Current research projects in German Studies
Externally funded projects:
Resonances: Love and Intimacy in Contemporary German Language Literature
Professor Helmut Schmitz's project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, investigates the diversity, richness and cultural implications of contemporary literary representations of love and intimacy from a variety of theoretical perspectives and assesses the reasons for the re-emergence of love as one of German literature’s dominant topics at the beginning of the 21st century. Looking at literary representations of love across the diversity of social, ethnic and gender identities, it will be the first full-length study of contemporary literary representations of love and intimacy. Exploring the works of authors like Hanns-Josef Ortheil, Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Navid Kermani, Antje Ravik Strubel, Ronja von Rönne and Alain Claude Sulzer, the monograph will consist of a set of case studies that are representative of diverse thematic concerns and socio-cultural issues, and will take full account of contemporary literature’s frequent theoretical and meta-critical self-awareness. A central thread linking these case studies will be the relationship between literary representations of intimacy and passion and issues of gender politics, frequently seen as incompatible with the cultural iconography of traditions of love. This will serve to close a research gap by addressing representations of intimacy in fiction that thematise non-heteronormative gender identities.
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Ambivalent Relations: German-Islamic Kinships from the Enlightenment to WWI
Dr James Hodkinson was also awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to complete an original monograph on forms and representations of ‘kinship’ between German-speakers, Islam, and Muslims in Germanophone culture, 1750-1918. The first study on the topic, the book uses contrasting visual and textual sources from differing discourses across the period to examine critically representations of ‘familial’ belonging between Muslim and non-Muslims and perceived ‘commonalities’ of religious heritage, doctrine, and between Islam and other faiths.
The study shifts the focus of scholarship, showing for the first time a continuing, growing engagement with Islam and Muslims in German-speaking culture throughout the period, though one which shifts from literary writing into other spheres of cultural production, stimulated by travel, colonial politics, and changes in academe: previous studies dedicated to forms of German ‘Orientalism’ have not fully explored this continuity. The work also innovates conceptually, moving beyond paradigms of Islam’s exclusive ‘otherness’ and ‘difference’ and employing instead the alternative critical paradigm of cultural ‘similarity’ (Bhatti/ Kimmich, 2015) to conduct fresh analysis. Breaking with the denser terminology of some postcolonial theory, the terms ‘ähnlich’ or ‘Ähnlichkeit’ often figure explicitly within my corpus. An historical and contemporary term, ‘similarity’ captures forms of interfaith friendship and non-binary relations which can characterize ‘kinship’, though also describes aptly how Islam has been forced to ‘resemble’ other faiths and cultures and thus assimilated problematically into Eurocentric cultural norms. By considering canonical and lesser-known sources, including literature, travelogues, philosophical and historical treatises, scholarly writing on Islamic history and doctrine, political cartoons and postcards, governmental documents and civic architecture, my monograph brings new material into scholarship and marks the first intermedial and interdisciplinary study on the topic. This breadth will interest a wider range of academic colleagues, including literary scholars, historians of religion, politics and art, philosophers, and theologians.
From Enlightenment to imperialism, the book covers a period of drastic cultural, political, and social change in German-speaking Europe, in which relations with the Muslim world attained a new complexity, and in which images and concepts of kinship with Islam continued to reflect the ambivalent thoughts and feelings of German-speakers towards Islam. Although historically focussed, my book is of wider importance today. The exploration of ‘kinship’ and ‘similarity’ articulates notions of Islamic-Western relations in non-binary non-exclusive terms, though also highlights how such ideals have threatened to domesticate Islam in the past. The work thus provokes critical thought on contemporary public discourse and policies on diversity, which may or may not be as ‘inclusive’ of Muslims and Islam as Western societies might hope. In this respect, the book both draws upon and feeds into Hodkinson's engagement and impact work within SMLC.
Constellations of Alterity: Constructions of Jewishness, Race and Gender in Germany’s long 19th Century
This research project, also funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, aims to investigate the connected social origins of different kinds of projection and discrimination along the lines of gender, ethnicity/’race’ and Jewishness, without denying their specificities and historically changing relationships, and to develop theoretical approaches able to describe their entanglement.
Dr Christine AchingerLink opens in a new window will develop this line of research through a series of case studies, each chapter focusing on a literary or political text or a closely related group of texts that have been of central cultural significance at important junctures in modern German and Austrian history between the late 18th and early 20th century, and that allow a closer investigation of the ways in which images of different ‘others’ respond to specific social issues emerging at that time and still having an impact today. Social concerns articulated through such images of gender, ethnicity/’race’ and Jewishness and their interplay include, but are not restricted to, worries about the cohesion of post-feudal civil society, new notions of equality and difference, conflicts about the boundaries of the national community, concerns about the alienating, fragmenting and disenchanting aspects of capitalist modernisation, and the fear of decadence and disintegration of the autonomous individual, connoted as male, around the turn of the century.
While scholarship on different constructions of alterity and their interconnections has hitherto mainly focused on their similarities and overlap, this study will explore these constructions as mutually illuminating even where they play very different discursive roles, as reflections of a changing society riven by exclusions and contradictions. As an ensemble, these case studies will help explore the dialectic between abstractly universalist tendencies and novel forms of difference and exclusion as an important feature of capitalist modernity. Through all historical transformation, their analysis helps illuminate present-day concerns.
At the same time, the study aims to put approaches from within the tradition of critical social theory – from Marx through the Frankfurt School to the present day – into critical dialogue with select intersectional approaches and more recent contributions to postcolonial, racism and gender studies. The project thus aims to make a contribution to understanding the connected histories of constructions of Jewishness, race and gender, as well as to the development of theoretical frameworks able to capture this entanglement.
In-house Projects
Dialogue, Movement, and World Entanglement: Towards a Redefinition of World Literature
Professor Elisabeth Herrmann's project responds to the demand for a critical review of the idea of world literature in our time of globalisation. The study goes beyond a synopsis of the different concepts that have been developing since Goethe’s time, with the aim of inciting a scientific dialogue between the fields of literary, cultural, comparative, and translation studies in order to encompass the term world literature from a transnational perspective. Applying new theories of material, communicative, and cultural mobility that derive from disciplines in social sciences and the humanities, this study in literary theory determines historically traceable characteristics as well as newly emerging indicators of world literature by extending the concept in the direction of a ‘literature of movement and world entanglement.’ World literature cannot be investigated as an entity in itself. Instead, the concept becomes meaningful within examinations of its parts as excerpts of the world. Language and locality, specific themes and the idiosyncrasies of individual texts are hereby seen as impetus for potential movement. Drawing on a selection of literary texts written in German across different countries and centuries that have been received and adopted internationally, while at the same time focusing on new developments in German and multilingual literature that have emerged since the turn of the millennium, this monograph develops new tools with which to examine the dynamics of literature traveling the world. The study identifies historical and new literary communities that are created beyond existing concepts of national, cultural, and geographical location.