Carol Rifelj Lecture: Narratives from Rented Rooms: The Literary Fascination with Hotels and their Dwellers...

Narratives from Rented Rooms: The Literary Fascination with Hotels and their Dwellers in early 20th Century Germany and Austria
Bettina Matthias, Department of German, will give a talk as part of the 2020-21 Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series.

Around 1890, German-language bourgeois fiction seems to move from the family home to the rented hotel room. Authors such as Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig or Thomas Mann increasingly submit their protagonists to the social laboratory-like universe that is the hotel, testing the individual’s ability to survive in a space that is neither private nor public and fully inscribed in the dynamics of the mature money economy. Early 20th century theorists such as Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer and Thorstein Veblen provide the modernist framework in which to view these stories. The gender of the protagonist determines what it takes it survive the stay in a hotel unscathed: more often than not, the “home away from home” really turns out to be a trap for the “transcendentally homeless” (Lukács).

Register in advance:

https://middlebury.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIlcO2sqDstGtOkZAvZ2lpF06Cdodn6snrN