Inspired by the mass circulation of environmentalist discourse around 1970, many European fiction writers became preoccupied with visions of empty, silent landscapes in which no humans remain. German-language fiction of the 1970s frequently envisioned desertified, depopulated landscapes that signified the destruction wrought by industrial society, consumerism, and militarism. The literary imagination of these spaces is marked by a tension: A narrator attempts to describe a landscape that is devoid of human voices, lending voice to these silent, empty spaces and thus shattering their silence. This seminar, based on a book project about the representation of ecological crisis in German literature after 1968, will explore the peculiar aesthetics and ethics of describing post-human spaces.
Paul Buchholz is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Scripps College. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2010 and was Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow in the German Department at New York University in 2010-11. A scholar of 20th- and 21st-century German fiction, he is particularly interested in the intersection of narrative poetics and social theory. He is currently finishing his first monograph, “Private Anarchy: Monologue and Impossible Community in German Experimental Fiction,” which considers how nihilist, “hyperconscious” monologue became a medium for envisioning social solidarity in the prose of Thomas Bernhard, Wolfgang Hilbig, and Franz Kafka. His academic writing has appeared in TRANSIT, the Journal of Austrian Studies, Thomas Bernhard Jahrbuch, and Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook.
Faculty seminars run from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m.
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