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This article traces different literary ways of engaging with Berlin’s historical topographies in works by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aras Ören and Tomer Gardi. It regards their texts as being an integral part of the city in an on-going dialogic process. This process is deeply interwoven with the poetics of each of the authors. The concept of affective topographies proposes to think of this relation as a dynamic of affecting and being-affected. In this view, affective topographies are explicitly including historical layers, temporalities as well as ›memory gaps‹. Reading Özdamar, Ören and Gardi alongside each other, the article lines out how the texts are linked and overlap, especially with regard to Berlin time-spaces. This dialogical reading is underscoring that Berlin’s topographies as well as Berlin’s literature are social phenomena constitutively shaped and formed by processes of (post-)migration. It sets out to provide a first sketch of what could be a literary history of Berlin within the horizon of postmigrant society.

Recent years have witnessed substantial transformations of the public sphere that are driven by processes of transnationalization, migration, and digitalization and in turn significantly fuel social and political change. The public sphere continues to be the most important space where these processes and changes and their implications for social coexistence, belonging, and solidarity are debated and negotiated by various actors. Traditional views have portrayed the public sphere as a locus of language-based communicative rationality, deliberation, and the exchange of different views and arguments. The international conference Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language will question these normative conceptions and proposes to conceive of contemporary public spheres as often fragmented spaces of affective resonance that emerge from the power of language to affect and to ascribe and instill collective emotion. This is not a self-evident conjecture because most affect theories suggest to conceive of the social not primarily in terms of language, discourse and conceptual thought, but instead as an assemblage of bodies and their capacities to affect and be affected. Although this is a fruitful correction of existing bias towards overreliance on linguistic categories in the humanities and social sciences, it often oversteps the mark in its disregard for language. Language, in particular in a pragmatic sense and much like affect, is a genuinely relational category in its capacity to convey meaning. However, meaning is not restricted to propositions and denotations but critically involves connotative, associative, and bodily sources. The conference Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language therefore assumes that language not only conveys, represents, and attributes emotions, but also has the capacity to affect and to establish affective resonance, in both consonant and dissonant ways. The conference will investigate this power not only for spoken language, but also for different types of texts as the constituencies of different public spheres (including counterpublics) in which the terms and conditions of social coexistence are reflected and negotiated, for instance politics, media, and the arts. The conference focuses on issues of belonging, the recognition and accommodation of difference, equality, and solidarity and investigates how affect and emotion interfere with, undermine, or fortify established and esteemed rules of political engagement.Programme Thursday, April 27, 2017 Venue: ICI Berlin Christinenstr. 18-19, Haus 8, 10119 Berlin 18.15 Welcome and Introduction Anne Fleig & Christian von Scheve 18.30 Keynote Kathrin Röggla (Berlin) Es ist die Sprache, stupid! Affekt im öffentlichen Diskurs with simultaneous interpreting, Public Spheres of Resonance: Constellations of Affect and Language, conference, ICI Berlin, 27 April 2017

Was das Verhaltnis von Kleists ›Marionettentheater‹ zu Schiller angeht, gilt als jungster Stand der Forschung, folgt man dem ›Kleist-Handbuch‹, Ulrich Johannes Beils Einordnung von Kleists Text als »Schiller-reecriture« bzw. »›Kenosis‹ der idealistischen Asthetik«. Kleists Grazie-Begriff wird als provokativer Gegensatz zu Schillers ›Ueber Anmuth und Wurde‹ (1793) und ›Ueber die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen‹ (1795) gelesen sowie als »Aushohlung der Schiller’schen Grazie und ihrer ›deutschen‹ Commercium-mentis-et-corporis -Konzeption «, d.h. der von der Descartes zugeschriebenen ›Trennung‹ in res cogitans und res extensa ausgehenden Frage, wie die ›Gemeinschaft‹, aber auch der › Umgang‹ / ›Verkehr‹ zwischen dem Korperlichen und dem Geistigen mithin zwischen ›Natur‹ und ›Kultur‹ zu denken seien.

Die Dissertation untersucht die Wechselwirkungen von emanzipatorischen Einstellungen und modischem Erscheinungsbild der „Neuen Frau“ in der Weimarer Republik. Sie zeigt, inwiefern die Bilder dieses neuen Frauentyps dem historischen Konzept einer „Neuen Frau“ zum Durchbruch verhelfen. Deutlich wird aber auch, dass die rasche Popularität dieses Frauenbildes seinen ursprünglich auf gesellschaftliche Veränderung zielenden Gehalt veräußerlicht.Kessemeier’s dissertation deals with the complicated relations between early feminist ideas and images of the “new woman” in the German twenties. Kesselmeier shows the role which visual images played in making the historical concept of a “new woman” popular. She documents that the immediate popularity of this image was related to contemporary societal changes but that the final product, the “new woman,” focused on form (physical appearance) rather than content.

Die Dissertation untersucht die Wechselwirkungen von emanzipatorischen Einstellungen und modischem Erscheinungsbild der „Neuen Frau“ in der Weimarer Republik. Sie zeigt, inwiefern die Bilder dieses neuen Frauentyps dem historischen Konzept einer „Neuen Frau“ zum Durchbruch verhelfen. Deutlich wird aber auch, dass die rasche Popularität dieses Frauenbildes seinen ursprünglich auf gesellschaftliche Veränderung zielenden Gehalt veräußerlicht., querelles-net, Nr. 7 (2002): Literaturwissenschaften I