pre-reading in English available on request

U-M Germanic Languages & Literatures Winter Colloquium

Friday March 16, 2018

2:00-4:00 PM

Room 3308 Modern Languages Building

Peter McIsaac's essay (available on request in advance) analyses Gottfried Benn’s 1912 Morgue und andere Gedichte (Morgue and other poems) in terms of exhibition. Beyond situating the poems alongside public displays of bodies in morgues and specimens and models used in medical schools and popular anatomy exhibitions of Benn’s day, the essay also uses concepts from Mieke Bal’s Double Exposures to illuminate how the poems themselves operate in exhibitory terms. With this approach, the Morgue poems become comprehensible as configurations of material objects that can be visited in the mind’s eye and that stand in critical relationship to popular exhibits and urban culture around 1900.

Peter McIsaac is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Michigan Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. His most recent publication, "Medical Collections and Medical Education at the University of Michigan,” appeared in the 2017 volume Object Lessons and the Formation of Knowledge. The University of Michigan Museums, Libraries and Collections, 1817–2017, eds. Kerstin Barndt and Carla Sinopoli. His article "'Es schmeckt nach Kino': Provocative Display and Gestures of Exposure in and around Gottfried Benn’s Morgue und andere Gedichte" is forthcoming in German Studies Review.

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