"The Case of Wagner: A Reconsideration", a conference

May 9-10, 2003

314 Royce Hall

University of California, Los Angeles

The conference aims to re-examine Wagner's place in a history of modernity. Like Freud, though in a far less acknowledged way, Wagner has become so much a part of the intellectual fabric of modernity, both for good and ill, that we take his influence for granted. His work invites a wide range of generic and disciplinary modes of analysis, from the musical and literary to the sociopolitical, and yet Wagner studies have played a remarkably small role in the recent explosion of interdisciplinary scholarship. Is Wagner the most aggressive propagator of the grand récit that much contemporary interdisciplinary work has tried to fragment? Or is he instead the endlessly self-fashioning, proto-Walt Disney jack-of-all-trades, the cultural bricoleur who may be post-modernity's most important, if most equivocal, progenitor?

Please see the website below for program schedule, including speakers and paper titles.

This conference is sponsored by the UCLA Center for Modern & Contemporary Studies, and co-sponsored by the Humanities Research Institute (UCI), the Department of Musicology (UCLA), the Department of Germanic Languages (UCLA), and the Goethe Institut, Los Angeles.

This program is free and open to the public. Seating is limited, but registration is not required. For more information, please see our website below, or contact our Center by email at modcon@humnet.ucla.edu, or by phone at (310) 825-9581.

For more information, please see the program webpage: http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/cmcs/events/Wagner.htm