Small Forms. Aesthetics – Media – Modernity
Transatlantic Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium
09/09 – 11/09/2022
Small Forms. Aesthetics – Media – Modernity
Cornell University
A cooperation between the Institute for German Cultural Studies (Cornell University) and the Research Training Group „Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms“ (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The contemporary boom of small textual forms and genres is a media phenomenon. In the age of digital technology, short messages, hashtags, and posts are ubiquitous and dominate everyday communication. Yet similar interactions between media and forms also occur in earlier periods. Since the early modern era, for example, the press has expanded its domain through the distribution of pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines, responding to the pressures of increased media competition through the use of forms including letters, dispatches, notes, reports, critiques, faits divers, anecdotes, feuilletons, caricatures, and cartoons. In their brevity and ephemerality, such texts index not only practices of media consumption and production, but also temporal relationships. Their formal compactness in particular contributes to the impression that their contents are new and worthy of attention. Whether appearing as pointed observations, quick sketches, ironic comments, parts of a series, or elements of a montage, small forms participate in the emergence of a modern consciousness framed by a sense of the current and the contemporary.
Through a series of case studies, the Transatlantic Research Colloquium will explore how small forms have structured understandings of the contemporary since the 17th century by presenting themselves as up to date, fashionable, avant-garde, anachronistic, or timeless.
The sessions will foreground three aspects, beginning with the aesthetics of small forms. What styles and modes of writing do writers and editors deploy to reflect experiences of temporality and to enable critique of the present? How and when do aesthetic choices align forms with—or distance them from—new social, artistic, or technological developments? A second focus will be on media ecology. How do small forms come to be “in-formation,” and how are they themselves “informed” and formatted through the materiality, periodicity, or mobility of their dissemination? How can attention to textual form chart new paths through media history? Finally, we are interested in the specific disruptions that avant-garde artists sought to achieve through the radical deconstruction of form in their prose and poetry.
Schedule
Friday, September 9
Timelessness, Timeliness, Truth
Cornell University | A. D. White House | 27 E Avenue | Ithaca, NY 14853
10:00 – 10:30 Welcome and introductions
10:30 – 12:00 Reading Seminar 1: Small Forms and the Factography of Modernity
Ethel Matala de Mazza (Humboldt-Universität Berlin, moderator)
12:00 – 1:00 Research Report 1: Patrizia McBride (Cornell University)
The Truth of Fake Forms: the Feuilleton and the Lure of Ornamental Writing
Lunch
2:30 – 4:15 PhD Student Presentation Group 1: Media Platforms, News, Updates
Stephan Brändle (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
At the Litfaßsäule: Telegraphic News and the Advertising Column During the Franco-Prussian War
Ron Sadan (Princeton University)
The Topicality of “Bildnachricht” in the German Daily Tempo (1928–1933)
Break
4:30 – 5:45 PhD Student Presentation Group 2: Snapshots, Miniatures, Truth Effects
Dennis Wegner (Cornell University)
Vladimir Nabokov’s A Guide to Berlin (1925) as Metropolitan Miniature
Christian Struck (Harvard University)
BeReal. Selfies That Don’t Lie
Break
6:00 – 7:00 Keynote 1: Devin Fore (Princeton University)
Factography: Narrative Forms and Mass Technics of the Document
Dinner
Saturday, September 10
Media Ecologies and Embedded Forms
Cornell University | A. D. White House | 27 E Avenue | Ithaca, NY 14853
10:00 – 11:00 Research Report 2: Madeline Zehnder (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
The Excerpt, The Gift Book, and Washington Irving’s Poetics of Portability
Break
11:15 – 12:45 PhD Student Presentation Group 3: The Politics and Ambiguity of Small
Forms
Thomas Howard (University of Washington, St. Louis)
Aphorismus and Nineteenth-Century American Literature: Reading “Double-Consciousness” Aphoristically
Nora Siena (Cornell University)
Inoperative Brevitas: The Contamination of Literary and Philosophical Short Forms in Giorgio Agamben’s Work
Lunch
2:15 – 3:15 Research Report 3: Paul Fleming (Cornell University)
Reading for the Anecdote: On the Persistence of Small Forms in Big Ones
Break
3:30 – 4:30 Research Report 4: Matthew Miller (Colgate University)
Splinters of the Real: Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage in the 21st Century
4:30 – 5.30 Research Report 5: Peter Gilgen (Cornell University)
The Shape of Time: Oswald Egger’s Small Forms
Break
6:00 – 7:00 Keynote 2: Bruno Bosteels (Columbia University, New York)
Formas breves: Jorge Luis Borges and Ricardo Piglia
Dinner
Sunday, September 11
Small Forms and the Avant-Garde
Cornell University | Physical Sciences Building | PSB Conference Room | 245 Feeney Way, Ithaca, NY 14853
10:00 – 11:30 Reading Seminar 2: Montage, Cut-Up, Self-Imposed Constraints.
Small Forms as Minor and Minimalist Forms
John Hamilton (Harvard University, moderator)
Break
11:45 – 12:30 Research Report 6: Franziska Schweiger (Hamilton College)
A Minor Revolution: Hannah Höch’s Handarbeitskleinigkeiten
12:30 – 1:15 PhD Student Presentation Group 4: Small Forms and Art Brut
Chiara Sartor (Humboldt-Universität Berlin)
Jean Dubuffet’s Jargon Texts, Art Brut Writings, and the ‘Raw’ Artist’s Book
Farewell and Lunch