The Scale of Texts

The issue of scaling and rescaling texts has gained new relevance today due to profound technological transformations. Artificial intelligence tools can now summarize long texts at the push of a button. Yet the desire for shorter versions of complex works is ancient: literary summaries were already being produced and valued in antiquity, especially in education. This practice has always been controversial, however, with critics accusing summaries of distorting, simplifying, and robbing works of their essence. This talk will try to shed light on the genre of the summary, examining its diverse forms and using current examples to show why it has a right to exist despite all the criticism. Furthermore, engaging with summaries can also help to address more general problems of cultural practices of scaling and rescaling.

Carlos Spoerhase holds the Chair of Modern German Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied German literature, philosophy, and political theory, before completing graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 2006. He completed his Habilitation at the same institution in 2016. Spoerhase has held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, among others, and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In the spring of 2025, he will be lecturing as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.