Rethinking Lessing’s ‘Limits’: Approaches to the Laokoon on its 250th Anniversary (1766-2016)
8-10 April 2015, Göttingen und Wolfenbüttel
This interdisciplinary workshop takes its cue from the 250th anniversary of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (‘Laokoon, or on the boundaries of painting and poetry’), first published in 1766. Lessing’s essay is focused on an ancient statue and its interpretation. Yet over the last 250 years, Lessing’s essay has had a profound influence on all manner of different disciplinary fields: if the text helped define the direction and scope of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics in Germany (and indeed beyond), it has also helped to shape the very form and practices of modern European poetry and painting. At different moments within the twentieth century in particular, Lessing was both heroized and demonized for his carefully calibrated (and for many, hierarchical) delineation between the temporal linearity of poetry and the spatial field of the visual arts. The speakers will negotiate and discuss different ways of approaching the text, at once rethinking the medial ‘limits’ defined by the Laokoon, and situating the text within both its Entstehungs- and Rezeptionsgeschichte.
NB: As the number of participants is limited, please send a message to Turan.Lackschewitz@zvw.uni-goettingen.de not later than 31st March if you’d like to attend. Thank you!
Programme
Wednesday, 8 April 2015 | Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen
14:00 – 14:30 Martin van Gelderen (Göttingen), Michael Squire (London/Cologne), and Avi Lifschitz (London/Göttingen): Welcome and introduction
14:30 – 15:30 Friedrich Vollhardt (Munich): Lessings Laokoon: Aktualität – Historizität – Kontiguität
16:00 – 18:00 Jonas Grethlein (Heidelberg): Lessing’s Laokoon and the ‘as-if’ of aesthetic experiences Jürgen Trabant (Berlin): Symbolic articulation
Thursday, 9 April 2015 | Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel
9:00 Organised transport from Göttingen to Wolfenbüttel
11:00 Guided tour of the ducal library and the Lessinghaus
14:00 – 15:45 Elisabeth Décultot (Halle): Über die Grenzen der Kritik: Zur epistemologischen Verortung von Lessings Laokoon Daniel Fulda (Halle): Verzeitlichung? Lessings Laokoon und die Modernisierungsprobleme der seinerzeitigen Geschichtsschreibung
16:30 – 18:15 Jason Gaiger (Oxford): ‘Yielding stone’: the material as medium in Lessing’s Laokoon and recent sculptural practice Susan Gustafson (Rochester, NY): Gender, sexuality, and family entanglements: fathers, mothers, and snakes in Lessing’s Laokoon
Friday, 10 April 2015 | Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen
9:00 – 10:45 Frederick Beiser (Syracuse, NY): Mendelssohn’s critique of Lessing’s Laokoon Ritchie Robertson (Oxford): Goethe, Laokoon, and the artistic depiction of pain
11:15 – 13:00 Katherine Harloe (Reading): Sympathy, tragedy, and the morality of sentiment in the Laokoon Alfred Nordmann (Darmstadt): Lessing’s pregnant moment in works of art and technology
14:30 Round-up discussion: Laokoon after 250 years
Registration Closes: 31 March 2015
