Volker Demuth

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Volker Demuth, 2018

Volker Demuth (born July 21, 1961 ) is a German writer. His work includes poetry, prose and essay. With the RaumPoem, Demuth developed a form of multimedia lyrical language installation within literature. In his essays he introduced the terms topical aesthetics, cyclomodern and carneology to cultural theory.

Life

Demuth comes from a working-class family, attended grammar school and studied philosophy, literature and history at the universities of Tübingen and Oxford. In 1993 he did his doctorate on the Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz . Afterwards he was a freelance author and lecturer for media theory and from 2000 professor for media history and media theory at the Schwäbisch Hall University of Applied Sciences . In 2004 he gave up his professorship to work again as a freelance writer. He lives in Berlin and is a member of the PEN Center Germany .

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The focus of his writing was initially on poetry. While in the first volumes of poetry the critics pointed to “the delicate and precise skepticism” as well as layers of memory and consciousness, “which are formed into images of the palimpsest”, literary studies in the last volume of poetry “Lapidarium” (2010) “ the successive exceeding of representational images ”and the further development of a“ contemporary experimental poetry ”are highlighted. Volker Demuth's poetry has been translated into English, French and Russian.

Since 1993 he has been writing radio plays, essays, original sound collages and features for public broadcasting. At the end of the 1990s he invented “RaumPoem”, a new spatial form of poetry. Based on poems, he developed an installative language form in which video, sound, photo, text, light and architecture are used. The spatial form of poetry enables an expanded spectrum of text, technology, media, body and space.

In 2007, his first prose book was published with the short story "The Chalked Year", which is one of the first literary works to deal with the childhood of his generation. The “great narrative tone” and “a language composition that thrives on a remarkable ability to observe” are striking.

In April 2012, Volker Demuth was awarded the Eugen Viehof honorary gift by the German Schiller Foundation for his complete work, the great strength of which lies in the “ power of his poetic approach and his clever, concentrated and uncompromising work ”.

In his essay “Zyklomoderne” (2010), Demuth contrasts the cultural role of circling with that of modern linearity. In doing so, he recognizes the history of the body, technology and media of the modern age, as well as today's economic dynamics, increasingly shaped by the central figure of rotation, loops, recursions, loops and cycles. With the global computer and media reality of non-linear processes of the circulation of information and capital flows, circling becomes the determining semantics of world culture. The dialectical or progressive understanding of history takes a back seat. The concept of a cyclomodern found an echo in art with the artist Wolfgang Petrick and in cultural theory with Tilman Baumgärtel ("Loops"). The following volume of essays Come to language or write.doc (2012) examines the author's typical generation experiences, including the media dispositions of the “television generation” as the “first real generation of images in history”.

In Demuth's 2013 novel “Stille Leben” (2013), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recognizes an “impressive, intellectually and humanly challenging moral picture of our time” in which “the main carrier of meaning is the meat itself”. In the essay Meat , published in the same year in the magazine Lettre International (No. 101) , Demuth then proposes a special area of ​​research on the cultural codings and scientific techniques of meat, “carneology”. After the first scientific conference on carneology under the title "We are meat" in Berlin was organized by the Guardini Foundation in January 2015, the first monothematic exhibition on meat in Germany took place from October 2015 to February 2016 in the Museum Villa Rot. Works by Jana Sterbak, ORLAN and Hermann Nitsch were shown. With his book “Fleisch. An attempt at a carneology ”, which was published in 2016, is how Volker Demuth formulated the first extensive cultural-historical study that developed the basic ideas for a theory of meat. In it “Volker Demuth focuses on the natural, but hardly consciously made material basis of human existence and illuminates our dealings with ourselves. From the incarnation of God to the measurement of man in the Renaissance to the pornography of our day.” The carneological question, to What the human being can be reshaped in a human technological age, Demuth also deals with in his book "The next person". He sees the globally effective image of progress of the 21st century in a bioutopia in which humans relate to themselves as bio-organic design objects. Life science and biotechnological research creates increasingly larger and more effective possibilities to influence the fleshly substance in a changing and controlling manner up to a point where it is possible to gradually detach oneself from the conditions of biological evolution. Demuth creates the critically questioned picture of a body, technology and media history in which growing evolutionary autonomy allows civilization to continue economically successfully in a world characterized by far-reaching global environmental changes by means of adaptations to post-ecological bio-perfection.

Works

Books

  • Management of the cold, poems, Warmbronn 1990
  • The victim, a play, Eggingen 1990
  • Reality as history, biography, history and poetry at JMRLenz, Würzburg 1994
  • Kettenacker elegies, poems, Uhldingen 1995
  • Through Halden, Gedichte, Weilerswist / Cologne 1996
  • Bits and Bones, poems, Weilerswist / Cologne 2001
  • Topical aesthetics. Body Worlds Art Space Cyberspace, Würzburg 2002
  • The material of the sea buckthorn shade. Ein RaumPoem, Weilerswist / Cologne 2003
  • Flying skin brain frieze, poems, Warmbronn 2006
  • Text worlds and image spaces, essays on literature and media, Würzburg 2007
  • The chalked year, narrative, Tübingen 2007
  • Lapidarium, poems, Weilerswist / Cologne, 2010
  • Zyklomoderne, essay, Vienna 2010
  • Bringing up the language or writing.doc, essay, Vienna 2012
  • Quiet Life, Roman, Tübingen 2013
  • Flesh. Carneology attempt, Berlin 2016
  • The next person, Berlin 2018

Publications in journals (selection)

Literary magazines: die horen , Das Gedicht , concepts , new German literature , literary magazine, yearbook of poetry , common land ; Cultural magazines: Lettre International , Neue Rundschau , Art and Culture, Ethics and Teaching, Weimar Contributions , Das Wort.

Audio media

  • CD Sector A / B, with electronic compositions by Fried Dähn , * Klangsteine ​​Records, LC 12346 KSR 2005-002, published 2005.

Scholarships and Awards

  • 2001: Literature grant from the state of Baden-Württemberg
  • 2003: Scholarship Künstlerhaus Edenkoben
  • 2007: Visiting Scholarship to the Writers and Translators Center of Rhodes
  • 2012: Eugen Viehof gift of honor from the German Schiller Foundation
  • 2018: German Literature Fund grant

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Harald Hartung, Saying and Seeing, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 21, 1991.
  2. Nico Bleutge, Bits and Bones, in: Das Gedicht, Volume 11, No. 11 (2003).
  3. ^ Juliana V. Kaminskaja, Traditional Modernity or The Afterlife. On the role of the historical avant-garde in poetic experimentation after 1989, in: Carsten Gansel, Elisabeth Herrmann (ed.), Developments in contemporary German-language literature after 1989, Göttingen 2013, pp. 55–70.
  4. M. Merkle, Opulente Quellen, in: Reutlinger Generalanzeiger, April 27, 2007.
  5. ^ Eugen Viehof honorary gift from the German Schiller Foundation
  6. Wolfgang Petrick, P (R) UNK, ed. v. Harald Falckenberg, Wulf Herzogenrath, Catalog 2010.
  7. ^ Tilman Baumgärtel, grinding. On the history and aesthetics of the loop, Berlin 2015.
  8. ^ Wiebke Porombka, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 2, 2013.
  9. Stefanie Dathe (ed.), Fleischeslust, catalog 2015.
  10. ^ Uli Hufen, Westdeutscher Rundfunk, October 30, 2016.