Florian Fuchs | Princeton University (original) (raw)
Books by Florian Fuchs
Zone Books, 2023
This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep hi... more This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.
“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University
“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University
“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin
Edited Books by Florian Fuchs
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020
Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,... more Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.
History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.
Papers by Florian Fuchs
History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, 2020
Articles by Florian Fuchs
The Cambridge History of the American Essay, 2024
28. The American Essay and (Social) Science 477 ted anton 29. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing 490... more 28. The American Essay and (Social) Science 477 ted anton 29. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing 490 paul jenner 30. The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion 509 stefano ercolino Contents vii
Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 56, Issue 2-3, 2023
This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the ess... more This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the essential linguistic material for literary writing: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's 1642 play The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs and Gottfried Keller's 1856 novella cycle The People of Seldwyla. Harsdörffer's use of the proverb as the crude but 'original' token of German vernacular that could help to construct German as a literary language from its spoken realist pieces returns in the crude formalism of Keller's realist novellas. With subtle but constant allusions to the Baroque, Keller employs various proverbs as a scaffolding for his realist prose. As will be shown particularly for the novella Clothes Make the Man, these proverbs are responsible for rendering a realist modern world based on formulaic structures, while demonstrating at the same time that this realist world can, in consequence, be navigated by formulas alone. Keller's use of the proverb as a foundation for realist diegesis hence echoes Harsdörffer's attempt to ground German literature on the proverb. This implies that a decisive signature of the surface and the make-up of modern reality is its constant reliance on repeatable formulas.
Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 56, Issue 2-3, 2023
Our expectations of a "large form" are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of ... more Our expectations of a "large form" are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of the construction, each detail, each stylistic device, has a different function, a different force, and a different load is laid upon it. (Tynyanov 32
cargo – Zeitschrift für Film, Medien, Kultur , 2022
New German Critique, 2022
New German Critique 145, Vol. 49, No. 1, February 2022, pp. 163-183
Prosa. Geschichte, Poetik, Theorie, 2021
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2020
La parade 1 EDITORIAL MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES AND CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD 10 CHRISTIANE HILLE Albrec... more La parade 1 EDITORIAL MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES AND CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD 10 CHRISTIANE HILLE Albrecht Dürer and the tailoring of the human form 23 SHIRA BRISMAN Maerten van Heemskerck's Momus and the moment of critique 41 FRANCESCA ALBERTI Menacing laughter in sixteenth-century pitture ridicole 60 AMY KNIGHT POWELL Porcelain white 76 EMMELYN BUTTERFIELD-ROSEN The hierarchy of genres and the hierarchy of life-forms 94 JOHN COOPER The dancing image in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1770-1870 111 HANNAH WALSER Three homunculi: The emergence of the figure in eighteenth-century embryology and Goethe's Faust 124 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD The dancer in and out of character: Tiepolo, Canova, Degas 140 MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES Time-chaste damsels: Ingres, Nerval, and Sylvie 155 RALPH UBL Delacroix's parade 170 ALEXANDER NEMEROV John Quidor in hell 184 MICHAEL FRIED Facingness meets mindedness: Manet's Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony 203 MATTHEW SPELLBERG Art and aliveness on the Northwest Coast 221 ROMY GOLAN Is Fascist realism a magic realism? 238 FLORIAN FUCHS The animation of sameness: Brecht's Elephant Calf and the parade ground of epic theater 247 EYAL PERETZ From the mark of Kane to the artistic signature: Orson Welles as self-portraitist 256 WHITNEY DAVIS Jackson Pollock's Mural in the light of photography 276 THOMAS CROW The hidden Mod in the New Art History 294 CHIARA CAPPELLETTO Transvestism: The parade of the embodied self 304 FRANCESCO PELLIZZI Postscriptum: A note on Jean-Michel Basquiat's word-parade 307 CAROLYN DEAN A celebrated stone: The Inkas' carved monolith at Saywiti 325 VAUGHAN HART "London's standard": Christopher Wren and the heraldry of the Monument LECTURES, DOCUMENTS, AND DISCUSSIONS 340 DANIEL JÜTTE Toward a history of the corner 1. D. Diderot, Paradox sur le comédien (Paris, 1992).
Verkleinerung. Epistemologie und Literaturgeschichte kleiner Formen, 2021
New Literary History, 2019
G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an app... more G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an appellation that fits neatly into its centuries-long genealogy. Before there were hashtags, the novella has been described as many things: an anecdote retold, the sister of drama, a short novel, a story readable in a single sitting, an unprecedented incident, or simply as a piece of news. Curiously, these alternative titles point to no common feature, except one: novellas seem to be defined with respect to other genres. This is perhaps most true of the rapprochement of the novella and the short novel, which has proven so intuitive that its comparative nature is often forgotten and "novella" used interchangeably with "short novel." On the contrary, a novella and a novel, however long or short, are very different things.
Rückkehr des Erlebnisses in die Geisteswissenschaften, 2019
Enzyklopädie der kleinen Formen / Microform Podcast / HU Berlin, 2019
Podcast: http://www.kleine-formen.de/enzyklopaedie-devise/ – Persönliche Devisen sind kurze Sprüc... more Podcast: http://www.kleine-formen.de/enzyklopaedie-devise/ – Persönliche Devisen sind kurze Sprüche, die sich Einzelpersonen gewählt haben, um ihre Identität, ihren Charakter, oder ihre Lebensziele auszudrücken. Während diese Praxis besonders um 1500 aufkommt und in diesem historischen Kontext hier betrachtet wird, zeichnet sich auch ein Wiederaufleben dieser Kulturtechnik ab. Personal Devices besetzen heute – über die etymologische Verwandschaft zu den persönlichen Devisen hinaus – erneut den Ort zwischen Individuum und Umfeld, der die Filterfunktion der Renaissancedevisen weiterentwickelt.
In den letzten Jahren häufen sich literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einzelnen literarischen ... more In den letzten Jahren häufen sich literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einzelnen literarischen Gattungen sowie Studien zum Problem der Gattung überhaupt. Teil-weise handelt es sich dabei um zeitspezifisch-kulturelle Phänomene, wie Arbei-ten zum Essay als einer Form, die eine hohe Flexibilität besitzt und sich beson-ders gut mit anderen Gattungen vermischen kann oder zur TV-Serie, die derzeit eine intellektuelle Wiedergeburt erlebt. Diese Arbeiten sehen Gattungen jeweils als Echokammern für bestimmte Entwicklungen des öffentlichen Raumes, denen sie durch ihre besondere Form Raum geben. Parallel dazu entstehen jedoch auch immer mehr Analysen zur Rolle und Funktion von Gattungsdefinitionen über-haupt, wie etwa die grundlegende Studie Kulturen der Gattung von Werner Michler. Der vorliegende Band gehört beiden Kategorien an, was ihn zu einem äußerst richtungsweisenden Beitrag zur Literatur-und Wissensgeschichte macht. In seinen gründlichen, neugierigen Studien werden Gattungen als allgegenwärti-ge und eigenständige gesellschaftliche Akteure sichtbar – womit bereits die Bedeutsamkeit des Bandes innerhalb und außerhalb der Geisteswissenschaften angedeutet ist.
![Research paper thumbnail of Roman (Friedrich Hölderlin) ["Emilies Amortisierung. Zu Rom und Roman bei Hölderlin"], in: Rom rückwärts. Europäische Übertragungsschicksale von Lucan bis Lacan, ed. Judith Kasper, Cornelia Wild, München: Fink 2015](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/40547603/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Only after renouncing himself from Rome and its romantic implications in the form of the novel, t... more Only after renouncing himself from Rome and its romantic implications in the form of the novel, this article argues, could Friedrich Hölderlin move from his "Roman" Hyperion to writing unromantic, non-novelistic narratives, specifically the short idyll "Emilie vor ihrem Brauttag" in June of 1799.
Merkur Blog, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken, Aug 2015
"Blumenberg lesen – Ein Glossar", ed. Robert Buch, Daniel Weidner, Suhrkamp 2014, 2014
Zone Books, 2023
This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep hi... more This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.
“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University
“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University
“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020
Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,... more Edited by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.
History, Metaphors, and Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.
History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader, 2020
The Cambridge History of the American Essay, 2024
28. The American Essay and (Social) Science 477 ted anton 29. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing 490... more 28. The American Essay and (Social) Science 477 ted anton 29. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing 490 paul jenner 30. The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion 509 stefano ercolino Contents vii
Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 56, Issue 2-3, 2023
This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the ess... more This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the essential linguistic material for literary writing: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer's 1642 play The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs and Gottfried Keller's 1856 novella cycle The People of Seldwyla. Harsdörffer's use of the proverb as the crude but 'original' token of German vernacular that could help to construct German as a literary language from its spoken realist pieces returns in the crude formalism of Keller's realist novellas. With subtle but constant allusions to the Baroque, Keller employs various proverbs as a scaffolding for his realist prose. As will be shown particularly for the novella Clothes Make the Man, these proverbs are responsible for rendering a realist modern world based on formulaic structures, while demonstrating at the same time that this realist world can, in consequence, be navigated by formulas alone. Keller's use of the proverb as a foundation for realist diegesis hence echoes Harsdörffer's attempt to ground German literature on the proverb. This implies that a decisive signature of the surface and the make-up of modern reality is its constant reliance on repeatable formulas.
Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 56, Issue 2-3, 2023
Our expectations of a "large form" are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of ... more Our expectations of a "large form" are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of the construction, each detail, each stylistic device, has a different function, a different force, and a different load is laid upon it. (Tynyanov 32
cargo – Zeitschrift für Film, Medien, Kultur , 2022
New German Critique, 2022
New German Critique 145, Vol. 49, No. 1, February 2022, pp. 163-183
Prosa. Geschichte, Poetik, Theorie, 2021
RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2020
La parade 1 EDITORIAL MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES AND CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD 10 CHRISTIANE HILLE Albrec... more La parade 1 EDITORIAL MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES AND CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD 10 CHRISTIANE HILLE Albrecht Dürer and the tailoring of the human form 23 SHIRA BRISMAN Maerten van Heemskerck's Momus and the moment of critique 41 FRANCESCA ALBERTI Menacing laughter in sixteenth-century pitture ridicole 60 AMY KNIGHT POWELL Porcelain white 76 EMMELYN BUTTERFIELD-ROSEN The hierarchy of genres and the hierarchy of life-forms 94 JOHN COOPER The dancing image in India, England, and the Caribbean, 1770-1870 111 HANNAH WALSER Three homunculi: The emergence of the figure in eighteenth-century embryology and Goethe's Faust 124 CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD The dancer in and out of character: Tiepolo, Canova, Degas 140 MARIKA TAKANISHI KNOWLES Time-chaste damsels: Ingres, Nerval, and Sylvie 155 RALPH UBL Delacroix's parade 170 ALEXANDER NEMEROV John Quidor in hell 184 MICHAEL FRIED Facingness meets mindedness: Manet's Luncheon in the Studio and Balcony 203 MATTHEW SPELLBERG Art and aliveness on the Northwest Coast 221 ROMY GOLAN Is Fascist realism a magic realism? 238 FLORIAN FUCHS The animation of sameness: Brecht's Elephant Calf and the parade ground of epic theater 247 EYAL PERETZ From the mark of Kane to the artistic signature: Orson Welles as self-portraitist 256 WHITNEY DAVIS Jackson Pollock's Mural in the light of photography 276 THOMAS CROW The hidden Mod in the New Art History 294 CHIARA CAPPELLETTO Transvestism: The parade of the embodied self 304 FRANCESCO PELLIZZI Postscriptum: A note on Jean-Michel Basquiat's word-parade 307 CAROLYN DEAN A celebrated stone: The Inkas' carved monolith at Saywiti 325 VAUGHAN HART "London's standard": Christopher Wren and the heraldry of the Monument LECTURES, DOCUMENTS, AND DISCUSSIONS 340 DANIEL JÜTTE Toward a history of the corner 1. D. Diderot, Paradox sur le comédien (Paris, 1992).
Verkleinerung. Epistemologie und Literaturgeschichte kleiner Formen, 2021
New Literary History, 2019
G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an app... more G iven its brevity, the novella has been newly rediscovered as "the original #Longread," 1 an appellation that fits neatly into its centuries-long genealogy. Before there were hashtags, the novella has been described as many things: an anecdote retold, the sister of drama, a short novel, a story readable in a single sitting, an unprecedented incident, or simply as a piece of news. Curiously, these alternative titles point to no common feature, except one: novellas seem to be defined with respect to other genres. This is perhaps most true of the rapprochement of the novella and the short novel, which has proven so intuitive that its comparative nature is often forgotten and "novella" used interchangeably with "short novel." On the contrary, a novella and a novel, however long or short, are very different things.
Rückkehr des Erlebnisses in die Geisteswissenschaften, 2019
Enzyklopädie der kleinen Formen / Microform Podcast / HU Berlin, 2019
Podcast: http://www.kleine-formen.de/enzyklopaedie-devise/ – Persönliche Devisen sind kurze Sprüc... more Podcast: http://www.kleine-formen.de/enzyklopaedie-devise/ – Persönliche Devisen sind kurze Sprüche, die sich Einzelpersonen gewählt haben, um ihre Identität, ihren Charakter, oder ihre Lebensziele auszudrücken. Während diese Praxis besonders um 1500 aufkommt und in diesem historischen Kontext hier betrachtet wird, zeichnet sich auch ein Wiederaufleben dieser Kulturtechnik ab. Personal Devices besetzen heute – über die etymologische Verwandschaft zu den persönlichen Devisen hinaus – erneut den Ort zwischen Individuum und Umfeld, der die Filterfunktion der Renaissancedevisen weiterentwickelt.
In den letzten Jahren häufen sich literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einzelnen literarischen ... more In den letzten Jahren häufen sich literaturwissenschaftliche Beiträge zu einzelnen literarischen Gattungen sowie Studien zum Problem der Gattung überhaupt. Teil-weise handelt es sich dabei um zeitspezifisch-kulturelle Phänomene, wie Arbei-ten zum Essay als einer Form, die eine hohe Flexibilität besitzt und sich beson-ders gut mit anderen Gattungen vermischen kann oder zur TV-Serie, die derzeit eine intellektuelle Wiedergeburt erlebt. Diese Arbeiten sehen Gattungen jeweils als Echokammern für bestimmte Entwicklungen des öffentlichen Raumes, denen sie durch ihre besondere Form Raum geben. Parallel dazu entstehen jedoch auch immer mehr Analysen zur Rolle und Funktion von Gattungsdefinitionen über-haupt, wie etwa die grundlegende Studie Kulturen der Gattung von Werner Michler. Der vorliegende Band gehört beiden Kategorien an, was ihn zu einem äußerst richtungsweisenden Beitrag zur Literatur-und Wissensgeschichte macht. In seinen gründlichen, neugierigen Studien werden Gattungen als allgegenwärti-ge und eigenständige gesellschaftliche Akteure sichtbar – womit bereits die Bedeutsamkeit des Bandes innerhalb und außerhalb der Geisteswissenschaften angedeutet ist.
Only after renouncing himself from Rome and its romantic implications in the form of the novel, t... more Only after renouncing himself from Rome and its romantic implications in the form of the novel, this article argues, could Friedrich Hölderlin move from his "Roman" Hyperion to writing unromantic, non-novelistic narratives, specifically the short idyll "Emilie vor ihrem Brauttag" in June of 1799.
Merkur Blog, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Europäisches Denken, Aug 2015
"Blumenberg lesen – Ein Glossar", ed. Robert Buch, Daniel Weidner, Suhrkamp 2014, 2014
"Mnemosyne: Meanderings through Aby Warburg’s Atlas", The Warburg Institute & Cornell University, Aug 2014
in: "Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie". By Hans Blumenberg. With annotations by Anselm Haverkam... more in: "Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie". By Hans Blumenberg. With annotations by Anselm Haverkamp, et al. Ed. Haverkamp. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013.
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2020
The German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) has fallen into the... more The German philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) has fallen into the spotlight as of late. The new essay collection, History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader was published in June 2020 by the Signale imprint for German thought at Cornell University Press. The volume is edited and translated by Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. Contributing editors Andrew Hines and Jonathon Catlin interviewed the editors about this new edition of Blumenberg’s writings.