2025 Scholars Workshop: Processes of Decay, Collapse, and Reorganization
On March 28-29, 2025, the Umwelt Center hosted its second annual Scholars Workshop, focusing on “Decomposition – Processes of Decay, Collapse, and Reoarganization. Over the course of two days, participants and OSU-affiliated graduate students and faculty discussed the concept of decomposition as an aesthetic paradigm, as form and metaphor, theoretical model, or worldmaking principle, to name but a few examples, engaging with and responding to a broad range of authors and artists, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gottfried Keller, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kurt Schwitters, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Judith Schalansky, Esther Kinsky, Christoph Ransmayr, Erich Fromm, Alexander von Humboldt, Christian Gottfried Nees von Esenbeck, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Christoph Ransmayr, Merlin Sheldrake, and Anna L. Tsing. Aside from exploring decomposition as concept, metaphor, process, and symbol, we discussed recurring themes like the etymology of de- and recomposition, polyphony, waste, loss, memory and archive, and the temporalities of decomposition.
Program
MARCH 28
Session 1: Aesthetic…
- Shira Miron, Yale University: “Against (De-)Composition: On Goethe’s Rejection of a Term and its Remaking around 1800”
- Hester Baer, U of Maryland: “Salvage Aesthetics: From Merz to Remediation”
Session 2: …and Philosophical Approaches
- Micah Thomas, U of Bucharest: “Between Decomposition and Eternal Recurrence: Philosophies of ‘Becoming’ in a Changing Climate”
- Lisa Höller, Washington State University: “‘Holy Shit’ – A Critical Examination if Friedrich Hundertwasser’s Philosophy of Decay and Decomposition”
Session 3: Worlds of Loss
- Anna-Maria Senuysal, Ohio State University: “Mycelial World(s) – Fungal Worldmaking in Judith Schalansky’s Verzeichnis einiger Verluste”
- Xan Holt, Boston College: “Mournful Entanglement: Esther Kinsky’s Linguistic ‘Eco-Grief’”
Session 4: Decomposition as Form and Metaphor
- Jessica Resvick, Oberlin College: “Decomposition as Form: Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich”
- Arvi Sepp, Free University of Brussels: “Mirror Images of Pathology: Victor Klemperer’s German-Jewish Sprachkritik and the Crisis Metaphors of ‘Decay’ and ‘Decomposition’”
MARCH 29
Session 5: Otherworlds and Underworlds
- Heather Sullivan, Trinity University: “Fungal Agency”
- Julia Ludewig, Allegheny College: “Revisting Erich Fromm’s Necrophilia as Social and Environmental Decay: A Critical Appraisal”
Session 6: Matters of Decay
- Elaina Foley, Humboldt Foundation: “Decomposing Collections: Relating to Rot in Berlin’s Natural History Museum”
- Yorick Josua Berta, FU Berlin: “Spoiling Nature. The Rise of Systems-Ecology and the Aesthetics of Decay”
Session 7: Decomposing Land- and Soundscapes
- Xiaoyao Guo, Princeton University: “Decomposing Ice: Glacial Landscapes in the Anthropocene”
- Daniel Gilfillan, Arizona State University: “Unsinging the Planet: Sonic Decomposition in Austrian Soundscapes”
Session 8: Closing Discussion and Synthesis
2024 Junior Scholars Workshop
In April 2024, the Umwelt Center hosted its first Junior Scholars Workshop. Participants from around the world pre-circulated papers with each other and invited senior scholars, resulting in two productive days of feedback and conversation in Columbus. In addition to forging new scholarly connections, participants discussed curriculum building and debated the role of Environmental Humanities in German and Nordic Studies. Senior scholar participants included Joela Jacobs (Arizona) and Johannes Wankhammer (Princeton), as well as Umwelt Center members Matthew Birkhold, Katra Byram, and May Mergenthaler. Junior scholars were selected on the basis of a blind review. The Umwelt Center covered the expenses for all participants, including travel, lodging, and meals.
Nicole Fischer (Wisconsin) posited that literature can alleviate eco-anxiety in (Do) We Need More Hope?! On German Cli-Fi and How it Approaches the Current Climate Crisis. Through an analysis of five novels and their reception, Fischer categorized types of cli-fi texts with differing possibilities to induce behavioral changes among readers.
Matthew Childs (Washington) focused participants’ attention on a critical source of energy: calories. In Sugar-High: Capitalist Energies in Wilhelm Raabe’s Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft, Childs turned to the work of George Bataille to illuminate the role played by sugar as a convertor physical energy into metaphysical energy, showing the environmental consequences of this transformation along the way.
Anna-Maria Senuysal (Duisberg-Essen/Cincinnati) presented Zum Verhältnis von Geos, Bios und Anthropos bei Johann Wolfgang von Goethe und Esther Kinsky, tracing the shift from the distinction between the organic and anorganic in the late eighteenth century to contemporary concepts interrogated this distinction. In particular, analyzing Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and Esther Kinsky’s Schiefern, Senuysal shows how the use of metaphor and auto-/onomatopoeia make this shift visible in literary texts.
Marcel Foerster (Ohio State) circulated a draft of his article The Greenhorn Gaze: The (De-)Construction of the Indigenous Landscape in German Indianerliteratur. Drawing on narratology and environmental humanities, Foerster theorized a subset of the “colonial gaze” to deconstruct colonial authority in German literature and account for German identity in light of colonial fantasy.
Anna Axtner-Borsutzky (LMU München) shared a new project on The Dramatic Landscape in Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, exploring the multifunctional garden as an ontologically open place. Situated between the natural and the cultural, the garden assumes various meanings for the characters in Goethe’s drama, allowing Axtner-Borsutzky to use the highly potent garden as a fruitful metaphor to investigate not just German drama but key questions of the Environmental Humanities about the natural world, as well.
Bradley Harmon (Johns Hopkins/Södertörn) prompted discussion about metaphors of atmosphere with his paper „Die Existenz des Entsetzlichen in jedem Bestandteil der Luft“: On Atmosphere, Sense, and Trans-Corporeality in Rilke’s Malte. Through a close reading, Harmon dissected the trans-corporeal elements of Rilke’s text, identifying how the body perceives its environment and its own permeability.
