Brown-bag discussion with Professor Anita Traninger, Sept 13, 12-1pm

Anita Traninger, a professor at the Freie Universität in Berlin, is visiting the German Department and will hold an informal brown-bag discussion and Q/A on Sept 13 from noon to 1pm (3401 Dwinelle) to discuss what that field of Rhetoric is like in Germany and in Europe, both as a discipline and as an interdisciplinary research area.

Prof. Traninger is also a participant in Temporal Communities, a research cluster that invites graduate student participation from across the world. So, if you are curious about the one and/or interested in the latter, please come.

Everyone is invited. Please feel free to bring your lunch along with your questions. 

If you cannot join us for lunch, please consider the following of Prof. Traninger’s events:

“The Unwanted Reader: Towards a Theory of Literary Resonance in a Global Perspective”

A theory of literary resonance has to reckon with the unwanted reader: a potentially uncongenial reader, one who is not imagined at the moment of writing–indeed the default in global literary relations. Against Nietzsche’s portrayal of unwanted readers as “chubby, clumsy souls” who “torture the author”, Prof. Traninger will draw on substantial pairings – La Fontaine and Paul Valéry, Novalis and Jorge Luis Borges, Murasaki Shikibu and Virginia Woolf – to highlight a neglected mode of (mis)reading that in fact safeguards the connectivity of literature across time and space.