Conférence – Christian Moser – « The Author as Editor : Alexander Kluge’s Literary Counterhistories and Heinrich von Kleist’s Berliner Abendblätter »
18 septembre 2025 – 11:30-13:00
Biographie
Christian Moser dirige le département de littérature comparée de la Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Par ailleurs il est Joint Research Professor à l’Université de St Andrews depuis 2023. Il a été président de la Société allemande de littérature générale et comparée de 2011 à 2017 et est actuellement vice-président de la Société Heinrich von Kleist.
Livres récents :
Re-imagining the Public Sphere in the Long Nineteenth Century / Literatur, Theater und das soziale Imaginäre, co-dir. avec Seán Allan. Bielefeld : Aisthesis, 2024.
Hermeneutics between Berlin and Paris. The Search for Ethics, co-dir. avec Tim Mehigan. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2025.
Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature, and the Arts. Vol. I : From the Enlightenment to the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Stuttgart : J. B. Metzler 2018. Vol. II : Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Berlin : J. B. Metzler 2023 – coécrit avec Markus Winkler et al.
Résumé
The writer, filmmaker, and social theorist Alexander Kluge is currently considered one of the most prominent intellectual figures in Germany. He has never made a secret of his affinity for the Prussian poet Heinrich von Kleist. In my talk, I would like to show that Kluge’s admiration for his radical predecessor encompasses much more than a shared interest in certain themes, motifs, or historical constellations. Kluge finds in Kleist narrative techniques and forms of storytelling that he himself adopts and further develops. What fascinates Kluge about Kleist is the way in which the latter applied journalistic activities—investigating, arranging, and compiling—during his tenure as editor of the short-lived Berliner Abendblätter (1810/11), the first daily newspaper in Prussia, to create a new and distinctly modern concept of authorship: the author not as a genius creator, but as a montage artist and arranger, whose works are characterized by polyphony and profound enigmatic complexity. I will demonstrate how Kluge adapts this concept of authorship and the associated modes of writing by examining his recently published book on Kleist: Heinrich von Kleist – ein Gewitterleben (Heinrich von Kleist – A Thunderstorm Life) (2023).
Détails
Lieu
Montréal, Québec H3T 1P1 Canada + Google Map