Bertinoro, 16/23 September 2007
SCANDAL
See the participants
Skandalöse Erscheinungen:
Teufel, Monster, Unholde
Unser Seminar befasst sich mit Figuren, die schon durch ihre Anwesenheit, und nicht erst durch ihr Verhalten, Skandale bewirken und unsere gewohnte Lebenswelt in Frage stellen. Oft zeichnet bereits ihr äusseres Erscheinungsbild sie als hybride Geschöpfe aus, deren Wesen sich jedem Versuch einer dauerhaften Klassifizierung widersetzt. Trotz ihrer offensichtlichen Andersartigkeit, drängen sich diese Figuren förmlich in unsere Alltagswelt, wo ihre Anwesenheit oft tragische Folgen hat. Problematisch erscheint insbesondere jedes eindeutige moralische Werturteil: einerseits bestärkt die Anwesenheit von Teufeln, Monstern und Unholden unsere Sehnsucht nach einer klaren Trennung von Gut und Böse, andererseits lässt sie uns aber erkennen, dass das Böse und Hässliche nicht als selbständige Kategorie verstanden werden kann. Skandale, welche auf diese Weise entstehen, sind deshalb oft in besonderem Masse öffentlich. Im Verhalten des Anderen lassen sich die Ängste und Ziele einer ganzen Gesellschaft erkennen.
Texte :
Presenze scandalose:
il diavolo, il mostro, il nemico
Il seminario prenderà in esame alcuni personaggi la cui semplice presenza, al di là di azioni specifiche, è sufficiente a creare scandalo. Ci interrogheremo sulla loro natura ibrida: costruiti come totalmente “altri”, questi personaggi tendono invece a invadere lo spazio quotidiano e a stravolgerne le regole, spesso con conseguenze tragiche. La loro presenza suscita impulsi contrastanti: da un lato la tentazione di distinguere nettamente fra bene e male, dall’altro l’oscura consapevolezza che il maligno non è una categoria a sè stante. Lo scandalo creato da questi personaggi ha quindi anche un significato pubblico: nei loro gesti e nelle loro azioni si rispecchiano spesso le paure e le preoccupazione di una società intera.
Testi :
Scandalous presence:
devils, monsters and fiends
In this seminar we will look at characters whose mere presence creates scandal, and reflect on their inherently hybrid nature. Despite their apparent status as absolute “others”, these characters regularly invade the spaces of everyday life and subvert its rules, often with tragic results. Their presence prompts contradictory reactions: on the one hand, the desire to enforce a categorical distinction between good and evil, on the other an obscure awareness that “evil” is never an isolated and self-defining category. The scandal provoked by devils, monsters and fiends is therefore inherently public: in their behaviour, one often sees a reflection of the fears and concerns of a whole society.
Texts:
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil, 1808
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, 1818 / 1831
- Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel, 1959
- Michail Bulgakow, Master i Margarita, 1966-67
- J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999
Seminar in German
Held by
Florian Mussgnug
University College London
Florian Mussgnug teaches Italian and Comparative Literature at University College London. Born in Germany, he graduated in Philosophy and Italian at Balliol College, University of Oxford. From 2000 until 2004 he was a graduate student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.
He is a member of the excecutive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and of the Réseau Européen d'Etudes Littéraires Comparées (REELC) as well as editor of “Contemporanea. Rivista di Studi sulla letteratura e sulla comunicazione”. He writes for "The Times Literary Supplement”, “Italian Studies”, “The Modern Language Review” and “Forum for Modern Languages Studies”. In London he works with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies (IGRS) and the Italian Cultural Institute. Main research interests: experimental literature and avant-garde culture; literary theory and philosophy of language; theories of postmodernism; literature and ethics.
Tutor
Matteo Colombi
Matteo Colombi (Bergamo, 1978) is concluding his Ph.D. in Literary Genres at the University of L’Aquila and in Western Slavonic Literature at the Universität Leipzig. The title of his research project is:
Historical and Literary Space in Comparison. Prague and Trieste 1919-1939 and the subject is the literary representation of these two Middle European centres after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The core of the analysis is the theme “literature/national identity” (Czech, Hebrew and German literature in Prague, Italian, Hebrew and Slovene literature in Trieste). Matteo took part as student (and actor) in Synapsis 2001, 2002 and 2003 and published in Quaderni di Synapsis an essay on Kafka (La giustizia con le ali ai piedi, in Cospirazioni, Trame edited by S. Micali) and one on Benjamin (Walter Benjamin fra contaminazione e redenzione in Contaminazione edited by P.Zanotti). In other articles for Italian and foreign reviews he dealt with the Czech, Italian, Sloven and German literature of Middle Europe and with the theoretical problem of the relationship between ideology and historiography. He is now working at the project Literature and Visual Culture: from the Pre-photographic Age to the Age of Cinema from the universities of L’Aquila, Bologna and Palermo, in which he studies the theme “flânerie and visualità” and takes part in the organization of a conference in L’Aquila. At the University of L’Aquila he gave also some seminars for the student (on Prague, on the Czech, French and Italian Avant-garde) and he is working together with some students at a didactic project for the high school classes which go to visit Prague (title of the project Prague: Enchanting?). In Leipzig he works at the research institute Geistwissenschaftliches Zentrum Ostmitteleuropas at the interdisciplinary project Cultural spaces of interference on multilingual Middle European regions. His subject is the representation of Karst in the Italian and Slovene literature of the 20th century.