German at UVA

The uprising in Charlottesville really does represent a shift in university budget politics.  Rather than everyone watching as the small departments get axed, and hoping that they will not be next, the entire university, from the President on down, stood up in favor of preserving a coherent Liberal Arts curriculum.  

The German and Classics departments would have been the usual budget cutting targets.  Venerable and stocked with high grade professors the UVA German department is, yet we would have all been signing online petitions to save the program had it not been for the principles of the university’s president and the fact that everyone else at the University of Virginia defended the larger principle rather than watch the humanities get chopped off like some failing corporation.

Colleges and Nobel Prize Winners: Herta Müller at Dickinson College

     Last week Herta Müller gave a reading at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, about two hours drive from here. So five of us piled into a minivan and set off across the rolling hills, not quite singing songs but definitely in a good mood as our classes were done and our papers corrected. With the semester just behind us, a road trip to see a Nobel laureate seemed like an adventure we could afford.

     Dickinson has wonderful eighteenth-century buildings. The campus is compact and lovely, the old stone buildings set within a few feet of each other. Graduation was about to unfurl and the town was filled with excited parents. Carlisle has a string of classy restaurants and they all seemed to hold cheerful families circled around one beaming youngster. The undergraduates were different than the lot I usually encounter. The women were polished and artsy; the men soft and thoughtful. Not an athlete in sight.

     At Penn State all you ever hear about Dickinson College is that the law school is wandering over to University Park, but after strolling along the historic center of Carlisle, I thought it might be more pleasant if Penn State moved in next to Dickinson College. But to the main event: Herta Müller was visiting Dickinson to receive an honorary degree and to participate in the commencement activities. Her connection to the place reaches back to the 1990s when she was a writer in residence there, at a time when she was by no means expected to win the Nobel prize, when she was known only to a handful of professional critics who included Romanian German writers in their portfolio.

      Now her great novel, Atemschaukel, has appeared in a fine English translation as The Hunger Angel, and the edgy artist who used to bristle easily was on her US tour, Harvard, Chicago, Carlisle, PA. Dickinson College chose well, not just the faculty who invited Herta Müller, but also the administration who sustained the relationship over many years.

     Sitting in a state-of-the art lecture hall, packed with attentive listeners, I was reminded of the other Nobel prize winners that I had heard speak at little, well-endowed colleges. Colleges seem better equipped to handle the delicate relationships inherent to artistic patronage. Back in the late 80s, I listened to Seamus Heaney read from Station Island in another well-built lecture hall at Bucknell College. Ostensibly I was at Bucknell for an academic conference on Romanticism, so I wondered who this wavy haired Irishman was who kept alluding to Wordsworth as if he were a peer—even the grandest English professor does not compare his writing with such a canonical figure. Then as the poems rolled out, my epiphany commenced, and for years thereafter, I would read Heaney and see him speak with an eager desire to relive the wonder of first hearing him speak his own poems. Several times I heard him in New York swaggering in front of a large audience with fellow poets on the stage, my delirium continued, but always with a sense that the Bucknell reading, quiet and elegant, was the most wonderous.

      Hearing Herta Müller at Dickinson brought out that college delight at literature, but almost in reverse. I had heard her before in high-profile events in Berlin where all sorts of luminaries huddled around the bar until late in the evening. Now in Dickinson, the audience was a little more naïve, but it was a real pleasure to hear the nervous undergraduates ask their questions. For well-heeled colleges with their intimate seclusion train students to believe that if they listen and read carefully enough, then they will be able to speak with the smartest people in the world. The close reading techniques that Liberal Arts colleges teach their students build in them a reservoir of confidence, that allows them to tip toe up to a Nobel laureate, unafraid to ask their modest question, so that they may then receive the sharp, swift answer from a foreign writer unfamiliar with privilege.

What gets left out of digital humanities?

Digital Humanities is taking off and well it should.  The potential is tremendous and there seem to more new, wonderful resources to be discovered everyday.  Documents and books that were once locked away in a remote castle under Communist rule are now readily accessible through the internet.  You can access the info without having to travel to a specific site, that reduces the adventure but it improves the ability to mull over the info.  Here is today’s find:  http://www.dariah.eu/index.php

As the digital networks expand, we might bear a few limitations in mind:

Starting off on an epistemological scale, we can point out that there are limits to digital humanities in terms of the interface between the digital network and our sensory perception. The two systems do not directly align, thus there are many bodily perceptions that cannot be replicated digitally, for example the haptic experience of other bodies and space.  Digital reinforces sight and sound over touch, smell and taste. 

How the information is indexed will shape its use, the example of montage and editing in film show clearly that the arrangement of images alters our understanding: chop info up into small units that alternate or deliver info in long theme related streams and you will alter how the info is understood.  Does digital humanities want to deliver fragments or an epic narrative?   

What will become of culture that does not have a digital platform?  Well-endowed nations will replicate their culture digitally, others will not.  Certain art forms—music will quickly adapt, others not.  Will cultural info be processed into a similar format, so, for example, will all north African music be produced to sound appealing to Western consumers sitting at a screen?

Already back in the 1980s, switching to digital meant losing certain sounds,  you don’t have to be a music snob to know that Jimi Hendrix sounds better on vinyl than on CD

Will digital humanities respond and transmit those cultural artefacts that fit its format while neglecting those that cannot be transmitted?

Will digital humanities networks allow a mixture of institutions to participate so that not just nation states or elite universities are involved, but that smaller scale organizations without the same internal controls and restraints will also be able to join, will an avant-garde theater group be able to participate as well as the government cultural institute?

Evening reading at the end of the semester

Found a wonderful web site put out by the Morgan Library of its holdings, a nice digital resource.  They give ordinary websters the opportunity to leaf through rare Flemish art works.  Tonight I am perusing a Book of Hours by Simon Bening, an early sixteenth century miniaturist from Ghent-Brugges.

http://www.medievalbooksofhours.com/links.html

For those of us unschooled in Flemish art history, it is easy to spot the connection to Vermeer through the way in which domestic spaces are depicted.  One main room is shown with people engaged in ordinary household activities and in the background there is a doorway opening into another lighted room in the back.  The eyes movement from this room to the one in the back uses perspective without relying on a natural landscape.

Then another page shows the connection between Flemish painting and Albrecht Dürer.  Bening’s sad-faced Salvator Mundi reminds me of Dürer’s intense self portrait.  From one face to another the internet lets you slide, and as more archival and rare book material becomes available on the web, the easier it becomes to more from one visual memory to the other.  The connection between Dürer and Salvator Mundi is of course a familiar one, but how easily we can confirm it now.

In the midst of this late night contemplation comes an email announcing the death of Richard Sheirich, a German professor at Pomona, 84 years old, did not know him but he looks a bit like Ben Kingsley in Hugo.

http://www.pomona.edu/news/2011/12/13-richard-sheirich.aspx

All this hangs together as the internet brings us the private views from devotional pages to the news of a colleague's death, someone we have never met before tonight.

Waking up from the Dream

Rude awakenings, when sleepers awake from a long dream they are often angry,

This happened to the PSU students who rioted after Paterno was fired.  They were distressed that his exit was swift and disgraceful, but they were also more broadly angry that the football myth had been betrayed from within.  They attacked the messenger, a media truck, --the medium that had fed them the illusion was now blamed for its demise.  They were not initially angry about Sandusky’s crimes, rather they were upset that their “college experience” had been spoiled.

“Awakening as a graduated process that goes on in the life of the individual as in that of a generation.  Sleep is its initial stage.  A generation’s experience of youth has much in common with the experience of dreams.” 

 --Walter Benjamin, note on the Arcades Project

By no means is this desire to keep dreaming confined to students or the young.  This week’s Time magazine cover shows directly how American readers generally are encouraged to worry about staying in their dreamy beds rather than listening to the rumbling outside.

Pederasty and Football

Just because you don’t follow football much and have been to only one game since you got here, doesn’t get you off the hook.  There is the horror at reading the wrenching details of crimes committed where you work.  Sorrow for the children put through awful misery.  That’s enough to send you into despair, without the mythic grandstanding that sports fandom creates.  You work at a place, you have to take responsibility for the bad things that happen there, even if you had nothing to do with them.  Yet that does not mean you have to accept collective guilt either.  One way to negotiate the distance between individual and group guilt is through critique.  So here goes.

Too much about the response to the pederasty reported at Penn State has revolved around the collective “we.”  Even the remorseful public gestures for the victims have the feel of one giant narcissistic ego convulsively seeking redemption.  When the real problem is the collective “we” in the first place.  We should not be such a “we.”   We should be individuals pursuing an education, not some vast horde chanting in unison.

The big hype surrounding the football program is what got those boys into the locker room with an old pervert in the first place.  They were in awe of the players and coach, so much so that they could be lured into awful situations. 

It is belief in the goodness and power of football that now leaves fans and players unable to fathom what happened.  Just look at the stammering of ex-football players, incapable of explaining how Sandusky could do such terrible things.  Blind faith is what leads to such speechless incoherence and rage.

The collective shock that Penn State has gone through this last week must lead to more critical thinking, to a complete re-evaluation of the college sports machine.  We cannot cure or undo the crimes by coming up with one giant collective act of atonement.  The crimes were a result of the disjuncture between our collective image and the terrible interests of one person.  The Sandusky case shows how the myth can be used for sick personal interests regardless whether they contradict the public image.  The collective “we” cannot solve the crime, nor prevent some future crime.  Individuals need to act on their own in defiance of what is good for the program.  They have to stop thinking for the team and instead think for themselves.  For as everyone who has seen the time line published in the papers, everyone who has read the one mother’s anguish that no one stepped into stop the rapes, it is perfectly clear that it was the breakdown of such personal moral decision making that caused the crimes to go on unabated.

Instead of acting as a group, we have to think for ourselves and abandon the Dionysian frenzy that sweeps across every weekend.   We have to dismantle the collective myth of football, understand that the game is an entertainment, rather than a higher calling.  Otherwise, more rot and corruption, more provincial self-congratulation at our own awesomeness will lead to some further yet unimagined abuse.  A university is a collection of individuals thinking rationally and critically for themselves—that is the definition of Enlightenment which, in the end, is not a team sport.

Goethe in Love

The cinematic event of the decade approaches.  Who can fathom the mixed emotions, the excitement, the worry--all evoked by this new film, a new sexy cinematic adaptation of Die Leiden des jungen Goethes.  Run to the movie theater now!  You will be showing this film to your students for years to come.

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/younggoetheinlove/

Germany 1772 - the young and tumultuous Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Alexander Fehling) aspires to be a poet; but after failing his law exams, he is sent by his father (Henry Huebchen) to a sleepy provincial court to mend his ways. Unsure of his talent and eager to prove himself, Goethe soon wins the praise and friendship of his superior Kestner (Moritz Bleibtreu). But then Lotte (Miriam Stein) enters his life and nothing is the same as before. However, the young lovers are unaware that her father has already promised Lotte's hand to another man. Director Phillip Stoelzl returns to the very wellspring of Romanticism - Goethe's loosely autobiographical masterpiece The Sorrows of Young Werther - and conjures up a beguiling and refreshingly innocent period romance.