Renderings of the city. Joseph Roth, Siegfried Kracauer and the literary reportage of the Weimar Republic

This dissertation examines the relationship between urban experience, perception and literary journalism, particularly literary reportage. Literary reportage, a unique form of journalism which peaked in popularity in the 1920's, is commonly associated with the tenets of New objectivity, which endorsed a matter-of-fact, objective approach to artistic and literary representations of reality. Yet further investigation into the goals and techniques of literary reportage reveals that many writers who experimented with the genre actually rejected the notion that journalistic writing should or could remain objective. Specifically, the journalistic texts of Joseph Roth and Siegfried Kracauer provide evidence of a very different conception of literary reportage; by combining detailed observations of quotidian phenomena with their own literary imaginations and critical reflections, writers like Roth and Kracauer expanded the possibilities of literary reportage beyond the narrow confines of newspaper journalism. Far from subscribing to the naive belief that there is an 'external reality' that can be objectively perceived in its totality, and should thus 'speak for itself' if described with sufficient accuracy, these examples of literary reportage acknowledge the power of the fragment as a means of seeing, rendering and criticizing social and cultural phenomena in a new way. In investigating the status of the fragment, both as a trope of modernity and as an essential element in the construction of literary reportage, this project reveals how the fragmentary composition of literary reportage echoes the type of experience and manner of perception determined by the urban landscape. Finally, by delineating the connections between modes of experience and perception in the metropolis and literary reportage, the dissertation seeks to interrogate and correct misconceptions about this form of journalism and further to suggest how the genre may offer an alternative model to dominant journalistic practice.