About

Patrizia C. McBride is the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Senior Associate Dean for Social Sciences and Interdisciplinary Programs at Cornell University's Department of German Studies. Her research and teaching focus on German-language literature and culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on theories of modernity and modernism, the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy, and political theory, visual and media studies, and Austrian literature and culture, especially fin-de-siècle Vienna. Her scholarship revolves around three main themes: the development of narrative within literary and visual media; the reflection on art and society in the twentieth century and its contribution to the politicized practice of the avant-garde; and the exploration of literature and arts in terms of ideological, rhetorical, and material effects produced by media. Her notable contributions include her first book, 'The Void of Ethics: Robert Musil and the Experience of Modernity,' which analyzes Robert Musil’s engagement with narrative as a lens for understanding the rise of totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s. Her second book, 'The Chatter of the Visible: Montage and Narrative in Weimar Germany,' examines the notion of storytelling developed through montage by Weimar-era artists associated with Dadaism, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity across various media. She is currently working on a monograph that investigates the relationship between literature and the book in German-language culture during the early twentieth century, focusing on how writers and theorists sought to revitalize verbal arts by reconfiguring literature as an active, material medium capable of piercing traditional media illusions. Her work also explores the status of literary form in relation to journalism, the connection between truth and storytelling, and the rhetorical potential of literature in advertising. McBride’s research has been recognized through awards such as the honorable mention for the 2018 Scaglione Prize and the 2021 Max Kade Prize for Best Article in The German Quarterly.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Philosophy
• Political Science
• Media studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Art history
• Literature
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• Theology
• Linguistics
• History
• Computer vision

Selected publications

• Serial Untruth: The Feuilleton and the Ornamental Image

  De Gruyter eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Art

  Das Leben der Seele und des zuflligen Tages, in 2-3 Seiten eingedampft, vom berflssigen befreit wie das Rind im Liebig-Tiegel! Dem Leser bleibe es berlassen,

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Make the Body

  2022

  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Aesthetics

  <JATS1:p>How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment brings together contemporary and historical readings of the body, exploring the insights and limits of established and emerging theories of difference, identity, and embodiment in a variety of German contexts. The engaging contributions to this volume utilize and challenge cutting-edge approaches to scholarship on the body by putting these approaches in direct conversation with canonical texts and objects, as well as with lesser-known yet provocative emerging forms. To these ends, the chapter authors investigate “the body” through detailed studies across a wide variety of disciplines and modes of expression: from advertising, aesthetics, and pornography, to social media, scientific experimentation, and transnational cultural forms. Thus, this volume showcases the ways in which the body as such cannot be taken for granted and surmises that the body continues to undergo constant—and potentially disruptive—diversification and transformation.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• The Edge of the Page: Alfred Polgar, the Feuilleton, and the Poetics of the Small Form

  The German Quarterly · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Literature
  • Art history

  This essay examines Alfred Polgar's engagement with the literary miniature by situating it within the phenomenal growth of commercial journalism in Weimar Germany and the Austrian Republic. Drawing on reflections on the small form developed by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, this paper reconstructs Polgar's practice of engaged writing, which enjoins an ornamental style and imagistic rhetoric forged in the tradition of the Denkbild to mobilize readers to take a stance on contemporary events. Polgar's embrace of ornamental writing granted him special insight into its perils, placing him in a singular position to respond to the falsehoods of National Socialism in the 1930s. In his eyes, a media environment controlled by totalitarian rule made it impossible to combat the Nazis' mendacity by simply calling out their lies or insisting on separating factual from fake reporting. One should rather turn the ornament against itself with parodic writing that was unafraid of stepping into the mucky arena of blatantly deceitful communication.

  PublisherDOI

• Does German Cultural Studies need the Nation‐State Model?

  The German Quarterly · 2019-10-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  the nation-state model has long been the basis for the institutional structure in place to teach languages, literatures, and culture at american universities and elsewhere. Nationalism was in fact formative for the establishment of the discipline of German literary and cultural studies itself-and not something brought into its disciplinary history from the outside, as Jakob Norberg, building on earlier research (see for instance Costabile-heming/halverson; hohendahl, German Studies; Denham/kacandes/Petropoulos, and McCarthy/Schneider), in a recent issue of the German Quarterly has shown ("German literary Studies and the Nation. " GQ 91.1, 2018, pp. 1-17). over the past few decades, this history linking our profession to the nation-state model has often been questioned by those teaching German literature and culture, while the status of German in general was institutionally quite secure and there was little reason to think about structural changes. this, however, has changed. Not only do fewer students in the United States and across the globe opt to major in German; administrators at many institutions increasingly prefer language, literature, and culture departments to be part of larger structures, thus (implicitly or explicitly) also questioning the value of the nation-state model that so long has been part of our disciplinary history. in addition, scholars themselves in their teaching and research increasingly choose to emphasize the many global contexts of German literature and culture as meaningful for the study of German itself.

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• Berlin Dada and the Time of Revolution

  PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America · 2018-05-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Despite its brief history, Berlin Dada (1918–20) produced a glut of chronicles and memoirs, as if to immortalize its ephemeral insurgency. Its self-appointed chronicler, Richard Huelsenbeck, tried to harness this compulsion to memorialize in the service of Dadaist agitation he hoped would unleash a revolutionary time and redeem the failure of the communist uprisings at the end of World War I. his seditious temporality was based on two incompatible concepts of revolution: a properly political notion aimed at overthrowing an unjust regime and a vitalist discourse aimed at tapping into the circular low of life. he clash of the two modes of revolutionary time is enacted in Hannah Höch's photomontage “Cut with the Kitchen Knife” (1919). he spectral temporality that sustains both is conjured by the Dada Almanac (1920), a literary compendium that doubles as a quirky inquiry into political normativity and an inluential paradigm of Dada's self-legitimation.

  PublisherDOI

• Cut with the Kitchen Knife : Visualizing Politics in Berlin Dada

  2018-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Art and Resistance in Germany

  2018-01-01 · 1 citations

  book

  <JATS1:p>In light of the recent rise of right-wing populism in numerous political contexts and in the face of resurgent nationalism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and demagoguery, this book investigates how historical and contemporary cultural producers have sought to resist, confront, confound, mock, or call out situations of political oppression in Germany, a country which has seen a dramatic range of political extremes during the past century.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>While the current turn to nationalist populism is global, it is perhaps most disturbing in Germany, given its history with its stormy first democracy in the interwar Weimar Republic; its infamous National Socialist (Nazi) period of the 1930s and 1940s; and its split Cold-War existence, with Marxist-Leninist Totalitarianism in the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany’s barely-hidden ties to the Nazi past.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>Equally important, Germans have long considered art and culture critical to constructions of national identity, which meant that they were frequently implicated in political action. This book therefore examines a range of work by artists from the early twentieth century to the present, work created in an array of contexts and media that demonstrates a wide range of possible resistance.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Reading the Visible: Else Lasker-Schüler's Early Prose Texts and the Small Form

  MLN · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Reading the Visible:Else Lasker-Schüler's Early Prose Texts and the Small Form Patrizia McBride (bio) When Kurt Hiller said of Else Lasker-Schüler that her work lacked "das Mentale," that is, a level of reflexivity that exceeds merely sensual and sentimental expression, he was trying to set the record straight after a disastrous encounter with Wieland Herzfelde, who had slapped him in the face at the Café des Westens in 1915 for making disparaging remarks about his revered poet-friend.1 Hiller's sour comment about Lasker-Schüler's lack of reflexivity struck at an aspect of her public persona that invited both praise and controversy from contemporaries, who marveled at her fearless self-presentation as a radical performance artist whose biographical self was all but indistinguishable from the characters she developed. Lasker-Schüler played this role in a literal-minded way that foreclosed conventional forms of mediation, whether identificatory or allegorical. Her apparent disinterest in reflecting on or gaining distance to this performance, if only to be able to describe her poetics to others, would seem to support Hiller's assertion that Lasker-Schüler was generally unconcerned with metapoetic reflection. In this essay I take Hiller's concern seriously but reframe it by assuming that Hiller missed the reflexivity in Lasker-Schüler's work because it did not look like anything he would recognize as such. This poetological moment unfolds via Lasker-Schüler's engagement with the protean non-genre of the "kleine Prosa" propelled by the proliferation [End Page 625] of feuilletonistic forms of writing in both mainstream print media and the rapidly differentiating niche market of little magazines. Within this frame I will focus on the poetological reflection that unfolds in short prose texts from one of Lasker-Schüler's early collections, Gesichte (1920): specifically, three essays that lend themselves to reconstructing the role of vision and the visual in her poetics. Let me preface my analysis by briefly outlining the status these texts enjoy within Lasker-Schüler's oeuvre. The 1920 Gesichte collection encompasses prose texts that had previously appeared as stand-alone pieces in newspapers, periodicals, and little magazines. The book was part of Lasker-Schüler's twenty-volume edition of collected works that was published by Paul Cassirer and included a companion prose volume titled Essays. The texts in this latter collection have been termed "portrait essays" to reflect the collection's driving conceit, which labels each text for the individual it features and thus turns the short pieces into a portrait gallery of sorts, lending the volume a fairly unified character and a high degree of predictability. By contrast, the texts in Gesichte are marked by far greater heterogeneity in terms of both the generic conventions that frame them and the themes and occasions that prompt the writing.2 They include autobiographical vignettes, anecdotes, street scenes, personal reflections, sketches, and reviews of various kinds of performances, including stage drama, circus, and variété. Such textual heterogeneity shines a light on the modular arrangement that informs both collections and ultimately drives all of Lasker-Schüler's works from the years 1900–1920, including her early poetry collections and especially the prose works (Das Peter Hille Buch, 1906; Die Nächte Tino von Bagdads, 1907; Mein Herz, 1912; and Der Prinz von Theben, 1914). Yet these works retain a recognizable overall structure and a pronounced narrative and thematic continuity that override or at least disguise their piecemeal construction. By contrast, the 1920 Gesichte volume stands out for its heterogeneity and generic fluidity; one can clearly recognize the various units as having been conceived as stand-alone contributions. In sum, the strong heteronomous character of the texts ties them directly to the journalistic environment for which they were conceived: in particular to the literary experimentation that falls under the heading of the small prose form at the time. [End Page 626] Although the term kleine Prosa was reportedly first used by Alfred Polgar in 1926, debates about the reach and value of short prose forms date back to the rise of modern aesthetics in the course of the eighteenth century and flare up...

  PublisherDOI

• The Chatter of the Visible

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2016-01-01 · 4 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Patrizia McBride’s study, 'The Chatter of the Visible,' examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photo montage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized re-appraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photo montage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it; a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres). According to McBride, “a close engagement with montage procedures going back to Cubism” reveals explicit inquiry into the status of objects as complex signifying entities whose “material qualities are inextricably bound up with linguistic dynamics.”

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Chatter of the Visible

  University of Michigan Press eBooks · 2016-03-22 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Monika Žagar

  5 shared

• Richard W. McCormick

  5 shared

• Donna West Brett

  2 shared

• Erin Eckhold Sassin

  2 shared

• Brangwen Stone

  2 shared

• Charlotte Klonk

  2 shared

• Kathryn Starkey

  Stanford University

  2 shared

• John K. Noyes

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Honorable mention, 2018 Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germa…
• Winner of the 2021 Max Kade Prize for Best Article in The Ge…
• 2000 Max Kade Prize for Best Article in The German Quarterly