Aida Feng

Aida Feng is a Ph.D. candidate whose work focuses on experiments with experience across literature, history of science, and German critical thought. Her dissertation unfolds the ways in which description, or Beschreibung, emerged as an active site for reconfiguring human experience in Walter Benjamin’s hashish reports, Robert Musil’s essayistic novel, and Ingeborg Bachmann’s postwar poetry. Despite the widespread recruitment of description as a stabilizer of lived experience starting in the latter half of the 19th century,  she shows these writers to be advancing theories of description which, on the one hand, foreground the tensions between experience and the language that purports to represent it, and on the other hand, recuperate the plasticity of experience in the activity of writing.

Elsewhere, she has presented on Bachmann’s critique of anthropocentric notions of Geschlecht in “Ein Wildermuth,” theories of exercise and transformation in Musil and Ernst Mach, as well as the incomprehensibility of monolingualism in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee. Her forthcoming article, “Connecting the Thoughts: Ernst Mach, Robert Musil, and the End(s) of Thinking,” has been accepted for publication with The Germanic Review.

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.