Current Research

My current book project, Small Forms: Micrologies of German Literature and Science around 1800, explores the prehistory of debates surrounding the media ecology of ‘short prose’ or ‘small forms’ in the so-called Sattelzeit, a period of transformation and upheaval in the German-speaking lands. It argues that during this period a tension emerged between the perception of an ‘information flood’ in the German media environment and the normative demand to tame this heterogeneity by synthesizing it into coherent organizational forms, embodied in the ‘work’ (Werk) under a singular authorial figure. Against this backdrop, my book investigates how thinkers of various stripes recognized the epistemological value of attending to minutiae in the domains of literature and science and strove to provide these insights with adequate forms of representation. Through case studies of the works of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771-1833), and Goethe, my book argues that their writings contributed in different ways to the valorization of ‘smallness’ by emphasizing its unique affordances in the domains of (self-)observation (Lichtenberg), aesthetics and print (Jean Paul), authorship (Varnhagen), and the life sciences (Goethe).