core research areas

Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

Prof. Dr. Heiner Böhmer

Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria De Cesare Greenwald

Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Tiller

DETAILED PROJECT DESCRIPTIONS

In Search of Traces - On the Literarization of Contemporary History in Contemporary European Novels (Germany, France, Spain) Prof. Dr. Böhm

My study - based on Michel de Certeau - asks about the "writing of history", but shifts this question from the consideration of historiographical to that of 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be assigned to the field of research that investigates the mediality of historiography and the medial communication of historical content.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 - according to 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 or 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.

Towards a poetics of the precarious. Working worlds in contemporary European literature (Prof. Dr. Böhm)

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'.

Narratives of crisis in contemporary Romance cultures (Prof. Dr. Böhm)

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 situation, 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.

Observatoire de l'extrême contemporain | Observatory of Contemporary Cultures (Prof. Dr. Böhm)

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.

Fictionality and factuality (Prof. Dr. Tiller)

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 be increasingly found in recent years.

Invectiveness in literary and cinematic representations of migration in 20th/21st century Italy(Prof. Dr. Tiller)

The sub-project focuses on literary and cinematic narratives of migration in the Italian narrative community in order to analyze aesthetic stagings of invective social conflicts since the beginning of the 20th century. The project asks how invectives are narratively functionalized, how social conflicts, political identifications and cultural scripts are negotiated and made plausible in the media, and which historical discourse politics, knowledge regimes and affective dynamics underpin this.

Travel and exploration reports from Italy (15th/16th century) (Prof. Dr. Tiller)

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 report on them in writing. 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 and the Italian peninsula until the end of the great discoveries around 1530. The research project examines these travelogues of the 15th and 16th centuries 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.