Übergordnete Werke und Veranstaltungen
Three readings on American themes – third
Beatnik
Media
The third reading by students will receive double support, firstly from radio announcer Ralf Wendt, who will read from Eduard Limonow's Fuck Off America and secondly, from a DJ-battle featuring selected music from and about America. The event will begin however, with a reading of excerpts from T.C. Boyle's Greasy Lake and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Whilst Greasy Lake and Fuck Off America are contemporary, On the Road is already a classic. The Beatniks, Kerouac among them, oriented themselves to existentialism and hence, to European role models. On the Road reveals persistent attempts to find namesakes among European literati. Old Bull Lee (alias William S. Burroughs) thus holds "his Kafka" on his lap. Nevertheless, On the Road is rooted firmly in the American "pursuit of happiness" tradition. The novel traces essential features of the second wave of individualisation that characterised western society as of the late 1950s. Kerouac's narrator, an impoverished student called Sal Paradise, finds work as a hired hand picking cotton yet he sees himself and his friends as literati; not as social classes but as groups that cross the country footloose, fancy free and forever young, at least for a while. They close the gap between highbrow and underground. All that follows and remains is Pop.
(5) "An ideologically revised Bauhaus was exported back to post-war Germany, now as a part of the American education programme and Gropius himself helped to sell it as a component of American Modernism [...]".
Prof. Dr. Bernd Ostendorf in "Rezensionen", http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/REZENSIO/buecher/osbe1..., 28.08.2008
All three readings take place in the Galerie Durchlauferhitzer. They were jointly initiated by 'Sprechbuehne', the performance platform of the department of the Art of Speech & Phonetics at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Creative director of the programme of readings is Martina Haase. The following students will read: Almuth Hattwich, Ulrike Kerrmann, Hannah Kreft, Anni Lehmann, Franziska Löhr, Stephan Meurer, Jakob Mücksch and Juliane Peterson.
afterwards:
21.30 Amerika-Battle (live DJing), Galerie Durchlauferhitzer, Kleine Ulrichstraße 1
23:00 Club night Amerika, Turm, Friedemann-Bach-Platz 5