Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015 Between Acceleration and Slowness

by Fuchs, Anne; Long, Jonathan

• ISBN13: 9781137411860
• ISBN10: 1137411864
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-12-22
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Time in German Literature and Culture, 1900 – 2015 is an interdisciplinary volume that explores the social, psychological, and historical impact of acceleration through the medium of culture. New interpretations of modernist and contemporary works of literature, visual art, architecture, film and popular culture highlight the wide range of cultural responses to social acceleration. In so doing, they call into question dominant theories of acceleration, which can be excessively totalising and pessimistic.

The volume includes original readings of works by classic modernist authors Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Peter Altenberg and Robert Walser; contemporary writers Angela Krauss, Clemens Meyer, Wolfgang Herrndorf and Karen Duve; filmmaker Christian Petzold; artists Wassily Kandinsky and Umberto Boccioni; and photographers Umbo, Gyorgy Kepes and Paul Schuitema. This exciting volume shows that cultural expressions of and responses to acceleration are varied, and offer the spaces of resistance to the ongoing onward rush of our twenty-first-century lives.

Author Biography

Anne Fuchs is Professor of German at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely on German cultural memory since 1945, modernist literature, contemporary German literature and German-Jewish literature. Recent books include After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (2012) and Phantoms of War in Contemporary German Literature, Films and Discourse: The Politics of Memory (2008; 2010).

J. J. Long is Professor of German and Visual Culture at Durham University, UK. He has published extensively on twentieth-century literature, particularly on writing and photography. He is the author of The Novels of Thomas Bernhard (2001) and W. G. Sebald: Image, Archive, Modernity (2007). His current research focuses on photography in the Weimar Republic.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Faulty Clocks, Human Errors and the Management of Time in Modernity and Late Modernity; Anne Fuchs and J. J. Long
PART I
1. Temporal Ambivalence: Acceleration, Attention and Lateness in Modernist Discourse; Anne Fuchs
2. How Long does the Present Last? Seven Approaches to a Fleeting Phenomenon; Aleida Assmann
3. Architecture in Transit: Three High Tech Historicist Airports; Kathleen James-Chakraborty
PART II
4. Epistemology, Poetics and Time in Modernist Short Prose around 1900; Dirk Göttsche
5. Observations on Time and Motion: Kafka's Betrachtung and the Visual Arts around 1912; Elizabeth Boa
6. Icons of Speed – Icons of Crisis: Acceleration Effects in Weimar Culture; Matthias Uecker
7. Snapshot, Composite, Blur: Photography and Speed in the Weimar Republic; J. J. Long
8. Syncope, Pause, Caesura: Robert Musil and the Psychotechnics of Acceleration; Carolin Duttlinger
PART III
9. 'Good Work': Speed, Slowness and Taking Care in Christian Petzold's Barbara; Andrew J. Webber
10. Writing and Acceleration in the Aftermath of German Unification: Riding the 'Information Rapids' with Angela Krauß; Gillian Pye
11. The Temporality of Boredom in the Age of Acceleration: The Car Crash in Contemporary German Literature; Mary Cosgrove
Bibliography
Index