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The Institute for German Cultural Studies is a research-oriented initiative designed both to recognize extraordinary cross-disciplinary strengths in the study of German culture at Cornell University and to foster cutting-edge scholarly exchange pertaining to the interdisciplinary study of German culture from the medieval era to the present.
In his 1967 essay, “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” Martin Heidegger explores the ways in which “the speaker Zarathustra is an ‘advocate’—a Fürsprecher.” Yet Heidegger, like most of the scholars who sought to identify the role of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, never bothered to examine who Zarathustra was in the first place. A deeper examination of this question…
Ari Linden’s research intervenes in debates within Marx scholarship about the status of Marx’s Grundrisse (1857-1858), and more specifically, about the philosophical and intellectual-historical value of Marx’s views on machinery and technology expressed therein. Qualifying and challenging the prominent view that the Grundrisse offers a suspiciously “utopian” vision of technology (Heinrich, Saito) and thus that…
Thomas Wild’s research and writing in progress gravitate around the question how to read Hannah Arendt’s writing ‘in more than one language’? Arendt published practically her entire work both in English and German, often translated or re-written by herself. Arendt’s texts are further shaped by intense dialogs with quotations, inserts, and mottos in other modern…
The realization that monolingualism is not the norm but the exception—or, more radically, that “there is no such thing as a monolingual text” (Till Dembeck)—has posed new opportunities, but also new challenges for the study of literary multilingualism. Scholars now read purportedly monolingual texts through the lens of multilingualism, but at the risk of broadening…
Whether in fantasies about origins or stories about conflicting family emotions, whether in the desire for enrichment or in the examination of traditions: the theme of inheritance is inexhaustible in literature. In his presentation, Stefan Willer examined how these topics are addressed in contemporary German literature. To this end, he outlined some of the current…
Location: Klarman Hall, 155
Location: Big Red Barn
Location: Big Red Barn
Location: Big Red Barn
Location: Big Red Barn
