Sven Spieker

The Big Archive. Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)

"The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stands as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways—from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's "anemic archive" of readymades and El Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive—as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art—and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism." (Press release)

Sven Spieker (ed.), Bürokratische Leidenschaften. Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv (Berlin: Kadmos, 2004), 386pp., index

This volume brings together essays by philosophers, historians of science, literary critics, and art historians. All of them grapple with the notion of the modern archive and its implications in a variety of contexts and disciplines, from Hollywood film to library organization.

altSven Spieker (ed.), Gøgøl: Exploring Absence (Bloomington: Slavica, 2000)

Nikolai Gogol' is one of the central figures of 19th-century world literature. This volume explores the theme of absence in Gøgøl's works, a crucial connecting link between the writer's multi-faceted works and activities. The book's working premise is that in Gøgøl's work the unsayable and the sayable cannot be viewed in isolation, as both condition each other: in order to understand either, we have to examine both.

The book includes semiotician Jurij Lotman's last article, published here in English for the first time. Other essays by Boris Groys, Sven Spieker, Renate Lachmann, Mikhail Epstein, Michael Holquist and Mikhail Yampolsky, among others.

Sven Spieker, Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrei Bitov's Prose (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1996)

Andrei Bitov is one of Russia's pivotal living writers. Bitov's prose may be seen as a demonstration of the failure of modernist and pre-modernist models of mnemonic representation in the postmodern context of the Soviet Union. His characters' efforts to realign themselves with the modernist avantgarde routinely meet with the impossibility of establishing any viable metapositions vis-a-vis official culture and its ideology. This book on Bitov's work investigates the psychological, aesthetic, and epistemological implications of Bitov's treatments of memory.