Patrizia C. McBride

My research and teaching span German-language literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with a special emphasis on modernism and avant-garde studies, the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, and political theory, and visual and media studies. My scholarship revolves around three main themes: the development of narrative within literary and visual media; the ways in which the reflection on art and society in the twentieth century contributed to the politicized practice of the avant-garde; and the increasing concern, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with grasping literature and the arts in terms of the ideological, rhetorical, and material effects produced by the media that carry them. What holds these interests together is an overarching preoccupation with appraising the modalities of knowledge to which literature and the arts can grant access, as well as the political and ethical visions that sustain them.

I am currently working on a monograph that examines the tense relation between literature and the book in German-language culture during the first decades of the 20th century. Although the emergence of mass culture at this time has frequently been chronicled through the lens of film, photography, and radio broadcasting, one should not forget that newspapers and periodicals constituted the most widespread spare-time activity, so much so that the 1920s have been dubbed “the decade of the press.” For many contemporaries the press’s brazen commercialization risked cannibalizing print’s most treasured child, the book, which was however maligned by others for promoting modes of reading and writing that were out of touch with the needs and perceptual routines of modern life. Even an unabashedly high-brow writer like Robert Musil denounced the cultivated apartness and fundamentalist outlook of much book writing in his day, which for him encouraged readers to become caught up in the cultural sectarianism that drove ideological polarization in 1920s Germany and Austria.

My book focuses on the role literature played in debates and practices that sought to address the democratizing and polarizing effects of print, especially after the Great War. The norms and attitudes that regulated ‘the great sea of print’ harked back to the Romantic era, when the book’s new bond with literature had made it possible to bring order to the “reading revolution” of the 1800s by catalyzing practices of connecting, interpreting, archiving, sorting, and memorializing that taught readers to relate to print media in ways that exceeded literature itself. My study looks at how the expectations and norms that were naturalized in literature’s special alliance with the book became unbundled in works by Brecht, Balázs, Benjamin, Kracauer, Keun, Musil, Lasker-Schüler, Hausmann, Herzfelde, Huelsenbeck, Polgar, Tucholsky, and Heartfield.  I am especially interested in appraising the ways many of these writers set out to revitalize the verbal arts by reconfiguring literature as a ‘slow’ yet active medium that enlists print’s material features in strategies designed to pierce through the contemplative illusionism and feigned immediacy of old and new media alike (especially bourgeois theater and narrative film). Other questions I examine concern the status of literary form in relation to the small prose writing proper to journalism (feuilleton, reportage), the relation between truth, journalistic reporting, and literary storytelling, and the renaissance of a rhetorical understanding of literature in the bourgeoning field of advertising.