North American Heine Society

Current Calls for Papers

MLA Convention, January 5-8, 2023, in San Francisco, CA: Heine and the Diasporic Experience

In “Vitzliputzli,” “Bimini,” “Das Sklavenschiff,” and other texts, Heine gave voice to the historical moment of diasporic experience. How do these passages become newly legible in Heine’s writing? What were the political and cultural parameters of these poems? What is the substance of Heine’s interventions into diasporic spaces? How do these late poems contribute to a discursive practice in Heine’s oeuvre that privileges new political and mythic sensibilities? Through a deliberate dislocation of his previous work, Heine makes a shift by putting his narratives into contact with new cultural settings that exist outside the boundaries of Europe and into areas that represent colonial violence, the “New World,” and the transatlantic slave trade. This panel is a rethinking of Heine’s work in its historical context as a way of marking older diasporic transitions in his poetry and prose.

Please send 250 words abstracts by March 2022 to Alicia E. Ellis (aeellis@colby.edu).

 

Past Conferences

MLA Convention, January 2022: Heinrich Heine and Human Rights

Presider

Alicia Ellis, Colby College

Presentations

Claudia Nitschke (Durham University, UK): Embodying Human Rights: Heine’s Atta Troll
Christoph auf der Horst (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf): Heine’s Struggle for Human Rights: Writing in the Spirit of Solidarity
Willi Goetschel (University of Toronto): Poetic Justice: Heine’s Critique of the Limitations of Human Rights
Helge Dedek (McGill University): ‘A Bible of Egoism’: Heine, ‘Human Rights’, and Law
Sebastian Wogenstein (University of Connecticut): Lege artis: Heine and Human Rights

 

MLA Convention, January 2021: World Literature Otherwise: Heine's Opening Gambits

Presider

Willi Goetschel, University of Toronto

Presentations

Azade Seyhan, Bryn Mawr College: Searching for Heinrich Heine in the World Literary Domain 

Chloe Vaughn, Columbia University: Invented Worlds: Heine and Herder between National and World Literature 

Barbara Di Noi, University of Florence: Heine's Subversive Notion of Weltliteratur (World Literature) 

Michael Swellander, University of Iowa: ‘Yes, He Was a Mighty Poet’: Heine’s ‘Jehuda Ben Halevy’ and World Literature 

Christoph auf der Horst, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf: Heinrich Heine and the Persistence of His Concept of World Literature 

 

Contact

If you would like to notify the membership of a Heine-related call for papers and would like it posted on this website, please email  Sebastian Wogenstein (wogenstein@uconn.edu).