Rainer Rumold

(Professor)
Department of German
Northwestern University

Prof. Rumold is the editor of Avantgarde and Modernism Studies at Northwestern UP and editor of Eugene Jolas’s autobiography at Yale UP. He has written numerous articles on avant-garde and modernism in literature and the visual arts, with German expressionism as a focal point for international relations, on Gottfried Benn, Carl Sternheim, Carl Einstein, Zurich and Berlin Dada, the dadaist text, the history and theory of Dada in Central Europe, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Bert Brecht, Georg Grosz, Eugene Jolas (translation and documents), Helmut Heissenbuttel, and has published extensively on avant-garde theory with a focus on Walter Benjamin and Georges Bataille. He is currently working on a new book under the title Archeo-logies of Modernity. The Visual Turn of the Avant-garde that includes a re-reading of Walter Benjamin's prominent body-space theory as physis-zone, which not only re-evaluates the main concept of imaging in Surrealism, but also allows for a new understanding of the early 20th century European avant-garde.

http://www.german.northwestern.edu/faculty/rumold.html

Recent Publications, Performances or Presentations

1) "Painting as a Language. Why not? Carl Einstein in Documents." October 107 (Winter 2004): 75-94.
2) "Kafka Global: Nomadic Images." Journal of the Kafka Society of America, New International Series. 27, 1 and 2 (June/December 2003) : 65-78.
3) The Janus face of the German avant-garde : from expressionism toward postmodernism. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001.