Research projects

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

The central question of this transdisciplinary research project is the representation of history, memory and remembrance in the medium of literature. The study, which combines historical-philosophical and narratological methods, focuses on hybrid contemporary texts by Spanish, French and German authors that deal with the thirties and forties of the 20th century and the after-effects of this era in the present day. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

In the wake of the social upheavals of the last two decades and the resulting discussion about 'precarity' and 'precarization', German, French and Spanish authors such as Moritz Rinke and Kathrin Röggla, Emmanuelle Heidsieck and Yves Pagès or Laura Meradi and Isaac Rosa, whose texts are examined in this project, are rediscovering the economy, business and the world of work as productive literary subjects. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

In this multidisciplinary research project, recent discourses and narratives of the 'crisis', which give artistic expression to the economic and socio-political developments in the wake of globalization and migration around the turn of the millennium, will be examined from a cultural, media and literary studies perspective using various cultural artefacts. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

The Observatoire de l'extrême contemporain | Observatorium der Gegenwartskulturen (Observatory of Contemporary Extrême Cultures) is a place of observation, assessment and archiving, but also of encounters with authors in the sense of the Dresden Research Priority Area "Culture and Knowledge". By organizing readings, colloquia, etc., information about stakeholders and positions in contemporary cultures is communicated to a university and non-academic audience. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Heiner Böhmer

Research and representation of larger areas of dialog and text types, including on the basis of sequential syntax.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Heiner Böhmer

Contrastive studies on polysemy configurations of French, Spanish and German, with a system linguistic and a pragmatic part, based on the problematization of the concept of polysemy and lexicographic polysemy representation.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Tiller

The project focuses on the interferences of reality and representation that develop between political, economic or social events and their representation in the media. The object of investigation are literary or cinematic narratives of the Italian cultural area that explicitly deal with the political reality of the country. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Tiller

In the course of the rapid change from a classic country of emigrants to a country of immigrants, which Italy has had to cope with since 1990, more and more texts are being written that deal with migration, migrants and the realities of migration. The project focuses on historical changes in the migration processes affecting Italy on the one hand, and on literary and cinematic appropriations since the late 19th century on the other, which stage and encode these semantically, aesthetically and politically. [More]

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Tiller

Up to around 1530, a series of travelogues by Italian travelers and explorers emerged, establishing their own line of tradition. The project examines the specifics of these cultural contact narratives and develops a system of narrative coding of Italian geo-knowledge.

My research - based on Michel de Certeau - asks about the "writing of history", but shifts this question from the consideration of historiographical to literary texts. The project is thus located at the interface of historical and literary studies and can be assigned to the field of research that investigates the mediality of historiography and the medial communication of historical content.

In addition to narrative texts by W. G. Sebald and Marcel Beyer, by Patrick Modiano, Cécile Wajsbrot and Agnès Desarthe, the study also analyzes those by Rafael Chirbes, Alberto Méndez and Antonio Muñoz Molina, which can be attributed to the boom of a new memorialism and whose literary treatment of historical events relevant throughout Europe - so my thesis - opens up a European space of remembrance. These 'novels', which mix fictional elements with documentary material, deal with the period of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in Spain, National Socialism and the Third Reich in Germany, the occupation and the Vichy regime in France from the perspective of the second and third generation. The extermination of the European Jews is another thematic nucleus of a large number of these hybrid text forms.

Since all these varieties of historical narrative are forms of memory work in the literary mode, a central question of the research project concerns the interweaving of individual and collective history as well as the relationship between fact and fiction. The narrative texts confront the problem of the literarization of memory, remembrance and history with a discursive strategy whose specific conceptual and narrative design solutions are analysed from a comparative perspective. The question of the function of the material and immaterial traces used for the literary 'reconstruction' of the past plays an important role here. In addition, the female and male authors and first-person narrators often raise the question of the difficulties of their search for clues and the informative and reconstructive value of the finds they uncover. Another important theme is the reflection on the legacy delegated to them by the past to reconstruct unknown fates or to bear witness to their history.

In contrast to the white-collar literature of the Weimar Republic or the 'literature of the working world' of the 1960s and 1970s, the interest of today's authors is in a technically highly equipped service industry with qualified employees - or, on the contrary, in the precarious working worlds of mini-jobs, bridging activities and activation measures. What the authors have in common is a great sense of unease in the face of a working life determined by the demands of the globalized financial world, which demands adaptation, flexibility and commitment from employees, but in return no longer offers them a secure job, an appropriate salary or recognition. However, the individual texts differ greatly in their aesthetic treatment of the subject. Taking into account the literary-historical context and with the aim of differentiating it from predecessor phenomena, the project therefore aims in particular to work out the many points of contact between economic and linguistic-literary processes in order to explore the specifics of a 'poetics of the precarious'. The study is part of an interdisciplinary research project investigating crisis narratives of the 'extreme present'.

The political and at the same time aesthetic reflection on the crisis-like nature of the contemporary world of life and work has become a theme in numerous recent textual and visual media - an observation that is the starting point of this research project. Even if poverty, whose basic pejorative meaning has always been accompanied by concepts of revaluation in the course of cultural history, may be the signet of every age, revealing changes can be observed in the last two decades, which have intensified in the wake of the global financial crisis. Since the beginning of industrialization, 'the crisis' has been regarded as a constant companion of economic and technological social modernization, if it is understood as the open transitional state of a society that runs counter to the orientation towards tradition, provokes uncertainty of orientation and declares uncertainty competence as a life strategy. In the context of the current economic, political and associated social crisis, however, a new and almost proliferating field of words has emerged, as the media and current, mostly sociological publications are not only debating 'lower classes' and 'new poverty', but are also talking about the 'precariat', discussing 'precarity' and 'precarization'. But what lies behind these neologisms? What is the relationship between precarity and poverty - is the former nothing more than a (fashionable) euphemism for the latter? Can the indexed processes of social marginalization even be subsumed under the term 'crisis'?

The diversity of currently emerging text and image media that deal with precarious living conditions raises further questions that remain unanswered in social and political science research parameters: What are the specifics of a literary, cinematic and visual representation of economic-political crisis situations? Which artistic forms and procedures come into play in the narrativization of these problems? Where do shifts in meaning occur in an increasingly global context and what new focalizations arise from a transdisciplinary perspective? Where are there interdependencies, overlaps and interactions? And: What is the relationship between these current developments and the way in which poverty and precarity were thought of in earlier eras?

The project focuses not only on the economic and political aspects, but above all on the cultural-historical and theoretical dimensions of a globalized world. It contributes to the current debate on the interconnectedness of the world by emphasizing local and regional modifications, shifts and hybrid forms and thus the complexity of cultural exchange processes. An application for third-party funding is currently being prepared.

If "the future of the humanities [...] in the field of research lies in methodologically aware, historically precise, socially communicable and at the same time socially constitutive research", as the recommendations of the German Council of Science and Humanities (2006: 12) postulate, then the establishment of a Research Priority Area on extrême contemporain, i.e. on the immediate present, which deals with current cultural and social objects and issues of the last ten to twenty years (with a historical foundation), is a striking and promising unique selling point.

In my preoccupation with contemporary culture, I assume that it offers the opportunity to discover a "univers esthétique et conceptuel jusqu'alors inconnu" (Proguidis 2001: 9). If it is reserved for artists to creatively live such an extreme of heightened perception - "an astonishment, a tremor, [...] an intensity that is incredibly fragile" (Lerch 1989: 24) - then the work of critique on this terrain is also characterized by an extraordinary closeness to the object. What both the production and reception sides have in common is that the culture of extrême contemporain, like a seismograph, offers the possibility of questioningly circling and grasping the immediate present. It thus also serves as a means of recognizing the human condition of our present. In the longer term, such an observatory of contemporary cultures should function as a think tank through the establishment of a network of contemporary researchers, which accompanies the reflection of socially and politically relevant issues in the humanities by dealing with specific Research Priority Areas such as "precarity", "migration" and "digitalization", thus positioning the humanities as life sciences (Ette 2008) at the center of society.

As a result of its inherent relationship to the text, the epistemological orientation of philology - already due to its traditional interdisciplinarity - provides a new associative understanding with regard to the concept of innovation. In this respect, the analysis of the ideas of our intellectual-historical knowledge horizon must be significantly redesigned in order to fruitfully condense the performance of progressive thought concepts in a digital world and newly emerging expert culture. The project understands the examination of the Vicentine scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino as the starting point for the documentation of a system of knowledge generation that is still valid today via the planned or derivative construction of language fields for the creation of knowledge worlds. Digital access to Trissino via an online concordance of his entire oeuvre, made possible for the first time in this project, not only guarantees a global and multiple collection of qualitative metadata from different areas of knowledge, but also allows multi-layered documentation and semantic, functional, syntactic and morphological determination. The programmatic nature of the language reformer's ideas also allows for multi-layered text-linguistic and discourse-analytical interpretations of the expansion of knowledge and its verbalization under new paradigmatic conditions. The interdisciplinarity of the project should not only be extended to modern disciplines or established fields of the humanities, but the findings of media theory in the field of typography and writing culture should also be used to assist.

As part of this project, which has been running since 1994, research has been carried out into Muratori's correspondence partners in German-speaking countries and the complex cultural and intellectual relations between Italy and Germany during the Age of Enlightenment. The results of the research were documented in various publications, for example in the work Lodovico Antonio Muratori und Deutschland, Frankfurt/M.: Lang 1997 (Italien in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 8) and in the volume Die Glückseligkeit des gemeinen Wesens, also published by Peter Lang in 1999. Wege der Ideen zwischen Italien und Deutschland im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, which contains the proceedings of the congress "Le strade della cultura nel Settecento - Italienisch-deutsche Geistesbeziehungen im 18. Jahrhundert" (Dresden, December 1997). A further publication on Muratori's smaller correspondence with German correspondents (approx. 60 letters in Latin, Italian and French) and on Italian correspondents living in Germany (approx. 200 letters in Italian) was published by Peter Lang Verlag in 2010. A further sub-project was added in 2011: G. W. Leibniz's correspondence with Muratori (1708-1716). This was integrated into a larger project in 2013, i.e. volume 25 of the Carteggio Nazionale (approx. 300 letters from 25 correspondents), which is currently being edited (completion approx. 2017).

The presence of Italian and French in the fields of language, literature, poetry, but also jurisprudence, church, art (especially architecture and painting), music, medicine, natural sciences at the Saxon court from the 16th to the 19th century will be analyzed on the basis of the manuscript corpus available in the SLUB and the function of Italian alongside French and Latin as lingua franca of court culture and education at the courts of Europe as well as in the various fields of knowledge will be examined. In doing so, very different lines of tradition will be worked out, such as the history of German European politics with a special focus on Saxony, the history of dynastic relations and the history of German-Italian and German-French cultural and intellectual relations. The work that has been steadily advanced in recent years is now to be further networked through concrete research cooperation with internal and external partners. For the first time, selected manuscripts from the 280 Italian manuscripts and the approximately 580 French codices of the SLUB (Saxon State and University Library Dresden) identified so far will be processed with the aim of codicological contextualization, in-depth linguistic and content-related indexing and cultural-historical provenance research. All Italian manuscripts are being categorized and digitized in parallel by the SLUB in a DFG-funded project, so that the foundation stone for the critical digital edition has been laid in an overall project that goes beyond book culture and innovatively brings together further mosaic stones of Italian-Saxon identity within the framework of Saxony's museum institutions in a scientific network.

This project, which takes literary texts as its starting point but will also take film productions into account, focuses on the interference of reality and representation. This means the interaction of political, economic or social events or constellations and their representation in the media, for example in literature or film, which interact in a different way in the present. In recent years, a visibly more dynamic discussion on the interplay between fictionality and factuality can be observed across disciplines: of facts from real reality and fictional strategies for generating imaginary worlds, which sometimes lead to discussions of a new realism. The project deals with textual or cinematic representations of sometimes latent, but especially politically or socio-politically topical themes, which are not created exclusively within the framework of traditional literary conventions, but also with the help of innovative, cross-border literary or cinematic procedures, hybridizations and intermedial extensions. The area of access is the Italian cultural space, the resonance space of the Italian narrative and interpretation community , in which literary or cinematic narratives that explicitly deal with the political reality of the country can increasingly be found in recent years.

In the course of the rapid change from a classic country of emigrants to a country of immigrants, which Italy has had to cope with since 1990, more and more texts have been produced since then that deal with migration, migrants and the realities of migration, which may have occurred some time ago. While Italian literature of the 20th century hardly dealt with the topic of migration, especially Italian mass emigration until the 1970s, and Italian film, although more intensive in terms of numbers, never addressed it as an overarching socio-cultural factor of Italian realities, this has changed fundamentally in the last 20 years or so. Since the turn of the millennium, the Italian literary scene has been increasingly shaped by migrants and the so-called second generation, whose literary problematizations of everyday life as a migrant have launched themes and perspectives that have hardly been addressed to date. On the one hand, the project's viewings therefore focus on historically effective changes in the migration processes affecting Italy, which on the other hand are successively staged and encoded semantically, aesthetically and politically in literary and cinematic appropriations. Of particular interest here are fictional pattern formations, motivic knot formations and procedural innovations, which will necessarily only emerge more clearly in the coming years.

The Venetian Marco Polo was neither the first late medieval traveler from the Italian peninsula to undertake long journeys to distant regions of the world, nor the first to write about them. Nevertheless, he initiated a tradition that would shape a large number of travelogues written by merchants and bankers, seafarers, cartographers and other travelers after their return to Europe or the Italian peninsula until the end of the great discoveries around 1530. The research project examines these 15th and 16th century travelogues not only with regard to a rinascimental genre canonization, but also attempts in particular to examine the modes of valorization of experiential knowledge, the epistemically increasingly goal-oriented generation of knowledge, the humanistically guided classification and coding of foreign others and their cultures, the meaningfulness of the travelogue, and the way in which it is written. The aim is to describe and analyze the modes of valorization of experiential knowledge, the epistemically increasingly goal-oriented generation of knowledge, the humanistically guided classification and coding of foreign others and their cultures, the meaningful narrativization of the cultural contacts experienced and the associated conventions of world interpretation in order to systematically grasp the Italian specificity of these inscriptions of distant worlds.