Insight into the complex manner in which artistic texts are interwoven with daily life.

Insight into the specificity of literature and film as semiotic systems.

Enhanced cultural competency .

This course offers a systematic exploration of possible connections or correspondences between, on the one hand, technical innovations and, on the other, the literary and filmic experiences of day-to-day reality.  The focus is on steam trains and ships, motor vehicles, aeroplanes, telegraphy, telephony, and the World Wide Web. Running as a thread through this course is the question of how these technical objects from daily life impact on literary and filmic representations of reality. To this end, a number of notions are borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Our exploration of this almost virgin territory shall lead to a series of concrete cases, from Dickens and Zola to Platonov and Bontempelli to Cortàzar, DeLillo and J.G. Ballard. The film Crash (David Cronenberg, 1996) occupies a central position within the course. In a kind of “course-within-the-course”, we consider the tension between a romantic-expressive aesthetics and the editing principles of German expressionist as well as experimental Soviet film. 

Shall be made available to the students in due course.

R.A. Buchanan, The Power of the Machine. The Impact of Technology from 1700 to the Present, Penguin, London , 1994.

G. Deleuze, ‘Zola et la fêlure.’ In: G. Deleuze, Logique du sens, Minuit, Paris, 1969, p.373-386.

J. Derrida, ‘Ecriture et télécommunication.’ In: J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, Minuit, Paris, 1972, p.369-381.

J. Derrida, La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà, Flammarion, Paris, 1980.

M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, Signet, New York , 1964.

L. Mumford,Technics and Civilization, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London , 1962.

W. Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert , Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1989. H. Segeberg [ed.], Technik in der Literatur, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main , 1987.