Driven by my passion for contemporary literature and my interest in aesthetic theories of analog recording technologies, my research engages the relationship of different media and the way they inspire artistic expression and shape social relationships.
My research priority as an assistant professor will be the completion of my first monograph, tentatively entitled Chaos and Control: Indexicality and the Human Voice in Contemporary German Fiction. Based on my dissertation, my book project claims that literature’s integration of indexical voices—i.e., recorded voices that implicate the existence of the speaker’s physical body—contests common aesthetic theories of the index, such as those of Philip Rosen (Change Mummified, 2001) and Diedrich Diederichsen (Körpertreffer, 2016). At the same time, I advance new ways of understanding literature’s imagination of extra-literary reality. I establish a theory of what I call literary indexicality. By transcribing recorded voices, often claiming them to be authentic documents, literature simulates the immediate real-world connection promised by indexical media.
Following a chronological development, my dissertation illuminates how novels remediate these effects in different ways. As I show in my readings of both Hubert Fichte’s Die Palette (1968) and Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1970), indexical voices are often inserted into the text with- out markers identifying their origin and context; the indexicality at work in these novels is often chaotic and disrupts the otherwise dominating voice of the literary narrator. Both novels re- consider how literature conjures up marginalized queer and female bodies and their experience of violence. The second half of my dissertation engages two different literary approaches to indexical media, namely Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (1996) and Rainald Goetz’s Abfall für alle (1999). While Beyer’s novel presents a historical exploration of the relationship of fascism and indexicality, Goetz’s text confronts both writing and analog media with the digital’s promise to subsume all older media.
As I transform the dissertation into a book project, I expand my historical analysis of literary indexicality. I read both Franz Kafka’s Das Schloss and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz as early examples of the alienating effects of technologically disembodied voices, comparing the telephone in Kafka’s rural nightmare to the cacophony of Döblin’s metropolis. I conclude my book by interpreting two contemporary novels. While Berit Glanz’s Pixeltänzer (2019) builds bridges between our digital age and the classical avant-gardes, Juan S. Guse’s Miami Punk (2019) reverses the disorienting soundscape of Döblin’s metropolis. In Guse’s post-apocalyptic Miami, the only voices left are the moaning of the city’s molding concrete pillars.
As I complete my book project, I will also turn to my next research project, which focuses on the evolution of what Katherine N. Hayles calls “virtual bodies” (How We Became Posthuman, 1999). Tracing the trope of the technologically augmented body from expressionist cinema to Alexander Kluge’s Cold War inspired science fiction stories to Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008) and Anja Kümmel’s Träume digitaler Schläfer (2012), I argue that these science fiction narratives are no anticipation of the future but an attempt to process the “pile of debris” (Walter Benjamin) that is human history.