The Fellows's Project Conception

Date

Tuesday, July 13, 2021, 2pm.

Online via Zoom

Ron Sadan (Princeton University)

How to Read an (Illustrated) Newspaper: Vigilant Reading and Die Illustrierten
The rise of a photographically illustrated newspaper culture by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, and Hamburg, led to a notion of a “common reader” whose psyche was seen as weak and manipulable. My talk examines figures – some well-, others little-known – who not only noticed this trend, but sought to ameliorate it, paradoxically in the same discursive form supposed to have caused the problem – the newspaper. I propose that a notion of readerly vigilance, understood with Lucy Alford as a practice of “sustained objectless attention,” emerged in the 1910s and -20s as a normative discourse in the midst of what contemporaries often perceived in terms of a desensitizing “flood of images.” Calls to vigilance, however, not only bridged such dispersed phenomena as the media-critical feuilletons of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, the empirical reading research of the emerging discipline “Zeitungswissenschaft,” and the editorial practices of both popular and ambitious illustrated pages. They also appear to correct the notion of a weak and victimized, “common reader” through that of an empowered, vigilant reader.

Felix Schaefer (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)

Vigilantia und novitas. Zur Steuerung und Responsibilisierung von Aufmerksamkeit um 900
Als prototypische Vigilanzkultur ermöglicht es die karolingische Herrschaftsordnung einem Wandel von Aufmerksamkeitsstrukturen in der Umbruchszeit um 900 nachzugehen. Zum einen rückt hierbei die kollektive Responsibilisierung auf Synoden in den Blick, mit welcher die Bischöfe auf die zeitgenössischen Normanneneinfälle reagierten. Zum anderen zeigt die Chronik Reginos von Prüm, wie sich damalige Konfliktnarrative der Vigilanz sowohl thematisch als auch darstellerisch bedienten.