March 6-7, 2025: Workshop: "Fleeing Languages. Grammar - Literature - Politics"

Location: TUD Dresden University of Technology, Institute of German Studies and Media Cultures, Wiener Straße 48, 01219 Dresden, conference room 0.16

Time: March 6/7, 2025

Organization: Dr. Florian Scherübl

Schedule:

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Friday, March 7, 2025

Guests are expressly welcome. Please register at .

In recent German-language literature, there is an increasing tendency to push the boundaries of what can be regarded as the linguistic "standard" (Dembeck/Mein 2014) or as the "linguistic quality" of German (Stockhammer 2010). Artistic means are often used to transgress a grammatically codified, "correct" German, which is still largely identified with high culture and cultural capital and is therefore charged with cultural politics (Balke 2016). A few years ago, texts such as Tomer Gardi's Broken German, Iris Hanika's Echo's Chambers or Kim de l'Horizon's Blood Book once again refuted the notion that expressive literary language must be grammatically correct. The focus on multilingualism, but also on other languages per se, is also the subject of contemporary essays by contemporary writers (Grjasnowa 2023; Gümüşay 2020). These and other phenomena give reason to pay more attention to phenomena such as agrammaticality. The latter not only raises questions about the multilingualism and exophony of literature, but also about the ability of literary texts to delimit, change and renew language, as well as the (cultural) political implications and commitments that may accompany them.

Following the linguist Henri Gobard, Gilles Deleuze calls phenomena that undermine grammatical rules in concrete utterances(enunciations) "agrammatic": these are "lines of flight of language". These can occur not only in a migrant-influenced "Kanak Sprak" (Zaimoglu 1995), but also in dialects and sociolects. Since these can develop new transformation rules, as in the case of "Kiezdeutsch" (Wiese 2012), the question of the renewal, supplementation and diversification of languages is obvious here. At the same time, the question arises as to the subversive and - in the long term - reconfiguring potential of such "fleeing languages " . Several research options can be branched off here:

• What theoretical descriptive models and modes do philologies possess to describe deviations from language standards? How can artistic rule violations be systematically researched here? Which theories/methods prove to be (interdisciplinary) compatible?
• How can the strategies of fleeing languages be described in detail? What social and (cultural) political positions are associated with phenomena such as agrammaticality?
• What is the tense relationship between language-normalizing and language-crossing tendencies? What cross-references arise to neighboring issues (such as disputes about the regulation of "gender-appropriate language")? What options are open to literature here?
• What cultural-political assumptions are created by calls for a "language norm" (Hofmannsthal 1980) or a "referential" literary and cultural language (Gobard 1975), as can be found in authors such as Hofmannsthal, Stefan George or Rudolf Borchardt, among others? How do their ideas on language renewal and supplementation relate to the "agrammaticality" of fugitive languages?

Selected bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio: Die Sprache und die Völker, in: Ders., Mittel ohne Zweck. Notes on Politics, Zurich 2001.
• Arndt, Susanne/Naguschweski, Dirk/Stockhammer, Robert (eds.): Exo-Phonie. Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur, Berlin 2007
• Balke, Friedrich: Sprache und Politisierungen von Kulturbegriffen, in: Sprache - Kultur - Kommunikation / Language - Culture - Communication. Ein internationales Handbuch zu Linguistik als Kulturwissenschaft / An International Handbook of Linguistics as a Cultural Discipline, ed. by Ludwig Jäger/Werner Holly/Peter Krapp/Samuel Weber/Simone Heekeren, Berlin/Boston 2016.
• Bourdieu, Pierre: What does speaking mean? On the economy of linguistic exchange, Vienna 2015.
• Cixous, Hélène: Das Lachen der Medusa [1975], in: Esther Hutfless/Gertrude Postl/Elisabeth Schäfer (eds.), Hélène Cixous, Das Lachen der Medusa, together with other contributions, Vienna 2013.
• Deleuze, Gilles: Literature and Life, in: Ders., Kritik und Klinik, Frankfurt am Main 2000.
• Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix: Kafka. For a small literature, Frankfurt am Main 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix: Postulates of Linguistics, in: This, A Thousand Plateaus, Berlin 1992.
• Dembeck, Till/Mein, Georg (eds.): Philology and Multilingualism, Heidelberg 2014.
• Gardi, Tomer: Broken German, Graz 2016.
• Giesecke, Michael: `Natural' and `artificial' languages. Medienrevolutionen und ihre Auswirkungen auf Sprachen und Sprachbegriffe, in: Ders., Sinnenwandel - Sprachwandel - Kuturwandel. Studies on the Prehistory of the Information Society, Frankfurt am Main 1992.
• Gobard, Henri: L'aliénation linguistique. Analyse Tétraglossique, Paris 1976.
• Grjasnowa, Olga: The power of multilingualism. On origin and diversity, Berlin 2021.
• Gümüşay, Kübra: Language and Being, Berlin 2020.
• Hanika, Iris: Echo's Chambers, Munich 2019.
• De l'Horizon, Kim: Blood Book, Cologne 2022.
• Von Hofmannsthal, Hugo: Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation [1927], in: Ders., Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke. Reden und Aufsätze III 1925-1929, ed. by Bernd Schoeller et al, Frankfurt am Main 1980.
• Stockhammer, Robert: and: Globalisierung, sprachig - Literatur (Gegenwart?, deutsch?) In: Wilhelm Amann/Georg Mein/Rolf Parr (eds.): Globalisierung und Gegenwartsliteratur. Constellations - Concepts - Perspectives, Heidelberg 2010.
• Stockhammer, Robert: Grammar. Knowledge and Power in the History of a Linguistic Institution, Berlin 2014.
• Wiese, Heike: Kiezdeutsch. A new dialect emerges, Munich 2012.
• Zaimoglu, Feridun: Kanak Sprak. 24 Mißtöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft, Hamburg 1995.

The poster can be downloaded as a PDF under Plakat_Workshop_Fliehende Sprachen_06.-07.03.25.