Cultural and Literary Studies
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Prof. Dr. Sabina Becker (ISF) |
Laboratorium Weimar: Konstellationen in Gesellschaft, Kultur und Literatur 1918-1933 The aim of my research project, which is to be completed in the anniversary year 2018, is to work on a monograph on the culture and literature of the Weimar Republic. The distinctly historico-cultural study – which integrates findings from my research on the period from the past 15 years – is a topical contribution to the research in this field. The project starts off with the finding that there exists varied historico-cultural research on the Weimar Republic from the past two decades, yet – while there are contributions from history studies – there is no comprehensive study on this pivotal age in German history from the perspective of cultural and literary studies (cf. research overview). There are studies from the 1960s and 1970s on the topic, yet a more recent study is missing; there has not yet been made a contribution on this crucial period in German cultural and literary history from the field of German studies in Germany. The monograph will, on the one hand, provide an overview of the culture and literature of that period. On the other hand, it will set new impulses, especially with regard to the phenomenon of the “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous” and with that, the differences between political development and cultural modernization; furthermore, the Weimar period will be assessed as part of the overall context of societal and cultural modernity in the 20th century. |
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Dr. Dustin Breitenwischer (JF) |
The Creative Self in 19th-Century American Culture In his current research project he engages in the transnational history of creativity and the creative self in American culture. Focusing on mid-19th century American literature, culture and philosophy -- from Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendental reflections to Harriet Jacob's slave narrative -- he argues that factual and fictional narratives about the creative self were established and used as a means to strengthen, criticize, negotiate and resist dominant Romantic notions of individuality and selfhood. His project revolves around the sociocultural appeal and the aesthetic function of these self-narratives against the backdrop of transatlantic conceptualizations of creativity and creative self-determination. |
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Dr. Marco Caracciolo (JF) |
Perspective-Taking in 20th Century Fiction This project explores a corpus of 20th century novels encouraging readers to engage with scientific knowledge about the universe in hands-on, embodied ways. As argued by cognitive scientists working in the wake of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991), cognition results from embodied patterns of interaction with the world. Recent research in literary theory suggests that the body also plays a role in reading literary narrative, through kinesthetic empathy for characters or feelings of immersion in storyworlds. This project examines how 20th century fiction may leverage readers’ embodied involvement towards the representation of realities that, like the Big Bang or the evolution of life on Earth, far surpass the “human scale.” My main hypothesis is that a process of “bodily defamiliarization” is at work in the corpus texts: the conceptual challenge of understanding the universe is conveyed by reutilizing readers’ past bodily experiences in novel ways. |
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Dr. Todd Carmody (JF) |
Racial Handicap: Uplift and Rehabilitation in Postbellum America This book project charts the overlapping histories of racial uplift and disability rehabilitation in the postbellum United States. Not a study of analogy, Racial Handicap instead tells the story behind the conventional tropes of “overcoming” that saturated racial discourse after Reconstruction. It does so by excavating the material and discursive relays between two seemingly discrete social agendas – a Progressive movement to integrate people with disabilities into the national workforce and the contested project of imagining racial progress at home and on the imperial periphery. My central claim is that uplift and rehabilitation were united not only by the ideological valorization of labor, but also by a history of formal experimentation that cuts across the realms of law, literature, policy, physiology, and industrial management in an effort to represent the nature and value of work as such. |
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Prof. Dr. Carolin Duttlinger (ESF) |
Dialectics of Attention: Immersion and Distraction in Modern German Culture The German 'Aufmerksamkeit' can be translated as either attentiveness or attention - terms which respectively foreground its active and passive dimensions: attentiveness as a conscious state, the voluntary giving of attention, as opposed to attention as the passive, often involuntary response to a disciplinary injunction to pay attention. Indeed, Aufmerksamkeit is itself an umbrella term which encapsulates a wide spectrum of stances ranging from alertness and vigilance to introspective states such as concentration, immersion and contemplation. All of these, however, are points on a spectrum, their exact position impossible to fix or define. My project presents this dialectical configuration as one of the driving forces of critical theory, aesthetic innovation and social practice in twentieth-century Germany and Austria. After a historical introduction surveying theories and practices of attention in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the main part is dedicated to the years 1900-1933. In a series of case studies, I analyse the interplay of attention and distraction in philosophy (Benjamin), sociology (Kracauer), literature (Kafka, Musil), photography (Sander, Blossfeldt, Lendvai-Dircksen, Lerksi) and musical theory (Adorno). A concluding chapter offers an outlook on more recent literature, using the examples of Paul Celan and W. G. Sebald to show how modernist terms are refigured in the wake of National Socialism. |
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Dr. Erica Fretwell (JF) |
With Feeling: Sensation and Social Life in Nineteenth-Century America With Feeling is about the modes of sociality that sensation makes possible. It argues that the senses – taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell – body forth emotional attachments among intimates and strangers. It does so by tracking the transformation of the sensorium from a biological apparatus to a social organism in postbellum America, a period in which new scientific accounts of sensation and major shifts in national consciousness occurred. This materialist history of sensation furnishes distinctive insight into the cultural tensions that organized life in the era of Jim Crow, for the senses were used to justify hierarchical social arrangements while simultaneously materializing egalitarian forms of sociality. Accordingly, this book examines sensation as both a regulatory structure that enforced scientific classifications of race, class, and ability and an emotional force for altering that structure – alterations that, I show, emerged out of eugenicist Francis Galton’s identification of synaesthesia and the commingled sensations consequently tethered to the body. From cookbooks and photographs to poetry and memoirs, With Feeling draws upon texts that instantiate sensation as a historically specific experience of embodied feeling. Indeed, this literature’s capacity to dwell within the sensuality of feeling gives form to particular sensory encounters as they redoubled and troubled the dominant social arrangements of their moment. My attention to sensation as not only a cultural construct but also a generic form – what Lauren Berlant calls “an aesthetic structure of affective expectation” – approaches the complexity of how the literary makes the sensory legible. With Feeling demonstrates that scenes of intensified embodiment offer a more precise understanding of the sensory body and the emotional attachments that constitute its social life. |
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Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck (ESF) |
Reading for Recognition In my project I argue that the concept of recognition can have a tremendous explanatory value for interpretative work in literary and cultural studies. The argument is developed in five chapters. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to recent debates about whether and to what extent recognition can serve as a foundational normative concept in social theory and social analysis. Chapter 2 focuses on a reconsideration of the concept of identity, since recognition is inextricably linked with questions of identity formation in current debates. Chapter 3 moves on to the question of what explanatory value the concept of recognition can have for literary and cultural studies. The chapter wants to demonstrate that struggles for recognition are one of the dominant narrative patterns in Western culture and stand at the center of an amazingly wide range of fictional texts and cultural representations. Chapter 4 goes beyond the thematic level and a discussion of exemplary narrative patterns in order to provide an analysis of how recognition can be understood and described as an effect of the reading experience (and of aesthetic experience more generally). The purpose is to provide a better understanding of the special function and potential cultural representations can have in struggles for recognition. Finally, chapter 5 returns to the starting question of this project. It takes its point of departure from the puzzling disregard of the role of culture in discussions of recognition in social theory, and provides an outline of how a focus on cultural struggles for recognition can add an important dimension to theories of recognition. |
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Prof. Dr. Joseph Harris (ESF) |
The Tragic Death-Wish: Violence and Murder in the Works of Pierre Corneille It is a curious paradox that something as central to tragedy as death has received so little sustained critical attention. Readers, spectators, and critics alike have seemed content to take death’s presence in tragedy for granted, as the inexorable end-point of the tragic narrative. My monograph aims to plug this gap through a case-study of one immensely complex dramatist: the so-called ‘father’ of French tragedy, Pierre Corneille (1606-84). Throughout all his works – not just the few early tragedies that made his name, but also his comedies, religious poetry, dramatic theory, and ‘machine-plays’, death remains a concern that is as ambiguous and problematic as it is abiding. Far from holding a constant meaning for Corneille, death is a highly complex phenomenon which can produce quite contradictory responses. Indeed, while Corneille’s engagement with death flags up his own idiosyncratic attitude towards dramatic convention (and towards Aristotle’s Poetics in particular), it also exposes further contradictions and tensions between Corneille the playwright and Corneille the dramatic theorist. Drawing on secondary material from French and classical sources as well as on modern thought, this project will show the implication of death in a wide range of topics: from emotion (fear and despair; grief and mourning) to politics (judicial punishment and bio-power; regicide and dynastic succession), from religion (martyrdom; the Christian and pagan afterlife) to aesthetics (dramatic spectacle; plot construction and tragic theory). The Tragic Death-Wish thus poses questions that promise to challenge and to shake up the theoretical terrain of tragic theatre more generally. |
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Prof. Barbara Mennel (ESF) |
Women and Work in Contemporary European Cinema During my stay at FRIAS I intend to complete a book-length study on the representation of women and work in contemporary European cinema. Since 2000, European films about this topic have mushroomed. I ask what these films tell us about the changing nature of labor in the early twenty-first century. These films capture the daily grind of nursing, cleaning, typing, and sewing. They also show women succeeding in male-dominated professions as managers, doctors, politicians, and photographers. Characters of different classes, nations, and age groups engage in legal, semi-legal, and illegal activities; they perform paid and unpaid labor; and they are under- or unemployed. Female characters work in thriving capitalist metropoles or in dilapidated factories in former communism. Some films use social realism, the mode of representation associated with labor since the inception of cinema. Others follow the genre conventions of musicals, thrillers, biopics, romantic comedies, sports films, or science fictions. Work features centrally in independently produced art films and political essay films as well as in blockbusters. In contrast to the 1970s, when second-wave feminism politicized women’s work and only female feminist directors took on the topic, now both female and male directors address women’s work. The emphasis on women in films about work constitutes a qualitative change from the traditional depiction of male industrial laborers who confronted a factory owner in a strike. I argue that the current importance of women in films about labor indicates a radical shift in our cultural understanding of work. |
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Prof. Dr. Brian E. Richardson (ESF) |
Narrative Beginnings, Middles, Endings, and Beyond: Theorizing Plot after Postmodernism Despite the fact that story and plot are the most basic aspects of narrative, there is a major gap in narrative theory concerning story and plot: the nature of stories that transcend or elude the conventions of realism. Such narratives, which have been around since Aristophanes, are increasingly prominent since the advent of postmodernism, new avant-garde works, and many digital narratives. The study of narrative thus has an increasingly prominent gap that needs to be identified, analyzed, and theorized as traditional and more recent concepts of story and plot (Peter Brooks, James Phelan, Patrick Colm Hogan, even Marie-Laure Ryan) need to be integrated with emerging but still imperfectly assimilated scholarship and analysis of the more radical, antimimetic works. This study seeks to examine and explain how such works play with or problematize narrative beginnings, how they create alternative trajectories and different principles of sequencing (e.g., alphabetical or musical orderings), how they re-order time (including the construction of contradictory chronologies), and play with or even challenge the identity of narrative itself--what are the boundaries of narrative, what is the definition of narrative, and what is a single narrative. This study is also engaged with cognitive theory and metahistory to help identify identify distinctively fictional practices and to help determine how they are employed, developed and processed. |
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Prof. Dr. Andrea Riemenschnitter (ESF) |
Landscape Fever. Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics and the Environment Landscape Fever aims at analysing a selection of cultural interventions tackling China's environmental degradation and contributing to an emergent trans- and interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities. Addressing the critique, hopes, and anxieties of concerned intellectuals and cultural producers in China, the book will study pertinent aesthetic representations and contextualize them with pressing historical, social, political, and ethical issues that both question and supplement the Chinese state's current project of environmental modernization. Situated in the larger framework of an emergent trans- and interdisciplinary field of environmental humanities, it aims at contributing to the broadening and transculturalization of a common conceptual vocabulary, that was so far mostly derived from western contexts. The questions to be tackled in the course of the project arise from a paradigm shift in the perception of human-nonhuman relationships in view of degraded environments. It will be asked how landscape under the circumstances of the current environmental crisis is perceived, experienced, and recontextualized. Given the fact that the aggravating planetary effects of our era of the Anthropocene are irreversible, it will be asked how societies in and beyond China are perceived to cope with disasters, degradation and impending resource scarcity. Humanistic scholarship, it will be argued, is necessary for a comprehensive understanding and new perspectives – including the integration of hitherto marginalized ideas into the agenda of societies, policy makers and other stakeholders. |
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JunProf. Evi Zemanek (JF) |
Caricatures of man-made nature. Reflections on Environmental Change in German Magazines from the Era of Industrialization My research project focuses on a selection of long-forgotten caricatures that appeared in satirical magazines during the era of industrialization. These caricatures depict man made environmental transformations, address their consequences and implicitly demand environmental protection and thus a proto-ecological ethics. Usually neglected as mere illustrations in literary and cultural studies, their potential as a pictorial form of satire is greatly underestimated. However, as a medium of cultural criticism that inventively reveals problematic developments by combining text and image, it deserves more attention and a specific approach informed by intermedia studies. I intend to contextualise such caricatures with reference to environmental history, socio-political background and media history, as well as to offer iconographic interpretations. The aim is to decode and distinguish different modes of the artistic representation of environmental transformations and to assess their socio-political influence at a time when our world was less flooded with images than today. The outcome would not only comprise the exposure of untouched sources, but should be seen as an attempt to create a theoretical basis for the fusion of an ecocritical approach with analytical methods of intermedia studies. |
