Marcus Krause studied German literature, philosophy and English literature at the University of Cologne and worked as a research associate in projects about ›media and cultural communication‹, the ›cultural history of human experimentation‹, and ›case histories‹. He received his PhD from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum with a monograph about »Infamous People. An Epistemology of literary case studies 1774–1816« (Berlin, 2017).
My Research
The Sport im Bild (sports in pictures) was published from 1895 until 1934 in Vienna and Berlin. It started as a traditional illustrated sports magazine but became increasingly elitist during the 1910s and shifted its thematic focus from conventional sports reports to more ›exquisite‹ sports (like golf, polo, tennis) and to topics such as cars, fashion, high society, or arts. This shift was supported by the integration of literary reportages, fictional texts and a wide range of visual artworks into the magazine on the one hand. And it was reflected by advertisements that promoted expensive luxury goods on the other hand.
Abstract
Riding the Flow of Luxury: The Aesthetics and Politics of Style in Literary and Visual Images of the Sport im Bild (1921-1932)
On a thematic level, my presentation will retrace what images of a better living and of the high society are projected by the texts and pictures in the Sport im Bild and how these images are related to modernist ideas of acceleration and of the exploitation of new areas of experience. On the level of media theory, I will describe, firstly, the aesthetic regimes specific to the various formats of the journal (the paintings, the stories and novels, the advertisements, the reports, the drawings, the photographs) and, secondly, how these formats are intertwined to create a visual experience that is typical for the brand Sport im Bild. Finally, I will hint at the pictorial policy underlying this ›flow of luxury‹ and I will ask which elements of the magazine produce or intensify the desires typical for the ideology of ›aesthetic capitalism‹ and which elements provide a critical stance towards it.
Recent Publications
»Kriminalistische Metalepsen. Selbstreferenz und Serialisierung in Roman (Die verschlossene Tür) und Zeitschrift (Die literarische Welt)« (in: Suanne Düwell/Christof Hamann (eds.): Literatur und Kriminalität in der Weimarer Republik, Stuttgart, in print)
»Montages of Modernity. Correlations between the aesthetics of magazines, literature, and cinematography« (in: Felix Brinker/Ruth Mayer (eds.): Modernity and the Periodical Press, Leiden/Boston, in print)
»Die Gestalt der Literatur. Zur Form von Robert Musils Journalprosa« (in: Torsten Hahn/Nicolas Pethes (eds.): Form. Perspektiven einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Theorie, Bielefeld 2020, S. 259-288)