Kirsty Bell – författare

The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones.When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.

How has reproduction transformed works of art and literature, their dissemination and their reception? And how does it continue to do so? In what ways have our definitions and practices of reproduction changed over the last centuries thanks to new printing, photographic and digital techniques? These questions are timely. From the medieval copy to contemporary digital culture, including the rise of the printing press and engraving techniques in the Renaissance and the Ancien Régime, myriad modes of reproduction informed both our access to texts and images and our ways of reading, seeing, understanding, discovering and questioning the world.Dans quelle mesure la reproduction transforme-t-elle les œuvres, leur diffusion et leur réception ? De quelles manières les conceptions et les usages de la reproduction ont-ils subi des transformations majeures au cours des derniers siècles avec la diffusion des pratiques d’impression, de la photographie et des techniques numériques ? Ces questions sont d’une actualité incontournable. De la copie médiévale à la culture numérique contemporaine, en passant par l’essor de l’imprimerie et les techniques de gravure à la Renaissance et sous l’Ancien Régime, les différents modes de reproduction informent non seulement nos accès aux textes et aux images, mais aussi nos manières de lire, de voir, de comprendre, découvrir et d’interroger le monde.