Entertaining Germany in the Digital Age: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Markus Flohr’s Wo samstags immer Sonntag ist (2011) Isabelle Hesse As the recent controversy surrounding the publication of Günter Grass’s poem ‘Was gesagt werden muss’ (2012) confirms, Germany’s relationship with Israel is still an uneasy one, and one that is rarely marked by criticism. In Markus […]

Mimicking the Avant-Garde: Intellectual and Artistic Activism in the Digital Age Patrizia C. McBride The paper examines the recurrence of formal structures and tropes drawn from the European avant-garde (Futurism, Dadaism, German and Russian Constructivism) in the theorization of a digital turn that has unfolded in English-language scholarship of the past two decades. In focusing […]

Intersections of Music, Politics, and Digital Media: Bandista Ela Gezen Bandista, a self-described music collective, was founded in Istanbul in 2006. Through framing texts provided on their website – in Turkish, English, Spanish and German – the band proposes to sing for a world without borders and classes, characterizing their performance as “situationist.” Their internationalist […]

Computer Poems and Codework: Redefining Subjectivity for the Digital Age Kurt Beals This paper considers how poets have responded to the changing function of language in the digital age, and specifically how they have developed models of hybrid subjectivity to replace the traditional lyric subject. The first computer poems were written in 1959 in Germany, […]

The Nature of Digital Images Carsten Strathausen “In the age of computers, the image is not one, meaning not identical with itself.” (D.N. Rodowick) D.N. Rodowick is not the only media theorist to claim that digital images are, essentially, lacking. According to contemporary media theory, what has changed in the digital era is nothing less […]

The Documentary Tradition in the Digital Age Verena Kick This paper asks how and to what extent web-native documentaries (web docs) continue the documentary film tradition in the digital era. Web docs are not documentaries that are streamed online, rather, they operate within the framework of a website. Images, text, audio, video, animation, maps and […]

The Fate of Literary Studies in the Age of Digital Hyperculturality Rolf J. Goebel In his study Hyperkulturalität: Kultur und Globalisierung (2005), the Korean-German cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han develops the notion of hyperculturality. Akin to the digital hypertext, hyperculture denotes a rhizomatic space of de-substantialized dispersal; it is without memory; and it celebrates a post-auratic […]

Remixing Werner Herzog: The Auteur in the Digital Age Tara Hottman Werner Herzog’s voiceovers have become some of the most well known of cinema—a feat that is quite remarkable for any director. For a German auteur filmmaker known for his search for ecstatic truths and his portrayals of genius, madness, the far ends of the […]

Kafka and the Kafkaesques: Close Reading Online Fan Fiction Bonnie Ruberg “Gregor pushed against the door and undid the lock with his jaws. As it swung open… his father grabbed a poker from the fireplace and stabbed it through Gregor’s shell again and again. ‘But what happened to Gregor?!’ shouted his mother. After Gregor died, […]

Artistic and Scholarly Practice in the Digital Age The Division for 20th-century German Studies at the MLA 2014 presents a series of three panels on digital practice, organized by Deniz Göktürk (University of California, Berkeley). You can view abstracts and, even more importantly, provide feedback for each of the papers by clicking on their titles. Digital […]