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Gundela Hachmann

Gundela Hachmann received her PhD in German Literature from Harvard University. Before working on her PhD, she studied German Literature and Linguistics, Philosophy, and Applied Cultural Studies at the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Muenster, Germany, and at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. She is currently Assistant Professor of German at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where she teaches courses on German language, literature, film, and history. Her research interests focus on the intersection of literature, media, and arts. She has published on intermediality in E.T.A. Hofmmann’s writing, on the war poetry of Raoul Schrott, on science and literature in Thomas Lehr’s novel 42, on film and literature in Yoko Tawada’s novel The Naked Eye, and on the notion of “Bildung” in contemporary poetic theories. She is currently completing a book project entitled Die Technoimagination der Literatur (The Literary Techno-Imagination).

Articles of Gundela Hachmann

Drafting the Techno-Imagination: A Future for Literary Writing?

Vilém Flusser paints a dire picture for the future of literary writing. He contests that it is doomed to be replaced by automated language games. In that sense, one can see literature and the image-culture as antagonistic forces. Drawing on examples from contemporary German literature, however, I show in which ways the literary imagination may contribute to the formation of the techno-imagination. The authors Ulrike Draesner and Thomas Lehr scrutinize the impact that visual media has on conceptual thinking and identity. Core ideas from Flusser’s media theory, such as the photographer as homo ludens, communication as resistance to natural entropy, and the re-conceptualization of space and time, feature prominently in the two 2005 novels Spiele (Games) and 42. In these texts, the imaginative capacity of fictional literature provides a conceptual space in which a new awareness towards technical images is drafted, tested, and reviewed.

Drafting (PDF 310.67 KB)

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