Frankenstein / Eine Uni ein Buch: Nature and the Sublime
Thursday, December 13, 2018 5:00 pm – 8:30 pm EST/GMT-5Alte Nationalgalerie, Bodestrasse 1-3, 10178 Berlin
Introduction by Ralph Gleis (Head of the Alte Nationalgalerie)
Panel with: Geoff Lehman (Faculty, Bard College Berlin), Susanne Märtens (Guest Lecturer, Bard College Berlin), Hans von Trotha (Author, Historian, Journalist)
An event in the Frankenstein / Eine Uni ein Buch Fall 2018 program
The idea of the sublime in nature, as it emerged in late eighteenth-century aesthetics, plays a crucial role both in Frankenstein and in the visual arts of Mary Shelley’s time. With the collection of paintings in the Alte Nationalgalerie (by Caspar David Friedrich, Arnold Böcklin, and others) as a starting point, this panel will consider the dialogue between Shelley’s novel and the visual arts in terms of the understanding and experience of nature that they offer, particularly through the depiction of the sublime. What are the feelings evoked by a sublime experience and what ideas about nature do those feelings reveal? How might we understand the coexistence of the sacred, the awe-inspiring, and the terrifying? What is the relationship between the grotesque and the sublime, between monstrous form and immeasurable landscape? To what extent does sublimity in nature elicit the human desire for knowledge and control, and to what extent does it demand that we transcend that desire? These and related questions inform the visual arts contemporaneous with the publication of Frankenstein just as they do the novel itself, and it is such questions that this panel hopes to address. As an opportunity to look at paintings from the Alte Nationalgalerie together with text of Frankenstein, the panel will consider the sublime at the intersection of the visual, the literary, and the philosophical.
Program
5:00pm Encounter with the collection
6:15pm Panel discussion followed by open conversation
8:00pm Drinks
Note:
All Bard College Berlin students & faculty can enter the Alte Nationalgalerie at 5:00pm for free on condition that they are registered.
All other guests must buy an entrance ticket to the Alte Nationalgalerie (€10 / €5 reduced).
Date & time: Thursday, December 13, 2018
Venue: Alte Nationalgalerie, Bodestrasse 1-3, 10178 Berlin
View the event entry on the Alte Nationalgalerie website>>
Email: [email protected]