| Description |
This lecture course is dedicated to “long” and “short” forms in contemporary North American literature and other media, discussing them in connection with questions of cultural sustainability. It examines how different temporalities, scales, and modes of attention shape aesthetic experience and cultural value today. The instructors and some invited guest speakers will discuss long novels, short stories, short poems, notes, flash fiction, graphic narratives, films and series, social media modes, essays, art essays, and more against the backdrop of various theories that try to capture this complex cultural landscape and media ecology. Cultural formats such as Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) and the many successful TV series attest to a new monumentalism and stand in stark contrast to extremely short and minimalist forms, as for example flash fiction, aphorisms, haikus, etc. While looking at this wide array of media, genres, and forms, we ask: What aesthetic strategies distinguish shortness from length beyond word count or runtime? Can short forms achieve poetic complexity comparable to long works? How do fragmentation, serialization, and modularity blur the boundary between long and short forms? According to Jonathan Kalb, a scholar of contemporary theatre, people today appreciate monumental cultural forms as “slow food” and “antidotes to the image-swarm, split-screens, quick-cuts, bullet-lists and call-waiting” that characterize “the endemic ‘hurry sickness’ of the [contemporary] media era”. Today, people tend “to be busy, distracted and regretful about lacking the time and patience to read long books”, hence they consume “lengthily immersive” cultural forms and formats (Kalb in Anglia 131.2+3, 2013). While Kalb’s assessment of the contemporary is convincing, this lecture is interested in discussing how his diagnosis of our time relates to another fact of contemporary culture, namely the thriving and sustainable nature of many cultural forms that are characterized by (at times extreme) brevity. But does brevity lend itself to sustainability? Or is it just a way of ‘cultural fast-food’ – quickly consumed, discarded, and forgotten? Conversely, are long forms truly resistant to such logics, or do they depend on similar economies of attention and circulation? Ultimately, what does it mean to spend more or less time with a work of art in the age of acceleration – and how do different forms demand, reward, or resist such investments?
Required Reading: We will provide all primary and secondary sources as of late August 2026. The material uploaded on our ILIAS platform must be carefully prepared for each session. |
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