated on 1 December 2005 by the German Ambassador, Thomas Matussek. The guest of honour for this occasion was Dr Paul Oestreicher, the Dean of Coventry Cathedral and initiator of the Dresden Trust. The CAGCR was established in order to promote the study of cultural transfers and interrelations between Britain and the German speaking world (including Austria and the German speaking parts of Switzerland).
Housed in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures within the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film as a Research Centre of the faculty for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre has three main goals: