The Visual and Cultural Studies Program presents this year’s Craig Owens Memorial Lecture on Friday, November 22, 4:00 pm, in the Hawkins-Carlson Room, Rush Rees Library
Devin Fore, Princeton University
“Animal Spirits of the Theater, Collective Brain of the Revolution”
Documentary projects have always flourished in historical conditions of crisis and rupture. At no point in the twentieth century did the relationship between crisis and documentary achieve greater clarity, force, and sheer inventive potential than in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. This talk considers the work of the factographer Sergei Tret’iakov. For him, documents constituted the basic cells in a “collective brain of the revolution,” a brain capable of decoding the deafening noise of history that had been unleashed in October 1917.
Devin Fore is Associate Professor of German at Princeton University, where he is also an Associate Faculty member of the Slavic Department and Affiliated Faculty Member of the Program in Media + Modernity. His book “Realism After Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature” examines the returns of realism in German cultural production from the late 1920s into the Popular Front era. An editor of the journal October, Fore is currently completing a new book, “All the Graphs: Soviet Factography and the Emergence of Avant-Garde Documentary,” and editing the English translation of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s “History and Obstinacy.”