Julia Dettke is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmy Noether research group "Bauformen der Imagination – Literature and Architecture in Modernity" at Peter Szondi Institut for Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin. She studied Comparative Literature, Theatre Studies and French Language and Literature in Göttingen, Berlin, Paris and Bologna and holds an M.A. and a B.A. from Freie Universität Berlin and a Licence franco-allemande from the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. For her Ph.D., she did research at Columbia University, New York, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. In 2016, she published the edited volume “Spielräume und Raumspiele in der Literatur” (Königshausen & Neumann, with Elisabeth Heyne). She is a freelance film critic for Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

"J'habite ma feuille de papier": Built spaces in Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and French theory of the 1970s

In her Ph.D. project „J’habite ma feuille de papier“, Julia Dettke examines the close relationship between built spaces and aesthetic principles of form in works by Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and French spatial theory of the 1960s and 1970s. How exactly do narrative, time-based arts like literature and film manage to enact themselves as spatial arts? The project aims at showing how, e.g. by conceiving of chapters as individual rooms, pages as rectangular spaces of writerly movement, and tables of contents and opening credits as thresholds, the works take on a concrete spatial dimension. Built space thus becomes a central figure for self-reflexivity, which, even in the wake of the “spatial turn”, has not received much attention.