Miniature

Miniaturization has always had a special allure, as it promises to make the world more amenable to control and to play. Miniaturization today, however, has reached a qualitatively new stage: ever smaller technological devices are running our lives, while their memory grows ever larger, and their effects have become uncontrollable. Digital technologies produce not only changes in scale, but also transformations in the experience of temporality, which Alexander Kluge once described as the attack of the present on the rest of time.¹ With social media, miniaturization has metastasized. In this environment of short attention spans and ever shorter forms of communication, short literary forms garner special attention. The rise of the metropolitan miniature in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature resonates strongly with the current sea change from analog to digital, from print to imaging, to what some critics have overexcitedly described as the visual turn.

The age that produced Marcel Proust's Recherche, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz also generated the metropolitan miniature, an ostensibly minor form of short prose, as one of the genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism. Having hidden in plain sight, it is only now being recognized in retrospective, at a time when media concerns have moved to the center of literary criticism. The metropolitan miniature resulted from the intersection of print with photography and film, the new media that threatened the hegemony of literature in high culture. But rather than being merely defensive or nostalgic, the literary miniature understood the threat creatively, fighting it off by absorbing the visual focus of photography and film into its rigorous, medium-reflexive, exclusively verbal writing. It thereby expanded the notion of what literature can do in its active negotiation with the new visual media. From Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke on, learning how to see was a rallying cry of the age, and it was codified later in Làszló Moholy-Nagy's call for a "new vision."²

The literary miniature's main place of publication was the metropolitan feuilleton. The tropes of fragmentation and condensation, multiperspectivalism and self-reflexivity, alienation, estrangement, and montage aligned it with modernist experimentation. It took the urban condition as the core of modern life, but it shunned key aspects of realistic representation such as plot, individual psychology, and extended description and storytelling. Instead it focused on significant moments of subjective experience in confrontation with the rapidly changing urban world: hallucinations and dreams generated by urban space, diffuse memory images, shock and terror moments, vertigo and agoraphobia, all of which blurred the boundaries of the real and destabilized fixed subject positions, both in the world and in the texts. Often the miniature aimed at the kind of haunting effects spirit photography had experimented with from the late nineteenth century all the way to the Bauhaus. But it did so in language alone. Blending spiritist and occult clairvoyance with realist understandings of apprehending the world through photographic images, the metropolitan miniature transcended all literary period designations, from symbolism to expressionism, constructivism, and the new objectivity.

In its close-knit triangulation of new urban imaginaries, feuilleton writing in major European papers, and the impact of technologically reproducible media, the metropolitan miniature was a historically specific form of writing. It emerged and disappeared with that stage of European development when the metropolis was still an island of accelerating modernization in a sea of slow-paced country and provincial life. It evolved from Baudelaire's Petits poèmes en prose, miniatures that first made Paris legible as a modern metropolis, via Rilke and subsequently via Kafka to interwar writers of prose and poetry such as Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Robert Musil and philosophers and critical theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin.³ Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia, with its focus on exile in Los Angeles, may well represent the endpoint of this new form of writing that, according to Ernst Bloch, could not be named: "If only we had a name for the new form, which is no longer a form." Kafka spoke of his "little...