- German Film, DEFA, Musicology, Theodor W. Adorno, Niklas Luhmann, Film Music Theory, and 30 moreEastern European Cinema, Scandinavian Cinema, Psychoanalysis, Systems Theory, Comparative literature, Literary theory, Media Theory, Friedrich Kittler, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Avant-garde and modernist music, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, European Studies, Literature and Music, James Joyce, German Cinema, 20th Century German Literature, Bertolt Brecht, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elfriede Jelinek, 20th Century German Culture, East German Cinema, Frankfurt School, Media Studies, Theodor Adorno, Central and Eastern Europe, Science and Technology Studies, Computer Networks, Databases, and Softwareedit
Research Interests: Materials Science and Art
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Research Interests: Art and Subjectivity
Page 1. Karl Krolow and the Poetics of Amnesia in Postwar Germany Neil H. Donahue Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Karl Krolow and the Poetics of Amnesia Karl Krolow (1915-1999) was one of the most prominent German poets of the second half... more
Page 1. Karl Krolow and the Poetics of Amnesia in Postwar Germany Neil H. Donahue Page 2. Page 3. Page 4. Page 5. Karl Krolow and the Poetics of Amnesia Karl Krolow (1915-1999) was one of the most prominent German poets of the second half of the twentieth century. ...
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Research Interests: Art and Literary studies
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Decades after its provocative beginnings with Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme in 1985—which was nearly not accepted as the author’s Habilitationsschrift—German media theory has now solidly established itself at academic departments... more
Decades after its provocative beginnings with Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme in 1985—which was nearly not accepted as the author’s Habilitationsschrift—German media theory has now solidly established itself at academic departments in Germany and the United States, and is already well into its second generation. As with Hegel’s followers, those of Kittler can be divided into distinctive wings or directions. One branch of media theory, represented by Oliver Jahraus, has tried to reforge a connection to hermeneutics in order to view literature itself as a medium.1 Others have sought to link media theory back to cultural studies, dubbing their product with the neologism Medienkulturwissenschaft. Wolfgang Ernst, however, continues Kittler’s deliberately cold, posthumanist, machine-driven perspective, bringing media theory from literary studies into history and, more specifically, the history of science and technology. Ernst’s name for his approach is Medienarchäologie, first programmatically set out in his Antrittsvorlesung at the Humboldt University in 2003, titled “Medienwissen(schaft) zeitkritisch,”2 and then developed in several subsequent books. Like Kittler, in Chronopoetik. Zeitweisen und Zeitgaben technischer Medien Ernst follows the discontinuous model of Foucault’s archeology, and Heidegger’s approach to technology; this has specific consequences for his writing. A longer quote from the opening of the book may be parsed to give a sense of Ernst’s project:
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Research Interests: Sociology, Eastern European Studies, German Studies, Theodor Adorno, Cold War, and 10 moreAufarbeitung der Vergangenheit, Memory Studies, Niklas Luhmann, Poland, Modern Germany and Eastern Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Spatial Turn, Jan Assmann, German-Polish Relations, and Kulturelles Gedächtnis
Research Interests: Geography and De Gruyter
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This essay discusses Elfriede Jelinek's complex relation to music from both historical and theoretical perspectives, with reference to media theory and psychoanalysis. The first part situates her literary musicality relative to... more
This essay discusses Elfriede Jelinek's complex relation to music from both historical and theoretical perspectives, with reference to media theory and psychoanalysis. The first part situates her literary musicality relative to German Romanticism and Modernism (Joyce). Literary musicality is ...
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An article on the relation of composers Lachenmann, Ferneyhough and Mahnkopf to Adorno's thought
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Review of Larson Powell. The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. Rochester: Camden House, 2008. 256 pp.
Research Interests: Philosophy and Art
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How long Do works last? (...) As long as they continue to cause us trouble They do not decay. (Brecht) (1) I. The Edge of Madness The wildness of John Cowper Powys' writing may drive one to distraction and despair once one has yielded... more
How long Do works last? (...) As long as they continue to cause us trouble They do not decay. (Brecht) (1) I. The Edge of Madness The wildness of John Cowper Powys' writing may drive one to distraction and despair once one has yielded to initial fascination. To make the criticism that he did not reread or edit or polish, that he lacked Latinity, the sense of the work as object independent of his own untamed imagination, appears almost irrelevant before one's astonishment at his sheer brazen candor. He is able to write out stirrings or impulses so far below any control by the ego that one feels cowardly beside him. Near the end of Wolf Solent, as the hero confronts the loss of his "life-illusion" or "mythology," he meets up with one of the book's minor, sinister Gothic figures of lower-class village misery, tending the grave of his own (Solent's) predecessor. He must have been at the cellar-floor of misery when he licked with his mental tongue the ...
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The culturalist turn in Wagner studies dating at least back to the 1980s, including many books that never engage with the music via close reading or analysis, has proven a mixed blessing. Even the most speculative philosophical... more
The culturalist turn in Wagner studies dating at least back to the 1980s, including many books that never engage with the music via close reading or analysis, has proven a mixed blessing. Even the most speculative philosophical engagements with Wagner, such as Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s, referred their arguments to specific material details of the score; not to do so can be a risky business. If Tobias Janz’s Klangdramaturgie grounds its interpretation in close readings, Dieter Thomä’s Totalität und Mitleid operates at a vast distance from its object. Thomä’s book shows that a peculiar kind of free-form cultural-studies impressionism, long flourishing in the United States, has now made it across the Atlantic. The origins of Totalität und Mitleid have little to do with Wagner and Eisenstein and more to do with current trends in philosophy. Pity is now quite a fashionable topic among historians and philosophers alike. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton, 2007) argues, a...