Habilitation­sprojekte

LAUFENDE HABILITATIONSPROJEKTE

Narratives of Conciliation: Post-War Sri Lankan Literature in English (Heidemann-Malreddy)

– Birte Heidemann-Malreddy

This project explores the cultural politics of reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka since the ending of the three decades long civil war between the Army and the insurgents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. The project seizes upon an emergent corpus of Anglophone literature by resident and diasporic writers – novels, autobiographies and narrative journalism – that concerns with an ethical imperative of storytelling in the aftermath of war. As such, the project conceives this body of writing as 'narratives of conciliation' wherein attempts at mutual agreement, often touted as prerequisites for sustained reconciliation, may be rehearsed in the muted but pervasive undertones of narrative interventions. While suggesting that a positivist notion of reconciliation is inadequate, if not unattainable, to capture the country’s complex legacy of colonisation by three empires and the ensuing ethnic conflict, the project locates the literary category of conciliation in philosophical and anthropological discourses on suffering, compassion and consolation. Drawing from a corpus of seven novels and three reportage narratives, the project further builds on the methodological cues of a ‘narrative imaginary’ that encompasses fictional and non-fictional modes of storytelling in a post-war context. A major contribution of this research thus lies with its move towards translating the transitional justice paradigm – one of the most pressing issues in Sri Lanka at present – from the political to the cultural domain.

ABGESCHLOSSENE HABILITATIONSPROJEKTE

Literary Twinship since the Shakespearean Age (Schwanebeck)

– Wieland Schwanebeck

This post-doc project (Habilitation) addresses the motif of literary twinship from the Shakespearean age until today. Twins have all too often been discussed as mere footnotes to the allegedly more nuanced motif of the doppelganger, or as a kind of 'embarrassing' secret of literary history that is said to occur merely in inferior genres like farce or horror fiction. This study, by contrast, makes a case for the complexity of literary twinship across the literary spectrum, and it demonstrates that twinship articulates bodily anxieties, dynastic troubles, and genetic concerns that the classic double trope simply cannot accommodate. While the project does not seek to deliver a complete and unabridged history of literary twinship, it examines twinship in a diachronic fashion and in different historical periods in order to show how the category of twinship is frequently re-negotiated as part of larger discursive shifts. Some historical periods understand twins mainly as a biological conundrum that threatens to expose the arbitrary laws of dynastic kinship, others as an epistemological problem that challenges any attempt to impose clear-cut definitions.

The individual case studies trace the development of the category of twinship over time, demonstrating how the twin was repeatedly (re-)invented as a cultural and pathological type when other discursive areas (including the fields of criminology and eugenics) constituted themselves, and how it served as the battleground for ideological disputes. The goal is not to demonstrate that literature 'mirrors' scientific debates of the day; not only is it evident that literature frequently prefigured the discussions of modern twin scholarship, it has also been instrumental in facilitating these debates and in contributing to the negotiation of power shifts, for instance by setting the stage for debates regarding kinship systems in the Shakespearean age, by engaging in the Victorian reformulation of the criminal as genetically/pathologically evil, or by contributing to the dystopian quality of cloning discourse in the 20^th century.

Dubious as the origins of twinship are often rendered both in medical literature and in fiction, the idea of the 'monstrous' birth permeates not just the history of twinship but also that of literary history as such. Exactly how these paradigm shifts unfolded in several different eras of literary and cultural history will be investigated by way of discursive analyses that plot the individual literary analyses against medical debates. The twin motif clearly did not unfold in a vacuum, and the project explores the various intersections between literature and science in ways that existing literary scholarship has so far neglected to investigate.

The corpus of texts examined in this project include works by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (The Trail of the Serpent, 1860), Bruce Chatwin (On the Black Hill, 1982), Wilkie Collins (Poor Miss Finch, 1872), Charles Dickens (The Mystery of Edwin Drood, 1870), George Farquhar (The Twin Rivals, 1702), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932), Christopher Priest (The Prestige, 1995), Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things, 1997), William Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors [1594] and Twelfth Night [1601]), Zadie Smith (White Teeth, 2000), John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi, 1614), and many others. 

Check out Wieland Schwanebeck's website for an overview of project-related publications

Entstehung und Wandel kollektiver politischer Identitäten am Beispiel der Whigs und Tories in England, 1678-1714: Zirkulationsprozesse zwischen Literatur und Politik (Giovanopoulos)

September 2009-August 2011 DFG-Projekt (Einwerbung einer eigenen Stelle)

• 2011/12 Stipendienprogramm zur Förderung von Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen der TU Dresden (ohne Medizinische Fakultät)

Im Rahmen der literaturwissenschaftlichen Identitätsforschung wird anhand von Prozessmitschriften und Dramen des späten 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts die Herausbildung kollektiver politischer Identitäten von Whigs und Tories im Zeitraum von 1678 bis 1714/15 analysiert. Identität wird hierbei grundsätzlich als Resultat narrativ erzeugter, diskursiver Aushandlungen verstanden.

Das Vorhaben stützt sich auf einen interdisziplinären Ansatz, wobei produktive Allianzen mit der Identitätsforschung, der soziologisch-historiographischen Forschung zu Öffentlichkeit und Rechtskultur sowie der Theaterwissenschaft und literaturwissenschaftlichen Dramenforschung gebildet werden. Dies geschieht mit dem Ziel, den heterogenen Gegenstand, bestehend aus fiktionalen und nicht-fiktionalen, aus teils kanonisierten und teils neu zu erschließenden Texten, unter innovativen Perspektiven integrativ ins Blickfeld zu rücken. Herausgestellt werden sollen die jeweils gattungsspezifischen Verarbeitungs- und Konstituierungsstrategien sowie die besondere Wirkungskraft von Literatur und die Zirkulationsprozesse, die in die gesamtgesellschaftliche Öffentlichkeit ausstrahlen.