Kolloquium: The Terror of Flirtation from the 19th Century to #MeToo

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its summer semester 2018 colloquium

Barbara N. Nagel, Princeton University, American Academy in Berlin Fellow 2017-18

The Terror of Flirtation from the 19th Century to #MeToo

Has flirtation become a thing of the past? With mobile dating-apps like Tinder and Grindr designed to minimize unexpected encounters, and the #MeToo movement unveiling the rash of sexual abuses of power, does anyone still dare to flirt? Princeton literary scholar Barbara Nagel looks back to early theories of flirtation in Critical Theory and German realism to trace the literary–historical emergence of what she terms a “terror of flirtation”—flirtation as the place of contingency and aimlessness, of equalizing encounters in which woman is the sovereign. This warlike situation, she notes, is perhaps best illustrated by sociologist Georg Simmel’s observation, “In saying no and saying yes, in surrendering and refusing to surrender themselves, women are the masters.”

Barbara N. Nagel is an assistant professor of German at Princeton University. She studied at the Freie Universität Berlin and, from 2008 to 2011, was a member of the German Research Foundation (DFG) doctoral group “Forms of Knowledge and the Know How of Living.” In 2012, she completed her PhD at New York University and then worked for two years at the University of Munich, before beginning her position at Princeton, in 2014. Her research focuses on how language functions in relation to violence and on the comical side-effects of this linkage. Nagel is the author of Der Skandal des Literalen. Barocke Literalisierungen in Gryphius, Kleist, Büchner (Wilhelm Fink, 2012), and the co-editor of Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction (Fordham, 2015). She has published articles in Weimarer Beiträge, Law and Literature, and CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.