CURE out and about with Christiane Solte-Gresser
WHEN
—
WHERE
University of Bielefeld
LANGUAGE
GERMAN
PROGRAMME
Under the auspices of the Norbert Elias Lectures, CURE director Christiane Solte-Gresser will deliver a lecture entitled “Dreams and Reparation”, together with a master class on “Shoes – Worn Out and New: Narrating as a Cultural Practice of Reparation”.
Public lecture: “Dreams and Reparation”
Accounts of dreams constitute an important part of our knowledge of the Shoah. For survivors, they often function as a strategy for continuing to live: the dream’s uncertain status of reality, the idiosyncratic way in which its aesthetics condenses experience into unsettling images, its ambiguity, and the bodily sensations involved in dreaming make it a narrative mode that counters the “unsayability” of the Shoah. The lecture asks how survivors use dreams to confront the irreparable, exploring the reparative potential of dreaming and its contribution to contemporary memory politics.
Master class: “Shoes – Worn-Out and New. Narrating as a Cultural Practice of Reparation”
Objects that have been repaired are no longer the same; repair leaves traces. But how should we respond when damage is irreparable? Cultural practices grapple with questions about what cannot be repaired. In the seminar, we will read two texts that engage, through a focus on worn-out shoes, with the Shoah from the perspective of memory politics: N. Ginzburg’s essay “The Worn-Out Shoes” and E Keret’s short story “Shoes”. These texts demonstrate the extent to which narrating constitutes a necessary complement to financial, legal, and technical attempts at reparation.
The Norbert Elias Lectures feature two invited scholars each semester who have distinguished themselves internationally through outstanding research in the humanities and social sciences, and whose questions and theoretical approaches have shaped scholarly discourse beyond disciplinary boundaries. The series focuses on phenomena intertwined with literature and art, history and politics.
More information about the lecture series is available here.
