On November 30, 2018, Professor Samuel Frederick (Penn State University), a graduate of Cornell’s graduate program in German Studies, brought this year’s colloquium series to a close with his talk on “Collecting. A Poetics,” which drew on his current book-project tentatively titled “The Redemption of Things: Collecting as a Poetics in German Realism and Modernism.” The paper, which spurred a lively discussion, focused on collecting as a theory and praxis of poetics. In his introductory remarks, Frederick noted how one of his theoretical points of departure was the Aristotelian claim that “man is the living being to which collecting belongs.” While Frederick’s focus was on the phenomenon of collecting as represented in literature, the reference to Aristotle made it clear that his concern with a poetics of collecting also has more fundamental anthropological implications. According to Frederick, the study of collecting “moves away from the sphere of the museum, archive or bourgeois interior, where actual objects are gathered from safe-guarding and memorialization,” and extends instead “to the combined and conflicting logics of gathering and conservation as they are worked out in a number of different areas of human activity.” In sum, Frederick stressed collecting as an activity and a practical endeavor that moves beyond a narrow focus on the collected objects as the exclusive site of meaning.
During the event graduate students and faculty responded to Frederick’s paper with a number of critical questions and remarks, especially about the political stakes of Frederick’s project in a larger cosmopolitan framework. At issue was how collecting relates to political discourses that inform and guide not just the choice of objects that make up the collected archive but also the ways in which collecting itself operates. This in turn raised the question of how theories and practices of collecting might provide insight into the ways in which communities engage with and imagine the past, present, and future. (Søren Larsen)
