Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) has certainly been passed over as a science-fiction author. Yet, this eccentric writer has created an outstanding fantasy mode in his Astrale Novelletten (Astral Short ...Stories, 1912) which appeared as a very special form of science fiction at the beginning of the 20th century. He personally distrusted the scientific optimism of his time and his short stories describe remote worlds and civilizations as utopian counterworlds where the human instincts of competition, aggressivity and domination do not exist. Paul Scheerbart associates science with a sense of wonder and his short stories stray far from the conventional variations of interstellar adventures that are typical of the well-known space opera. They rather conjure up pleasant scenes of a utopian peaceful way of life based on art and aesthetic contemplation. Thanks to their humorous sense of grotesque and derision, these narratives depict an attractive form of literary alterity.
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) is a well-known author in studies on the origins of science fiction in Germany and is often quoted for his contribution to the aesthetics of modernist architecture. Yet he ...was rarely studied for his theatrical conceptions and writings; his theatrical work was never considered enough, nor under the prism of the anticipations of SF theatre. The author's revolutionary conception is approached here by relating his theatrical project to his utopian thought, which unfolds in the fantastic inventions of an essential stage and at the same time a phantasmagorical set thanks to the lighting effects of the 'astral' presences. We propose here the perspective of a continuity between the stage as a place of realisation of utopia, and the transparency of light as a dimension that aims at opening up to other worlds; theatre as a condition that fuses the dimension of the present (of presence) is investigated, within the deployment of the futuristic imaginary of science fiction. An important element of our approach to this visionary author, who anticipated many conceptions and practices of contemporary art and stage, is the knowledge of the world of technology and inventions, which Scheerbart transfigures in his innovative 'astral' theatre.
This article examines Wyndham Lewis’ The Caliph's Design alongside German Expressionist architectural design during the years 1918–1920, suggesting Bruno Taut for the role of Lewis’ sought-after ...‘single architect with brains’. By analysing the intellectual and ideological context of an architectural project with similar concerns and prejudices it is possible to see Lewis’ post-war pamphlet as an exceptional phase in his writing, in which he teeters on the brink of approving political engagement for the arts and echoes some of the ideas promoted by Germany's Activist programme. These images of revolutionary utopian architecture can then be traced to Lewis’ construction of the Magnetic City in The Human Age .
Science fiction studies has long been an interpretive arena marked by the discontents of the overarching generic classification. Through a reading of Paul Scheerbart's Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel ...(1910), a text that operates on the edges of several genres, this article examines the historical and conceptual differences between Anglo-American and German sf scholarship and derives from recent genre theory a critical principle of explicit openness, one in which genre can become constitutive of complex and hybrid narratives. Scheerbart's text refers extensively to its discursive environment, drawing on both fictional and scientific writing-including popular, alternative, and speculative science-as well as some of the important cultural debates of its time. Parallel to its evolutionist plot, the construction of a gigantic tower as a means to finding the "secret" of life and to advancing the species, Lesabéndio is itself a highly contrived and dynamic narrative edifice. It challenges its readers to move in and out of generic ideas, discursive formations, and, as sf, to negotiate the interactions between cognition and estrangement.
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54-3059 NA1068 MARC Visionäre der Moderne = Modern visionaries: Paul Scheerbart, Bruno Taut, and Paul Goesch, with contributions by EvaMarie Barkhofen et al. Scheidegger & Spiess, 2016. 198p bibl ...ISBN 9783858815101 pbk, $40.00
That in a glass house, if properly built, vermin must be unknown, needs no further comment," reads the whole of chapter 44 in Glass Architecture (1914)-as translated by James Palmes-German ...protomodernist Paul Scheerbart's brief, hilarious, visionary, and influential manifesto. Republishing Palmes's long out-of-print translation is one of the great gifts of this hodgepodge of an anthology.
A long-neglected German proto-Dadaist, Scheerbart (1863-1915) has been rediscovered recently in Euro-American art and literary circles. This handsome edition of his Lesabéndio is the latest sign of ...this recovery. The novel was first published in 1913, near the end of Scheerbart's life, and is the most celebrated of his science fictions.
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