Lecture: “The Metropolitan Miniature in Kracauer and Musil” by Andreas Huyssen

• Event Date: Wednesday, September 11, 2013
• Time: 7:30 pm (CDT)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

The lecture compares Kracauer’s scattered urban miniatures, collected in the 1960s under the title Strassen in Berlin und anderswo, with those of Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author as distinct contributions to a mode of modernist feuilleton writing in the Baudelairean tradition. The modernist miniature emerged as an experimental literary space to test new metropolitan perceptions in the context of the breakdown of boundaries between the visual and verbal arts and the rise of new technological image media such as photography and film. Both authors are paradigmatic for this mode of writing in modernism in that they insist on the specificity of the literary over and against the ever widening circulation of visual media. Neither writer supplemented his texts with images, but both first published these short prose pieces in the feuilletons of metropolitan newspapers before collecting them into book format.

Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. A founding editor of New German Critique. His books include After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), the edited volume Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008), William Kentridge and Nalini Malani: The Shadowplay as Medium of Memory (2013).

This event is co-sponsored by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) and the Spurlock Museum.