Professor Strowick’s lecture develops a concept of the real as perceived reality that nevertheless detaches perception from the subject and links it to a specific form of organization: the aggregate.
On Monday, Feb. 1, at 6: 30 p.m. Deutsches Haus at NYU and the NYU German Department present Aggregates of the Real, a talk by Professor Elisabeth Strowick of Johns Hopkins University. The event, free and open to the public, takes place at Deutsches Haus, located at 42 Washington Mews, New York, N.Y. (enter the Mews from University Place). If you would like to attend this event, please send an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. As space is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event to ensure you get a good seat.
Before the backdrop of the epistemological break in the relationship of perception and reality that takes place in Goethe’s Farbenlehre [Theory of Colors], Professor Strowick’s lecture develops a concept of the real as perceived reality that nevertheless detaches perception from the subject and links it to a specific form of organization: the aggregate. In readings of Goethe and Stifter, the aggregate is addressed as a serial-dynamic configuration and analyzed in terms of its aesthetic, epistemological, and poetological dimension. Goethe and Stifter’s aggregates of perception bring forth an aesthetic of appearing/disappearing, occur in the form of pluralized gazes as well as perceptions permeating one another. This talk will explore the consequences of this spectrum of perceptual events for the epistemology of realism: in the medium of perception, the real appears as simulacrum, revenant, and mimicry.
Elisabeth Strowick received her PhD from the University of Hamburg in 1998 and her venia legendi (habilitation) in German literature and literary theory from the University of Basel in 2005. She has taught modern German literature and held several academic positions at universities throughout the United States (Yale, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt), Germany (Hamburg, Greifswald, Trier, Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, Berlin) and Switzerland (Basel, Zurich). From 2004–06, she held a Feodor Lynen fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation. In 2012, she was a visiting professor at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Free University of Berlin.