Michael North
Personal Information
Description
Michael North studied history and Slavonic languages in Giessen, where he received his doctorate in 1979. He taught at the Universities of Hamburg, Kiel, Bielefeld and Rostock. Since 1995 he has been Professor and Chair of Modern History at the University of Greifswald and Head of the Department of History. He is a specialist in monetary and financial history and of the history of commerce and culture. 2004 he was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, 2007 and 2009 he was a scholar at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) in Wassenaar. 2010-2011 he held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Modern German Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has been retired since April 2023.
Books
Machine-age comedy
"In this latest addition to Oxford's Modernist Literature & Culture series, renowned modernist scholar Michael North poses fundamental questions about the relationship between modernity and comic form in film, animation, the visual arts, and literature. Machine-Age Comedy vividly constructs a cultural history that spans the entire twentieth century, showing how changes wrought by industrialization have forever altered the comic mode. With keen analyses, North examines the work of a wide range of artists - including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace - to show the creative and unconventional ways the routinization of industrial society has been explored in a broad array of cultural forms. Throughout, North argues that modern writers and artists found something inherently comic in new experiences of repetition associated with, enforced by, and made inevitable by the machine age. Ultimately, this rich, tightly focused study offers a new lens for understanding the development of comedic structures during periods of massive social, political, and cultural change to reveal how the original promise of modern life can be extracted from its practical disappointment."--Jacket.
Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies
Summary:"Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work-both published and unpublished-that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013"-- Provided by publisher
Camera Works
'Camera Works' is about the impact of photography and film on modern art and literature. With examples from the avant-garde of the little magazines and from classic authors like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, it argues that literature and art become modern byresponding to these new means of representation.
Reading 1922
"In this book, Michael North makes an ambitious journey back to 1922, examining the world in which Ulysses and The Waste Land - two texts synonymous with literary modernism - were first published. By reconstructing the larger culture into which these works were introduced, this study attempts to give a new start to critical controversies about aesthetic modernism and modern culture."--BOOK JACKET. "Returning to the world of 1922, North discovers many connections between people, movements, disciplines, and artistic works that are usually considered to be distinct from one another. In disclosing these connections, this book provides evidence to dispute common generalizations about the separation of modern literature from the social and cultural world around it. Paying attention to literary masterpieces as well as lesser-known texts, North considers the work of Howard Carter, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bronislaw Malinowski, Virginia Woolf, Anzia Yezierska, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, E. E. Cummings, Charlie Chaplin, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and a host of other writers, both famous and forgotten."--BOOK JACKET.