The Advanced Certificate Program in Poetics & Theory, the Department of German at NYU, and Deutsches Haus at NYU present “The Clinical Complex: Reflections on Sick Buildings and the Architectures of Illness in Ten Images 1880/2020,” a talk by Yale Professor Fatima Naqvi.

About the talk

We are what Walter Benjamin calls “newcomers to eternity,” with new spatial coordinates: “when the end approaches, [people] are stowed away in sanatoriums or hospitals by their heirs.” The architectonic development that Benjamin outlines holds true not only for the late 19th , but also for the 20th and 21st centuries. This talk looks back at the explosion of hospital construction in Austria-Hungary during its waning years and explores this moment as it is refracted in works by Arthur Schnitzler and Rainer Maria Rilke; it also suggests a connection to the present via works by Ulrich Seidl and Nikolaus Geyrhalter. The architecture of medicine and the medicalization of architecture have important implications for how we think about sickness and health today—and how we experience our clinical spaces.

About the speaker

Fatima Naqvi is Elias W. Leavenworth Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She has written books on victimhood in European culture after 1968; the films of Michael Haneke; the degradation of the landscape; and the interrelationship between architecture and Bildung in Austrian author Thomas Bernhard. She is currently working on the hospital experience in fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Date and Time: 5:00 - 6:30 pm on Friday, April 21st 2023

Location: In-person at Deutsches Haus at NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

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