10th Annual Graduate Student Conference
Department of German
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, Wisconsin
March 28-29, 2008

Recognizing (Dis)Order

Ist alles in Ordnung?  Muss Ordnung sein?  Herrscht hier Ordnung?  Erhält Ordnung die Welt?  In the 10th Annual Graduate Student Conference of the German and Dutch Graduate Students’ Association at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we will explore the concept of order and its inevitable subversion and disruption in German and Dutch literature, culture and language.  How is structure conceived of, implemented, and regulated?  How do individuals negotiate between conformity, resistance and rebellion in both the private and the public sphere?  How does the concept of order regulate literary and artistic production?  How do we approach and receive the apparent order in texts?  How is language structured, regulated and changed?

The relationship between order and disorder can be seen as both reciprocal and dialectic.  One could perhaps describe civilization in terms of human beings’ attempts to invent and impose order upon chaos.  Religions, rituals, scientific and philosophical systems, social structures, and narratives such as myths, folktales and fairy tales all represent efforts to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable world.  History, itself an invented narrative assigned to the confusion of the past, provides us with many instances of the creation and destruction of order.  The shift away from the social and ideological authority of theology in the 18th century is one such example.  Yet as the individual gained freedom to establish his or her own order, new uncertainties arose, resulting in hope as well as despair, as evidenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s famous Kant-Krise.  In our century, feminist thinking has problematized the notion of the progression of new order out of old.  As we are now very much aware, power relationships are also always implicated in the formation of order and when distinguishing order from disorder.

Keynote Lecture

David Fertig: “Too Many Priests in Kafka’s Temple: How Speakers, Linguists, and
Prescriptivists ‘Do Things With Junk’”

We are very pleased to have David Fertig as the keynote speaker for our conference. Dr. Fertig is an
associate professor of linguistics at SUNY-Buffalo where he is also director of the German language program. He has a wide range of teaching and academic interests, including historical linguistics, language pedagogy, German media and culture studies.

Reflecting the diverse research interests of the Department of German, this conference will feature the following panels on literature, cultural studies, linguistics and Second Language Acquisition:

Friday, March 28
Memorial Library, Room 126 (West Corridor)
728 State Street

4:00- 5:15 Keynote Lecture

5:45- 6:45 Panel I. Collapse and Regeneration

Donald Backman (University of California, Berkeley): Herr Lehmann and
the Kerouacian Myth of Enlightenment

Thomas Bäumler (Brown University): “Aus dem Nichts geht immer eine
neue Schöpfung hervor.” Schleiermacher’s Theory of Crisis and the
Re-Invention of Christianity

7:30 Conference Dinner

Saturday, March 29
Union South [TBA]
277 North Randall Avenue

9:00-10:30 Panel II. Questioning Medieval Order

Rose Rittenhouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Empirical Evidence
and Moral Instruction in Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur

Tyler Luiten and Mike Olson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): A noun
class in disarray? On the status of the –iz/-az stems in Old High German

Angela Bagwell and Kristin Speth (University of Wisconsin-Madison):
The Development of Umlaut in Old High German Feminine i-Stems:
Searching for Order in a Complex System

11:00- 12:30 Panel III. Institutional Narratives / Narrative as Institution

Tyler Hafen (Indiana University, Bloomington): Adalbert Stifter’s Trouble
with Order

Paul Buchholz (Cornell University): “in irgendeiner Anstalt”: Musil’s
Törleß as a Novel of the Instituion

Regina McConaghy (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Disorderly Narration: The Danger of Telling Tales in Faschinger’s Die neue Scheherazade

2:30- 3:30 Panel IV. Language, Time and Space

Charlie Webster (University of Wisconsin-Madison): A Study in Order:
The Acquisition of Verbal Forms in German as a Second Language

Renee Remy (University of Wisconsin-Madison): Mistaken Identity:
Language Contact in the Alsace-Lorrain Region

4:00- 5:00 Panel V. Turning Points in 18th Century Thought

Johannes Schlegel (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München): Die
(Un)Ordnung des Bösen

Steve Krause (University of Wisconsin-Madison): The Copernican
Tern: Kant, Formal Causes, and the Third Critique

5:00 Closing Remarks

7:00pm Conference Reception
1243 Jenifer Street

This conference is made possible by the generous support from the Department of German, Department of Linguistics, Department of Comparative Literature, Center for German and European Studies, University Lecture Committee, and the UW Anonymous Fund.

Click here to download the conference program

Last update: March 24, 2008
German and Dutch Graduate Students Association