German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. This book offers a collection of Scheerbart's multifarious writings.
The first collection in English of the selected writings of German writer, critic and theorist Paul Scheerbart Understudied during much of the 20th century, Scheerbart is a modernist not for his own time, but for ours. Today, the history of European modernism is being rewritten by a new generation of scholars who are energetically mining the archives to bring forward those figures eclipsed by more famous brethren. Scheerbart now occupies a seat in the modernist pantheon as one of the first theorists of glass architecture, which he developed with Bruno Taut, and as an innovator of meta-fiction (pataphysical fiction), long before the likes of Perec and Borges (both of whom admired him). In his own time, Scheerbart was viewed as a dilettante or too eccentric by mainstream academics and critics, for he produced not just theory, but short stories, novels, plays, and the literary prank Perpetual Motion. Perpetual Motion was written in the guise of a scientific treatise on motion, though in fact it is a total fiction, even down to the diagrams. But when first publishedand in fact until recentlyit was received as a genuine motion study and became part of the literature on that subject. Scheerbart is admired today by architects for a visionary work titled Glass Architecture. Both of those works are included in this collection edited by artist Josiah McElheny and the legendary publisher Christine Burgin (our copublisher) as well as a selection of Scheerbart s fiction, plus a peppering of short critical and biographical essays by other people as well as the first full bibliography of Scheerbart s writings."
