- Fatima Naqvi, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler
WHY WE NEED AUSTRIAN LITERATURE
A CONVERSATION WITH WENDELIN SCHMIDT-DENGLER AND FATIMA NAQVI
MONDAY SEPTEMBER 29, 7 PM
In 2004, when the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Elfriede Jelinek as the first Austrian writer ever to receive it, many critics said it was long overdue recognition for Austrian literature as a whole. Austria's literary production throughout the 20th century has indeed been quite astounding for such a small country. In recent years, too, a new generation of writers like Arno Geiger, Thomas Glavinic, Daniel Kehlmann, Michael Köhlmeier, and Kathrin Röggla have surprised the German-speaking world with a series of literary successes.
In an event at the Austrian Cultural Forum, Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, the doyen of Austrian literary criticism and last year's Scholar of the Year, teams up with Fatima Naqvi, a young Austro-American scholar from Rutgers University, to argue why we need Thomas Bernhard, Elfriede Jelinek & Co.
Fatima Naqvi is an associate professor and Graduate Director in the Department of German, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2000. She currently teaches courses on postwar literature and film, Vienna 1900, and the Austrian literary tradition. Her book, The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005, analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968.
Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, born 1942 in Zagreb, studied classical philology and German literature in Vienna. He is professor at and head of the Institute for German Language and Literature at the University of Vienna. Schmidt-Dengler has been a guest professor at numerous universities in Austria and abroad (Pisa, Naples, Klagenfurt, Salzburg, Stanford, etc.). He boasts a long list of publications and awards, among them the Theodor Körner Prize (1968) and the Austrian State Prize for Literary Criticism (1994). He is director of the Austrian Archive of Literature. His studies on 19th- and 20th-century Austrian literature (Nestroy, Thomas Bernhard, the inter-war period) as well as on the reception of the literature of antiquity were pioneering. He also focused on language and poetry as the editor of works by Doderer, Herzmanovsky-Orlando, and Albert Drach. In 2007, he was awarded the title Scholar of the Year.
BOOK PRESENTATION THE JOURNEY
A NOVEL BY H.G. ADLER
WITH TRANSLATOR PETER FILKINS
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19, 7 PM
H.G. Adler, one of less than a handful of known German-speaking Jewish novelists who survived the Holocaust, wrote a staggering work based on the author's own experience. A universal indictment against totalitarianism, The Journey is also a significant literary achievement, prophetic in its anticipation of how future writers would grapple with overwhelming tragedy.
Born in Prague in 1910, H.G. Adler spent two and a half years in Theresienstadt concentration camp before being deported to Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Langenstein, where he was liberated in April 1945. Leaving Prague for London in 1947, Adler worked as a freelance teacher and writer until his death in 1988. The author of twenty-six books of fiction, stories, poems, history, philosophy, and religion, he is best known for his monograph, Theresienstadt, 1941-1945, for which he received the Leo Baeck Prize in 1958. The Journey is the first of Adler's six novels to be translated into English.
Peter Filkins is a poet and translator. He is the recipient of the 2007 Distinguished Translation Award from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts, and Culture, the 2005 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and a past recipient of an Outstanding Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He teaches literature and writing at Bard College at Simon's Rock.
