Ecologies of Writing

Urs Büttner is Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Oxford, UK. He previously held positions at Leibniz University Hannover, Free University Berlin and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. He taught as Max Kade Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received a Visiting Scholarship at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Durham.Jacob Haubenreich is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University, USA. He has previously held positions at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and the College of the Holy Cross, as well as positions as Visiting Scholar at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and in the Marbach Weimar Wolfenbüttel Research Association.

• Introduction: An Expanded Perspective on Textual CreationUrs Büttner (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) and Jacob Haubenreich (Johns Hopkins University, USA)Part I. Materialities1. The Field of Writing: The Ambulatory Art of Noticing Third Nature in Sebald and Kinsky, Jason Groves (University of Washington, USA)2. Street Writing and Contemporary German Streetscapes, Peter Schweppe (Montana State University, USA)Part II. Mediality and Technical Devices3. Lines of Force: Writing Theory and the Energetic Scripts of Modernism, Susanne Strätling (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany)4. An Updated Superscript: Paradoxes of Writing Amidst Generative AI, Richard Gibson (Wheaton College, USA)Part III. Mind and Body5. “This Conflict between the Soul’s Inclination and the Body’s Capabilities”: Writing Hygiene in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Urs Büttner (Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Germany)6. Immersion and its Discontents: Kafka's Ecology of Attention, Carolin Duttlinger (University of Oxford, UK)Part IV. Social Conditions7. In the Machine Room: Writing between Author and Editor, ca. 1900-2000, Ines Barner (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) translated by Eric Hounshell8. Writing as Work: Towards a Theory of Literary Production, Carolin Amlinger (University of Basel, Switzerland)Notes on ContributorsIndex

This volume presents compelling new perspectives on practices and contexts of writing, looking beyond authorial intention and agency to the different natural and built environments, media ecologies, and social situations in which writing takes place. A delightful example of what Villem Flusser calls ‘superscript,’ or thinking and writing about writing, Ecologies of Writing boasts many inspiring insights and unexpected finds and will advance discussions about writing and media practices in the 20th and 21st centuries in media studies, materialist and object-oriented scholarship, and the sociology of literature.