Professor Jane O. Newman will be a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Univ. of London's School of Advanced Studies Warburg Institute in Feb. 2019
Department: Comparative Literature
Post Date: December 3, 2018News Details
Professor Jane O. Newman will be a Senior Visiting Fellow at the University of London’s School of Advanced Studies Warburg Institute in February, 2019. While she in residence in London, she will hold a keynote talk entitled: "Warburg on Luther and Dürer: Media Wars and the Freedom to Think.” She will also participate in a public workshop on visual propaganda and fake news.
Today’s mad landscape of fake news is not unique; a “sensationalizing press” (Sensationspresse) has sought to stir up public opinion, and even to provoke social and political upheaval, countless times in the past. In my lecture, I turn to Aby Waburg’s 1920 essay on the ‘media wars’ of the sixteenth century, in which he claims to see a battle being waged against this trend by Martin Luther and Albrecht Dürer, whose “sense for the truth” made them into early modern heroes of reason for Warburg, as they fought on behalf of the “freedom to think” carefully and critically in the face of irrationalisms of all kinds. Warburg’s essay is based on several talks he gave on the subject during the Luther jubilee year of 1917; in it, he celebrates the models he saw in Luther’s and Dürer’s work for ‘truth-seeking’ ways of combating the destabilizing “fictions” that filled the press not just during the Reformation era, but also during his own fraught and war-torn times; the ‘masses’ were and are allegedly particularly prone to believe such fictions, fictions that intellectual leaders like Luther and Dürer – and Warburg – could dispel. While such boosterism is not uncommon in jubilee years, and finds parallels in claims made about Luther in the more recent celebrations of 2017, in Warburg’s case, the argument relies on several traditions of partisan scholarship as well as on some strategic media manipulation of its own, as I show. Is Warburg’s way of resisting ‘fake news’ a model for us? A close reading of his examples asks us to consider who is to lead whom toward greater ‘truths’, if and when partisanship becomes the norm across the ranks?