Fellows

Mercury's twins. Newspaper and telescope as media of the dissolution of spatiotemporal boundaries in the early modern period

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The newspaper emerged as a new medium in the early 17^th century, not directly from book printing, but from the fusion of the printing press and the postal system. Hans Blumenberg describes how, parallel to this, the telescope was also being developed/formatted as an instrument of theory-based curiosity. The newspaper presupposes the continuity of news circulation. In its beginnings, it did not offer local news, but collected news circulating through the European postal routes, bringing distant events into local areas. Newspapers shaped the »mental maps« of their readers. Drawing on analyses of the telescope as a medium for »constituting visibility,« the Mercury's Twins project examines newspapers as media for »constituting the present«. Looking at early newspapers and the debates on newspaper reading in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the project examines the relationship between the newspaper and the telescope as media for the dissolution of boundaries in the perception of the world.

CV

Lothar Müller received his doctorate in 1986 with a dissertation on Karl Philipp Moritz and the psychological novel in the 18^th century. He has been writing for newspapers and public radio since 1981. He was the presenter of a cultural radio show on Norddeutscher Rundfunk, a lecturer at the Institute for Comparative Literature at the Free University of Berlin and a member of a research project on cultural studies in Germany at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 1997 to 2001 he was an editor in the cultural section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and from 2001 to 2020 an editor in the features section of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in the newspaper's editorial office in Berlin. Since 2010, he has been an honorary professor at the Institute for German Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin and is a member of the organizing team of the interdisciplinary and internationally oriented Mosse Lectures, with which the university addresses the general public in Berlin and beyond.

Publications

Adrien Proust und sein Sohn Marcel. Beobachter der erkrankten Welt, Berlin 2021.

Freuds Dinge. Der Diwan, die Apollokerzen und die Seele im technischen Zeitalter, Berlin 2019.

Weiße Magie. Die Epoche des Papiers, München 2012.

White Magic. The Age of Paper (Translated by Jessica Spengler), Cambridge 2014.

»Weißer Mann auf heißen Pfaden. Ein Kindheitsbuch über Afrika, wiedergelesen und zitiert«, in: Canceln. Ein notwendiger Streit. München 2023, S.173–191.

»Die Rose von Jericho. Georg Hermanns Roman Die Nacht des Dr. Herzfeld und die zeitgenössische Debatte über die ›Westjuden‹«, in: Christian Klein (Hg.), Vom gesicherten und ungesicherten Leben. Neue Perspektiven auf das Werk von Georg Hermann, Göttingen 2024, S. 34–51.