The Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies
and the
Centre for Social Theory
present:

 

Esther Leslie
Birkbeck College, London

 

 

This lecture uses the thought-constructions of Walter Benjamin, Paul Scheerbart and Siegfried Kracauer as entry into apparent contraries, the architectural uncanny and the glassy utopian spaces of modernism. In these theorists’ diagnoses of modern life much is unmasked as double of its own opposite, for example, that which is seen to be rational dogs the irrational and vice versa. The paper’s props include glass houses, old animation fragments, haunted homes and ornaments. Through these, Esther Leslie tracks an over-liveliness of lifeless materials, their seeming vitality lent by capitalist social relations and symptomatic of both past barbarism and future ideal form.                  

 

Thursday 7 December
6pm
Humanities H202

 

All welcome!

 

Best wishes,

Christine

 

 

 

-----------
Dr. Christine Achinger
Department of German Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
UK

 

Tel. + 44 (024) 761 50388