December 14th, 2024, 2-4:30 pm

TALK: A lecture by Jens Martin Gurr, Memory, Media and the City: Norman Klein's Bleeding Through - Layers of Los Angeles.

CONVERSATION: The lecture will be followed by a brief conversation between Scott Benzel and Norman Klein about the genesis of the current exhibition.

BOOK LAUNCH: Book launch and signing of the newly extended edition of Norman Klein’s The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects.

Norman M. Klein

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles

An Updated Edition 20 Years Later

In 2003, Norman M. Klein's docufable Bleeding Through raised questions of urban aesthetics and memory as part of the multimedia documentary Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920–1986. Now, 20 years later, this important text is reissued along with several essays addressing its central themes, such as the aesthetics and politics of urban memory, the development of Los Angeles since the 20th century, the role of urban imaginaries in US politics, or media evolution in the 21st century.

The volume also features a long interview with Klein and two docufables from Klein's celebrated study The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, one being the kernel of the novella, the other imagining Walter Benjamin in L.A.

Finally, the book contains links to two films featuring much of the multimedia material contained in the first edition.

Jens Martin Gurr

Jens Martin Gurr has been Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, since 2007. He is the author or co-author of six monographs, including Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City (Routledge, 2021), and (with Julia Hoydis and Roman Bartosch), Climate Change Literacy (Cambridge University Press [Elements series], 2023). His book Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do (An Argument and Six Case Studies) came out with Routledge in June 2006. He is currently completing on a monograph Historicizing the Enlightenment Controversy: The Literary Self-Enlightenment of the Enlightenment. He edited the 2023 new edition of Norman Klein's Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986 (transcript). In addition to English and American literary history from the 17th to the 21 century, a longstanding research interest has been in public functions of narrative: In this vein, a number of publications study the role of narrative in urban development, in climate change communication and in the dynamics of conflicts. He is currently co-leading a project on "Cultures of Compromise". Jens Gurr is a member of the UDE University Council and of the Board of Trustees of the Volkswagen Foundation. In research, teaching and administration, a consistent concern has been to define and strengthen the role of the humanities in academia and in society generally.

Norman Klein, Rosemary Comella & Andreas Kratky

Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920 – 1986,

2003, video documentation of the interactive media novel, 2023, 44 min.  

produced by Jens Martin Gurr