core research areas

Prof. Dr. Roswitha Böhm

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 the European Contemporary Novel (Germany, France, Spain) Prof. Dr. Böhm​

​My research—drawing on Michel de Certeau—examines the “writing of history,” but shifts this focus from historiographical texts to literary ones. The project thus lies at the intersection of history and literary studies and falls within the research field that examines the mediality of historiography and the mediation of historical content through various media.

In addition to narrative texts by W. G. Sebald, Marcel Beyer, Patrick Modiano, Cécile Wajsbrot, and Agnès Desarthe, the analysis also includes works by Rafael Chirbes, Alberto Méndez, and Antonio Muñoz Molina, which can be attributed to the rise of a new form of memorial writing and whose literary treatment of historically significant events across Europe—according to my thesis—opens up a European space of memory. These “novels,” which blend fictional elements with documentary material, address—from the perspective of the second and third generations—the period of the Civil War and the Franco dictatorship in Spain, National Socialism and the Third Reich in Germany, and the occupation and the Vichy regime in France. The extermination of European Jews is another central theme in a large number of these hybrid text forms.

Since all these variations of historical narrative are forms of memory work carried out through literature, a central question of the research project concerns the intertwining of individual and collective history as well as the relationship between fact and fiction. The narrative texts address the issue of the literary representation of memory, remembrance, and history through a discursive strategy, whose specific conceptual and narrative approaches are analyzed from a comparative perspective. In this context, the question of the function of the material and immaterial traces drawn upon for the literary “reconstruction” of the past plays an important role. This is often accompanied by the question raised by both female and male authors or first-person narrators regarding the difficulties of their search for traces and the evidential and reconstructive value of the artifacts they have uncovered. 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.

Toward a Poetics of Precariousness: Worlds of Work in Contemporary European Literature (Prof. Dr. Böhm)

Unlike in the “literature of salaried employees” of the Weimar Republic or in the “literature of the working world” of the 1960s and 1970s, the interest of today’s authors lies in a technologically advanced service industry with qualified employees —or, conversely, the precarious working worlds of mini-jobs, temporary work, and employment activation programs. What these authors have in common is a deep unease in the face of a working life dictated by the demands of the globalized financial world—a world that demands adaptation, flexibility, and commitment from employees but, in return, no longer offers them job security, an adequate salary, or recognition. The individual texts, however, show significant differences in their aesthetic treatment of the theme. Taking the literary-historical context into account and aiming to distinguish the phenomenon from its precursors, the project therefore seeks in particular to identify the diverse points of intersection between economic and linguisticliterary processes in order to explore the specific characteristics of a “poetics of precariousness.” The study is part of an interdisciplinary research project that examines crisis narratives of the “extreme present.”

Narratives of Crisis in Contemporary Romance Cultures (Prof. Dr. Böhm)

Political and, at the same time, aesthetic reflection on the crisis-ridden nature of contemporary life and work has become a central theme in numerous recent textual and visual media—an observation that forms the starting point of this research project. Even if poverty—whose fundamentally pejorative meaning has repeatedly been accompanied by concepts of revaluation throughout cultural history—may be the hallmark of every era, insightful changes have nevertheless become apparent over the past two decades, changes that have intensified once again in the wake of the global financial crisis. Admittedly, “the crisis” has been regarded since the beginning of industrialization as a constant companion of economic, technological, and social modernization—provided it is understood as that open transitional state of a society that counters traditional orientation, provokes a sense of disorientation, and declares the ability to cope with uncertainty a life strategy. In the context of the current economic, political, and associated social crisis, however, a new and rapidly proliferating lexicon has emerged, for in the media and in current, mostly sociological publications, the debate is not limited to “lower classes” and “new poverty”; instead, people are talking about the “precariat” and discussing “precariousness” and “precarization.” But what do these neologisms actually mean? What is the relationship between precariousness and poverty—is the former nothing more than a (trendy) euphemism for the latter? Can the processes of social marginalization indicated by these terms even be summarized under the concept of “crisis”?

The diversity of emerging textual and visual media that engage with precarious living conditions raises further questions that remain unanswered within the parameters of social and political science research: What are the specific characteristics of literary, cinematic, and visual representations of economic and political crisis situations? What artistic forms and methods are employed in narrating these issues? Where do shifts in meaning occur in an increasingly global context, and what new focal points emerge from a transdisciplinary perspective? At what points do interconnections, overlaps, and interactions occur? And: How do these current developments relate to the ways in which poverty and precariousness were conceived in earlier eras?

The project focuses not only on the economic and political aspects but, above all, on the cultural-historical and cultural-theoretical dimensions of a globalized world. It contributes to the current discussion 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 external funding is currently being prepared.

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

If “the future of the humanities [...] lies in research that is methodologically conscious, historically precise in its arguments, socially communicable, and at the same time helps to shape society,” as postulated in the recommendations of the German Science and Humanities Council (2006: 12), then the establishment of a Research Priority Area focused on the “extrême contemporain”— that is, the immediate present, which engages with current cultural and social subjects and issues from the last ten to twenty years (grounded in history), represents a distinctive and promising unique selling point.

In my engagement 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 the prerogative of artists to live creatively such an extreme of heightened perception—“a sense of wonder, a tremor, […] an intensity that is immensely fragile” (Lerch 1989: 24)—to live creatively, then the work of criticism in this realm is likewise characterized by an extraordinary closeness to its subject. What the production and reception sides have in common is that the culture of the extrême contemporain, like a seismograph, offers the possibility of circumscribing and grasping the immediate present in a questioning manner. It thus also serves as a means of gaining insight into the human condition of our present. From a longer-term perspective, such an observatory of contemporary cultures is intended to function as a think tank through the establishment of a network of contemporary researchers, which, by addressing specific Research Priority Areas such as “precariousness,” “migration,” and “digitalization,” to provide a humanities-based framework for reflecting on socially and politically relevant issues, thereby 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 equally consider filmic productions, focuses on the intersections between reality and representation. This refers to the interplay between political, economic, or social events or contexts and their media representations—such as literary or cinematic ones—which interact in new ways in the present. Across disciplines, a visibly intensified discussion regarding the interplay between fiction and fact has emerged in recent years: one that involves facts drawn from real reality and fictional strategies for generating imaginary worlds, which at times leads to discussions of a “New Realism.” The project examines textual or cinematic representations of sometimes latent, but especially politically or sociopolitically topical themes, which are created not exclusively within the framework of traditional literary conventions, but also with the aid of innovative, boundary-crossing literary or cinematic methods, hybridizations, and intermedial expansions. The scope of the project is the Italian cultural sphere— that is , the sphere of resonance of the Italian narrative and interpretive community —in which, in recent years, there has been an increasing number of literary or cinematic narratives that explicitly engage with the country’s political reality.

Invective in Literary and Cinematic Representations of Migration in 20th- and 21st-Century Italy(Prof. Dr. Tiller)

This subproject examines literary and cinematic narratives of migration within the Italian narrative community to analyze aesthetic representations of social conflicts played out through invective since the beginning of the 20th century. The project examines how invective is narratively functionalized in these works, how social conflicts, forms of political identification, and cultural scripts are negotiated and rendered plausible through media, and what historical discursive politics, regimes of knowledge, and affective dynamics underpin this.[More]

Travel and Exploration Accounts from Italy (15th/16th Centuries) (Prof. Dr. Tiller)

The Venetian Marco Polo was neither the first late-medieval traveler from the Italian Peninsula to undertake lengthy journeys to distant regions of the world, nor the first to give a written account of them. Nevertheless, he inaugurated a tradition that would shape a large number of travel accounts up until the end of the Age of Discovery around 1530—accounts written by merchants and bankers, seafarers, cartographers, and other travelers upon their return to Europe or the Italian Peninsula. This research project examines these 15th- and 16th-century travel accounts not only in terms of their canonization as a Renaissance genre, but also seeks in particular to describe the modes of valorization of experiential knowledge, the increasingly epistemically purposeful generation of knowledge, the humanistically guided classification and coding of foreign “others” and their cultures, the meaning-making narrativization of lived cultural encounters, and the associated conventions for interpreting the world, in order to systematically capture the Italian specificity of these written accounts of distant worlds.