Thursday, April 15, 1-8 p.m.
13:00 Lectures Insa Wilke and Florian Baranyi
Insa Wilke (Berlin): Wrestling with Setz. Rereading Setz.
Again and again, literary critics hear the question: Have you ever made a mistake? Many can then name a literary work that they read very differently today than when it was first published. With this in mind, Insa Wilke turns to her reading of "Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes" from 2011 and that of "Der Trost rundder Dinge" almost a decade later. Was that wrestling back then? A misreading? Moralism? - Conjectures about the connection between reading and life as a reflection of Clemens Setz's texts.
Florian Baranyi (Vienna): "I have long since stopped following the story mode": digression and perception in W.G. Sebald and Clemens J. Setz
In W.G. Sebald and Clemens J. Setz we encounter two different modes of uneconomic narration. While in Sebald's case it is the mode of digression that keeps the narrative going, especially in "The Rings of Saturn", and makes it revolve around a traumatic center, in Setz's literature a displaced, often strange perception (aisthesis) is at work. Both forms of writing are opposed to a narrative economy and thus also to an economically based narrative of life. The contribution explores how Sebald and Setz produce forms of dissidence and disruption through their poetics of uneconomic narration.
15:00 Lectures by Karla Mäder and Iris Hermann
Karla Mä der (Graz): Setz konkret: theater work with the uncanny.
For about six years, theaters have welcomed Clemens J. Setz with open arms. Some 20 productions of short and full-length plays are a proud record for the "career changer" in the theater. The lecture considers the specifics of Setz's plays in the context of concrete theater work in the field of tension between two poles - on the one hand the surprising simplicity of the author, which makes the work easy, on the other hand the complexity of the texts themselves, which makes them difficult (and appealing).
Iris Hermann (Bamberg): On the consolation of narrative in Clemens J. Setz.
Clemens Setz's texts expand our perception, they tell of bizarrely acting figures who remind us that the real is only conceivable as a world that reckons with the surreal. His characters often only find their way around here to a limited extent; the texts often tell of their efforts to master their existence. In doing so, their vulnerability comes to light. That's what I'm interested in here: What does storytelling do to confront it? Can the stories on the edge of the imaginable provide comfort? If so, where can comfort be found and how is it given in the stories (including other earlier texts)?
17:00 Lectures by Kalina Kupczynska and Klaus Kastberger
Kalina Kupczynska (Lodz):Poetics of (not always round) things: thing-power in the narratives of Clemens J. Setz.
In her study Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things (2010), Jane Bennett discovers worlds of things that develop a vibrancy independent of human will. She talks about metals, bacteria, electricity and waste - and suggests that the separation between the human and the non-human, between human agency and inanimate matter, considerably narrows the perspective on reality. I would like to consider Bennett's proposal to use anthropomorphizing against anthropocentrism as a possible guide through a poetics of things by Clemens J. Setz, using a few stories from the volumes Der Trost runder Dinge and Die Liebe zur Zeit Mahlstädter Kind.
Klaus Kastberger (Graz): Science Fiction of the Present. Times, things and media in the work of Clemens J. Setz
In what time do we find ourselves when we read Clemens J. Setz and in what place? Is it Graz or a virtual space where the protagonists of these texts reside? Is it the present that they inhabit or an anticipated future? Things and media are complexly intertwined in this literature, and the order of time is confused. The present appears here as if viewed from the future and memory is also an experiment.
19:00 CLEMENS J. SETZ in conversation with students of German studies
With: Yasmin Al-Yazdi, Hannah Bönisch, Anna Hengstberger, Tamara Markel, Johanna Niedermair, Lisa Plattner and Rebecca Wallner.
Moderation: David J. Wimmer