In-Person Lecture by Nils Plath, Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor in German Studies, Brown University

“Reading Non-Synchronicity: Notes on Newspapers and Literature”

Making it one’s task to repeatedly re-appoint the actuality of literature can mean to look for the effects of a multiple asynchronicity which is being generated by this obstinate cultural technique called ‘reading.’ Even–or possibly especially–in our post-paper age an intensive look at newspaper and literature can prove to be informative to gain some perspective on the complex relation between the sense of nearness and of remoteness, on reality and temporalities, and on a ‘world society’ marked by asynchronism. After some remarks on viewing the newspaper as the presumptive guarantor of temporal order and on reading the realities of media, this lecture promises notes on papers (Vilém Flusser/Harun Farocki), on cuts (Rolf Dieter Brinkmann), and interweavings (John Sparagana).