Aida Feng

Aida Feng is a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation project, Sprachverfahren, examines operations of literary language that stretch existing conditions of possible lived experience. Working alongside philosophical and theoretical accounts of experience from Immanuel Kant to Wilhelm Dilthey to Walter Benjamin, her first chapter attends to the movement of thought as a central Erlebnis to be recuperated by the Dichter in the writings of Robert Musil. Elsewhere, she has presented on the nexus of cultivation, performance, and multilingualism in Yoko Tawada’s contemporary novel, Etüden im Schnee and works on side projects involving critical theory, history of science, and cultural studies. Aida arrived at Yale after teaching high school English in Mönchengladbach with a Fulbright grant and working as a laboratory technician at the University of Connecticut. Prior to that, she studied Biology and German Studies at Brown University, where she conducted research on topics ranging from soil nitrogen availability in the Atlantic rainforest to the activity of writing as a response to damaged life for late 20th-century theorists Theodor W. Adorno and Maurice Blanchot.