NEWSLETTER - FALL 2009
Photo: akg-images
This conference takes a look at Kracauer’s writings, in particular with regard to current discussions in visual culture, film, photography, urban studies, architecture, and the digital turn. Its contributors will address the following topics: Kracauer’s work in regard to the intellectual’s role in today’s globalized public sphere; the relevance of his notion of exterritoriality to debates about migration, diaspora, and exile; his significance for the emergence of film criticism and New German Film of the 1960s and 1970s; the importance of his novels and his writings on biography and autobiography; his reflections on visual culture in relation to the current impasse in film theory between psychoanalytic and cognitivist positions; his object-based essays and their relevance for early 20th- century experiments in abstraction and photomontage (particularly at the Bauhaus); the relationship between his writings on architecture, photography, and city streets and contemporary issues in architecture and industrialized mass production; and his significance for a literature of urban miniatures. Other topics are currently being added. The goal of “Looking After Siegfried Kracauer” is to help his writings emerge from the large shadow cast by the Frankfurt School, and to provide fresh perspectives on an oeuvre ripe for new discoveries.
The conference is sponsored by the Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dickey Center for International Understanding, Office of the Provost at Dartmouth, DAAD, Max Kade Foundation, the German Consulate General in Boston, the Ted and Helen Geisel Professorship in the Humanities, The William P. and Dewilda N. Harris German-Dartmouth Distinguished Visiting Professorship, The Dartmouth Professorship in German Language and The Department of German Studies.
