World Literature: Christian Kracht's AI-novel AIR (2024)
About
Frauke Berndt, this years Max Kade professor in the German department, will present her research. Christian Kracht's brilliant novel AIR is world literature—and that it is world literature precisely because it is a novel. Since 1800, the genre code of the modern novel has provided this encyclopedic form. At the heart of the novel is the Green Mountain Data Center in Norway, where all of humanity's knowledge is stored. The lecture links the novel's aesthetics to media models of cultural memory. It shows how the cloud model functions as a literary game changer.
