“Heiner Müller and Critical Theory”
Speakers): Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University)
The lecture explores the complex relationship between Critical Theory (Adorno and Benjamin) and Heiner Müller’s drama from the early mythic plays to the later dramas on enlightenment and German history. At stake is the poetic power of theory in Germany’s most important playwright after Brecht and after Beckett.
Andreas Huyssen is the Villard Professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. A founding editor of New German Critique and founding director of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. His books include After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986), Postmoderne: Zeichen eines kulturellen Wandels (ed. with Klaus Scherpe, 1986), Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995), Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003), the edited volume Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World (2008), William Kentridge and Nalini Malani: The Shadowplay as Medium of Memory (2013) and Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (2015).