Beauty and suffering

A Humboldt University Graduate Seminar on "Codification of Violence in Medial Transformation", in co-operation with the House of World Cultures

Must beauty suffer? Does beauty sanctify, or is it the sacred itself that bestows beauty? This symposium deals with the aesthetic, religious-historical and social conditions of female sanctity: images of female beauty embody transcendence and violence, untouchableness and vulnerability. Sexual relations play an essential role here, and the passive female victim is often a central figure. Only rarely is the saint named as a source of violence; more typical of the Christian-European context is the fixation on such attributes as sacredness, chastity, suffering and beauty. This symposium focuses primarily on the different ways in which foreign contexts and codes can be presented outside Europe. Contexts that are foreign to one another, such as that of the European Middle Ages, of contemporary cinema or of Arab literature, will be examined in relation to aspects of female sanctity.

to the symposium website

With: Christian Kiening (professor of literature, Zurich), Daniel Kothenschulte (film critic, Frankfurt/M.), Thomas Macho (cultural-historian, Berlin), Friederike Pannewick (Arabist, Berlin), Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg (historian, Wisconsin)