Sommersemester 2012 - Graduate Seminar

The relation between fashion and modernity has always been taken for granted. Indeed, it is guaranteed in the very etymology of the French and German words “mode” and “modernité” (Mode und Moderne). Yet, on closer inspection, there is a blind spot in this relation in that fashion seems rather to be the other of modernity. The modern discourse of fashion testifies to the ambivalences and paradoxes in this relation. From the beginning until now, it is strangely split: there is fashion and fashion. Properly speaking, men's fashion is not really fashionable. The perfectly functional suit without superfluous adornment is, in its world-wide constancy through the centuries, almost invariably classical. Its staggering universal success is due to the fact that it is the ideal modern dress: beautiful, because functional. Women's fashion, on the contrary, is a remnant of the old, effeminate aristocracy — a frivolous frill, an all-in-all dysfunctional ornament, badly in need of thorough modernization. The “new woman“ is born in agonizing pain and perpetual fallbacks: while Chanel almost lead us toward a functional feminine form, Dior's new look was a setback. It brought back the unhealthy, restrictive corset and offered a slap in the face to the modern aesthetic dogma of “form follows function”. Fashion therefore seems to be the locus of a strange intimation of the political set against the common politics of modernity. The course will center around this blind spot between fashion and modernity and the new gendering of fashion in the bourgeois, post-feudal era. Texts by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, Georg Simmel, René König, Alfred Loos, Roland Barthes, Anne Hollander.

Sommersemester 2012 - Graduate Seminar

zusammen mit Michèle Lowrie (Professorin am Department of Classics der University of Chicago)

How to narrate the disintegration that is civil war? Lucan explodes the textual surface of his epic, Civil War, while Flaubert’s novel, Sentimental Education, pushes the disturbing events into the background. Analysis along several disciplinary angles will clarify each author’s textual strategies. The epic and novel challenge, each in different ways, contemporary or near contemporary attempts to redeem civil war as bringing a fated empire or otherwise fulfilling God’s plan. Comparison with historical accounts by Caesar, Appian, and Michelet shows that style is a battleground for debate about legitimation. Secondary material on emperor worship and selections from Augustine’s City of God reveal the theological moves used to subordinate human suffering to some larger plan. Flaubert’s engagement with antiquity is polemical and corrects the assumptions of his age: Paris is not the new Rome of Augustus’ refoundation celebrated by Vergil, but the Roman republic that Lucan shows riven by civil war.