Overview
My research and teaching span German-language literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on theories of modernity and modernism, the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy, and political theory, visual and media studies, and Austrian literature and culture, especially fin-de-siècle Vienna. My scholarship revolves around three main themes: the development of narrative within literary and visual media; the ways in which the reflection on art and society in the twentieth century contributed to the politicized practice of the avant-garde; and the increasing concern, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with grasping literature and the arts in terms of the ideological, rhetorical, and material effects produced by the media that carry them. My first book, The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity (Northwestern University Press, 2006), examines Robert Musil’s engagement with narrative as a lens for analyzing the rise of totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s. In my second book, The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany (The University of Michigan Press 2016; honorable mention, 2018 Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, MLA), I trace the path-breaking notion of storytelling developed under the rubric of montage by Weimar-era artists associated with Dadaism, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity in high and low-brow genres and media (besides literature, film, photography, graphic design, advertising, and typography).
I am currently working on a monograph that examines the tense relation between literature and the book in German-language culture during the first decades of the twentieth century. I am interested in tracing how the expectations and norms that were naturalized in the special alliance literature developed with the book in the course of the nineteenth century became unbundled in works by Brecht, Balázs, Benjamin, Kracauer, Keun, Musil, Lasker-Schüler, Hausmann, Herzfelde, Huelsenbeck, Polgar, Tucholsky, and Heartfield. These writers and theorists set out to revitalize the verbal arts by reconfiguring literature as a ‘slow’ yet active medium that enlists print’s material features in strategies designed to pierce through the contemplative illusionism and feigned immediacy of old and new media (especially bourgeois theater and narrative film). Other questions I examine concern the status of literary form in relation to the small prose writing proper to journalism (feuilleton, reportage), the relation between truth, journalistic reporting, and literary storytelling, and the renaissance of a rhetorical understanding of literature in the bourgeoning field of advertising.
Office Hours
By appointment only
Research Focus
- 18th to 20th-century literature and culture
- Modernism and theories of modernity
- The intersection of literary theory, philosophy, and political theory
- Visual and media studies
- Austrian literature and culture, especially fin-de-siècle Vienna.
Publications
Books
- The Chatter of the Visible. Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. Awarded honorable mention for the 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association (MLA).
- Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950. Co-edited with Richard McCormick and Monika Zagar. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
- The Void of Ethics. Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity. Evaston, IL.: Northwestern University Press, 2006.
Articles
- “The Edge of the Page: Alfred Polgar, the Feuilleton, and the Poetics of the Small Form.” The German Quarterly, 93.1 (2020): 1-18. Winner of the 2021 Max Kade Prize for Best Article in The German Quarterly.
- “Disciplinary History as Genealogy and Inheritance.” Special forum on “German Cultural Studies and the Nation State,” The German Quarterly, 92.4 (2019): 467-70.
- "Berlin Dada and the Time of Revolution." PMLA 133.3 (May 2018): 491-507.
- "Else Lasker-Schüler’s Early Prose Texts and the Small Form." Modern Language Notes, special issue, "Avant-Garde Revisited: Else Lasker-Schüler," ed. Andrea Krauss, 132 (April 2017): 625-38.
- Montage/Collage." German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno. Eds. J.D. Mininger and Jason Peck. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 204-9.
- "Erfahrung und Erzählung: Walter Benjamin und Kurt Schwitters." Von den Rändern zur Moderne. Studien zur deutschsprachigen Literatur zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Zweitem Weltkrieg. Eds. T. Lörke, G. Streim, R. Walter-Jochum. Würzburg: Königshaus und Neumannm 2014. 307-21.
- "Konstruktion als Bildung: Rethinking the Human in German Constructivism." The Germanic Review, 88 (2013).
- "Rethinking the Academic Journal in the Digital Age." German Studies Review 35.3 (2012): 465-469. Special issue on new directions in German Studies.
- "Narrative Resemblance: Weimar Germany’s Photography and the Modernist Photobook of Hannah Höch." New German Critique, Fall 2011. 169-97.
- "Learning to See in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen." The German Quarterly, 84.2 (Spring 2011): 220-38.
- "Montage and Violence in Weimar Culture: Kurt Schwitters’ Reassembled Individuals." Violence, Culture, Aesthetics: Germany 1789-1938. Eds. Carl Niekerk and Stefani Engelstein. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 245-65.
- "De-Moralizing Politics: Bertolt Brecht’s Early Aesthetics." Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 82.1 (2008): 85-111.
- "’Ein schreibender Eisenkönig’? Robert Musil und Walther Rathenau." Musiliana, vol. 14. Eds. Annette Daigger and Peter Henninger. Frankfurt a.M./Berlin/Bern/New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 1-17.
- "The Game of Meaning: Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters’ Merz." MODERNISM/Modernity 14.2 (April 2007): 249-72.
- "The Future’s Past. Modernism, Critique, and the Political." Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890-1950. Eds. Patrizia McBride, Richard McCormick, and Monika Zagar. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2007. 1-13.
- "The Value of Kitsch. Hermann Broch and Robert Musil on Art and Morality." Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature, 29. 2 (Summer 2005): 88-106.
- "‘In Praise of the Present’: Adolf Loos on Style and Fashion." MODERNISM/Modernity 11.4 (November 2004): 745-67.
- "Whose Community? Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party, Count Leinsdorf’s Wisdom, and the Logic of the Political." Modern Austrian Literature 34.1/2 (2001): 37-51.
- "On the Utility of Art for Politics: Musil’s ‘Armed Truce of Ideas.’" The German Quarterly 73.4 (Fall 2000): 366-86. Awarded the 2000 Max Kade Prize for Best Article in The German Quarterly.
- "The Paradox of Aesthetic Discourse: J.M.R. Lenz’s Anmerkungen übers Theater." German Studies Review 22.3 (October 1999): 397-419.