Center for German and European Studies

The Archival Pact. The Practice of Archival Reading and the Example of Rilke's 'Malte Laurids Brigge

Monday, Sept. 30, 2024
6:00 - 7:30 pm ET (US)
Hybrid on Zoom and In-Person
Mandel 228, Mandel Center for Humanities, Brandeis University Campus

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**Refreshments will be provided**

About the Event

Archival theory was and is a major topic, but the question of how collections and text interpretation can be linked has rarely been asked. Rilke's "Malte Laurids Brigge" allows the question to be posed in a special way - against the background of previously unknown materials. The archive is everywhere, one could say, even in the literary text. If we enter into an archival pact with the text, we can understand not only "Malte Laurids Brigge", but the entire literature of European modernism better than before.

About the Speaker

Head shot of Sandra Richter with a soft smileSandra Richter was born in Kassel and studied German, political science, art history, and philosophy at the University of Hamburg. Having completed her PhD at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen with a dissertation on the Huguenots as literary mediators in the eighteenth century, she received her Habilitation from the University of Hamburg with a thesis on poetics from Novalis to Rilke. She was previously a visiting researcher at the École normale supérieure in Paris, the University of London, and the Renmin University Beijing, and has received numerous prizes (including the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize in 2005 and a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2007). Having been Professor of German at King’s College London, she became Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Stuttgart in 2008. Since 2019 she has been the director of the German Literature Archive Marbach. Her most recent book publication is ‘Eine Weltgeschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur’ (C. Bertelsmann 2017).