Small Forms: Aesthetics – Media – Modernity. A Transatlantic Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium

About This Event

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 3 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 a 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? Finally, we are interested in the specific disruptions that avant-garde artists sought to achieve through the radical deconstruction of small forms.

Featured Guests

guest presenters: Ethel Matala de Mazza (Humboldt-Universität Berlin); Stephan Brändle (Humboldt-Universität Berlin); Ron Sadan (Princeton University); Christian Struck (Harvard University); Devin Fore (Princeton University); Madeline Zehnder (Humboldt-Universität Berlin); Thomas Howard (University of Washington, St. Louis); Bruno Bosteels (Columbia University, New York); John Hamilton (Harvard University); Chiara Sartor (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) corridor presenters: Patrizia McBride (Cornell University); Dennis Wegner (Cornell University); Paul Fleming (Cornell University); Matthew Miller (Colgate University); Peter Gilgen (Cornell University); Franziska Schweiger (Hamilton College);

Co-sponsors

Institute for German Cultural Studies (Cornell University); the Research Training Group Literary and Epistemic History of Small Forms (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin); Society for the Humanities (Cornell)