Current research projects in German Studies
Externally funded projects:
Resonances: Love and Intimacy in Contemporary German Language Literature
Professor Helmut Schmitz's Leverhulme funded project 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.
-
Ambivalent Relations: German-Islamic Kinships from the Enlightenment to WWI
In this Leverhulme-funded research project, Dr James Hodkinson [under construction]. -
Constellations of alterity: Conceptions of femininity and Jewishness in modern German and Austrian culture
This research project, 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, connotated 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:
-
Future in Crisis or What Comes After Dystopia? COVID-19 Literature
This research contribution in the form of a concise monograph pays tribute to the current moment and is designed to investigate literature’s role during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Elisabeth Herrmann explores how literature assists in addressing, enduring and transcending what we currently experience as a crisis and how it helps make the transition to either a ‘post-pandemic era’ or a ‘new normal’ after the caesura. Leading questions are: What role does literary fiction play in times of crises and more precisely during the COVID-19 pandemic? What specific aspects of the pandemic are remembered and worth being archived in literary form? Have new ways of writing evolved out of this crisis? If so, what kinds of new styles, genres and text formats have been produced since the pandemic started? More generally, what are these texts’ specific characteristics? With an unprecedented situation that has been challenging us to accept the unpredictable on a daily basis, one central aspect to be explored in this study is how the pandemic has changed our relationship to the future and how literature can help us envision the future in new ways. Exploring literature’s role in reflecting and even processing the social transformations and structural breaks that come with the current crisis, the project proposes literature to play a new significant role in shaping the pandemic narrative due to its potential to debate our relationship to the present in view of a future that lies within the realms of possibilities. Drawing on a representative selection of German-language and globally produced COVID-19 and pandemic fiction, the study sets a focus on the probabilistic as well as realistic aspects of fiction, developing a concept of ‘future realism’.
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.
Remembering Wartime Rape: The Emotional Politics of Cultural Memory
This project investigates and reconstructs how cultural works shaped and transformed the collective memory of wartime rape in Germany, where Allied soldiers assaulted hundreds of thousands of women into 1945. These events were evoked in a wide range of media throughout the post-war period. However, this dispersed chatter did not translate into sustained engagement with the phenomenon of wartime rape in the public sphere until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Dr Katherine Stone's book will address this discrepancy, asking: How did the political delicacy of discussing German civilian suffering shape the production and publication of narratives about wartime rape? Why is the idea that wartime rape was ‘taboo’ still so compelling in non-academic circles, especially culture and the media? Does the term ‘taboo’ educe more than the boundaries of political discourse, suggesting that earlier references to wartime rape elided core issues about its psychological and familial legacy? In searching for answers to these questions, this project combines aesthetic and reception analysis with theories of emotion to investigate why certain representations amplified the story of wartime rape, while others muted its impact. It argues that examining how memory narratives distribute emotion provides a key to understanding when and how memories of violence were deemed to matter and in which contexts. In so doing, it explains the ambivalent status of wartime rape in post-war memory cultures that repeatedly evoked the violence of rape without reflecting on its aftermath. Despite repeated calls to do so, the broader field of memory studies has not yet explained the connection between emotion, resonance, and the dynamics of cultural memory. This study therefore seeks to advance the field and create a more textured model of cultural memory that goes beyond the reductive concepts of narrative and silence, memory and taboo.