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Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Andreas Huyssen
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Abstract

This essay focuses on a little–studied narrative form I call the modernist miniature. Its practitioners after Baudelaire include novelists like Kafka and Musil, poets like Rilke and Benn, social thinkers and critics like Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno. Central concerns of these modernist miniatures, written primarily for the newspaper feuilleton and published only later in book form, were the perceptions and image spheres of urban space, which were undergoing radical change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernist miniatures can be alternately narrative or philosophical, lyrical or sociological, temporal or spatial. I draw on photographic and architectural discourse to analyze this hybrid literary form, which flourished in the interwar years in Austria and Germany.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 1: Special Topics Cities , January 2007 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2007

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