Professor Leslie Adelson of Cornell University, one of the foremost experts on contemporary German culture in North America, will deliver a talk titled "Touching Tales of Turks, Germans, and Jews: Cultural Alterity, Historical Narrative, and Literary Riddles for the '90s," October 27 at 7:30 pm in the New York Room, Mary Woolley Hall. A discussion and reception will follow. This event is cosponsored by the German studies departments at Mount Holyoke, Amherst, and Smith Colleges, the Five College Faculty Seminar in German studies, and the Jewish studies and critical social thought programs at Mount Holyoke. This is the second annual lecture of the Five College German Studies Faculty Seminar.
Adelson's lecture will address the linkages between "things Turkish" and "things Jewish"--narratives, histories, and references as they negotiate the German present. She will focus on an analysis of this phenomenon in works published by Feridun Zaimoglu, rap cult author, enfant terrible of the Turkish-German youth scene, and author of Kanak Sprak, 1995 (Backtalk) and by Zafer Senocak, prize-winning poet, essayist, and novelist, who has been called "the Woody Allen of Berlin." His works include Der Mann im Unterhemd (The Man in the Undershirt), 1995, and Gefahrliche Verwandtshaft (Dangerous Affinity), 1998.
"At the center of my textual analysis lies an interdisciplinary dilemma," says Adelson. "How do we delineate our objects of analysis or demarcate the contexts in which they become meaningful, when referentiality is associative, elusive, and unstable? Finally, how might the specific interplay of historical and literary narrative inform our understanding of Turkish-German culture at the present historical juncture?"
Adelson has achieved major recognition and awards both here and abroad for her pathbreaking work on contemporary Jewish-German and Turkish-German writers. She is also known for her insightful study on contemporary German culture, Making Bodies Making History: Feminism and German Identity (1993). According to Karen Remmler, associate professor of German, Adelson's scholarship has paved the way for a better understanding of the complexities of interdisciplinary inquiry and for a critical assessment of the impact of such inquiry upon learning, teaching, and writing in the humanities and social sciences.
![[Index]](../index3.gif){kind=small}