This talk will examine the short life of German naturalism through a look at the early work of Arno Holz. More even than his literary heroes Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen, Holz draws on a particular aesthetics of presence with roots in the theater’s placing of real bodies on a real stage in real time. However, Holz’s writings also actively work to destroy any sense of the auratic quality of such presence — not to mention, of art as “Verklärung,” as proposed by the practitioners of German realism and pugnaciously argued against by Holz in his own theoretical works. This talk will examine both the weirdness and the prescience of Holz’s attempts at an anti-apotheotic art in the context of the era’s debates around naturalism vis-à-vis realism, looking also at the fraught legacy of the theater in Germany and the residues of the Baroque stage on the cusp of literary modernism.

Weitzman's book Irony’s Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition (Northwestern University Press, 2015) explores the crucial but largely neglected role of the comic and its relation to irony in German-language literature from the Romantic era to the early twentieth century, through an examination of the works of Robert Walser, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth, and theories of comedy in Freud, Hegel, and others.

She is also co-editor and contributing author of the volume Suspensionen. Über das Untote (Fink, forthcoming), which considers “the undead” as a figure that challenges not only the life/death binary but also the regimes of knowledge that this structures.

Her current project, tentatively titled “At the Limit of the Obscene: Realism, Profanation, Aesthetics,” deals with how the concept of obscenity relates to questions of representation, perception, and knowledge in nineteenth-century German and European realism and beyond.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Germanic Languages & Literatures at 734-764-8018 or germandept@umich.edu at least one week in advance.