“World Literature: Christian Kracht’s AI Novel AIR”, Lecture by Frauke Berndt

Abstract: The lecture argues that Christian Kracht’s brilliant novel AIR (2025) is world literature—and that it is world literature precisely because it is a novel. Since 1800, the genre code of the modern novel has provided this encyclopedic form. At the heart of the novel is the Green Mountain Data Center in Norway, where all of humanity’s knowledge is stored. The lecture links the novel’s aesthetics to media models of cultural memory. It shows how the cloud model functions as a literary game changer.

Frauke Berndt is Full Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Zurich, after having taught at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, the University of Chicago, and Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. Berndt has also been a visiting professor at several American universities. She has published widely on rhetoric, aesthetics, poetics & literary theory, focusing on German literature, history & thought from the 18th & 19th centuries. She is the author of numerous monographs and anthologies and the founder of the Zurich Aesthetics Lab.