The Threat and Allure of the Magical: Selected Papers from the 17th Annual Interdisciplinary German Studies Conference, University of California, Berk ... Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Korean Edition) Hardcover - 2013

Ashwin Manthripragada, Emina Musanovic and Dagmar Theison are doctoral candidates in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley. Ashwin Manthripragada is writing a dissertation on the philosophy and politics of ambivalence, movement, and transculturation. In bringing early 20th century German-language works (i.e. a novella by Stefan Zweig) that reconfigure classic Sanskrit-language works (i.e. Bhagavadgita) together with current postcolonial and translation theory, he points to the porous, amoebic nature of cultural interaction - at once both exploitative and cooperative. Emina Musanovic is currently working on a dissertation titled Entangled Figurations: Shadow Matters in German Thought. Her dissertation takes up the figure of the shadow as a site of diffraction in which the entanglement of intra-acting agents involved (human and non-human) is overtly enacted; a scene of intervention in which diffraction is offered up as a structuring principle against the dominant strategies of reflection and reflectivity. Her focus is of a thematic rather than epochal nature, and she is currently enmeshed in ecocritical new feminist materialisms, object oriented ontologies, agential realist and speculative realist thought. Dagmar Theison is currently writing her dissertation on the interface between Yiddish and German literature of the interbellum period. She has a particular interest in Yiddish influences on the writings of Kafka and his contemporaries.