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7:00 PM
Transatlantic Feedback: Thomas Meinecke in Conversation with Alexander Regier
Reading and Discussion|A reading from Meinecke's novel "Odenwald" followed by a conversation with Alexander Regier, William Faulkner Professor of English at Rice University
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Inprint, Houston, TX
- Price Free of charge with RSVP
- Part of series: Transatlantic Feedback: Thomas Meinecke in the U.S.
About the Book
In Amorbach, deep in the Odenwald, in front of the Hotel zur Post where Theodor W. Adorno used to spend his summer holidays, the novelist Thomas Meinecke appears together with his fictional characters for research purposes. It soon becomes clear that Amorbach is also Adornobach, the dream place of the exiled philosopher, a place he himself often dreamed of from the Pacific coast. The Odenwald does not remain without influence on the investigations of the novel’s characters: it is a forest of odes and fairy tales, a dark German woodland inhabited not only by fairy-tale figures but also by forest peasants turned robbers after being dispossessed by the ruling prince. Some of them were transported to Texas as early as the nineteenth century, so that the Wild West, too, inscribes its motifs into Thomas Meinecke’s new novel.In the Odenwald, the writer-performer Meinecke and his protagonists weave the guiding threads of an expansive investigation into a dense philosophical discourse braid. And over everything lies the concert music of the twentieth century—a debt this novel owes to Adorno. (Translated from Suhrkamp Verlag)
This event is part of “Transatlantic Feedback,” a month-long musical and literary journey by Thomas Meinecke through the U.S., organized together with Goethe-Institut USA.
About the speakers
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Thomas Meinecke
Thomas Meinecke was born in Hamburg in 1955 and now lives near Munich and in Marseille. He has authored numerous novels and short stories published by Suhrkamp Verlag since 1986, most recently “Odenwald,” 2024. He is also a musician, with his band F.S.K. (Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle) founded in 1980, whose albums have been released on Daniel Richter’s Buback Label since 2008 (most recently “Topsy Turvy,” 2023). Meinecke has also collaborated on many electronic projects with Move D since 1998, worked as a radio DJ hosting his own show on Bayerischer Rundfunk from 1985 to 2021), and DJed at urban nightclubs (Berghain, Robert Johnson, Pudel Club, Rote Sonne, etc.). At Berlin’s Theater Hebbel am Ufer, he ran the dialogic event series “Plattenspieler” from 2007 until the first lockdown in 2020; since fall 2022, the series has continued at Berlin’s Volksbühne. In the winter semester of 2011/12, he held the poetry lectureship at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main (“Ich als Text,” edition suhrkamp, 2012). He has held residencies at universities in Europe and the U.S., most recently: Writer in Residence at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and poetry lectureship on gender at the Technical University of Braunschweig. He has been awarded numerous awards, including the 2020 Berlin Literature Prize (with a visiting professorship at the Free University of Berlin in the summer semester of 2022). A “Text + Kritik” volume on Thomas Meinecke was published in 2021, and the poetological reader “Oceanic Writing” (Verbrecher Verlag) in 2022.
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Alexander Regier
Alexander Regier is William Faulkner Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. He is also Professor of Modern and Classical Literatures, Languages and Cultures.
Regier is the author and editor of multiple books and articles on literature, art, and culture. His publications cover a range of subjects, from eighteenth-century philosophy and Romantic literature to gender, awkwardness, fragmentation, ruins, outer space, and sports. In recent years, Regier has received an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, as well as Fellowships at the National Humanities Center, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of Cambridge, as well as a Visiting Fellowship at The University of Exeter. He has also won multiple awards, amongst others from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A Latino-German born in Munich, Regier received his doctorate and was a Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, before moving to Houston in 2009. Given his interdisciplinary work and his multilingual background, Regier is deeply invested in thinking about questions of difference.
