(Post)Doctoral Projects

Projects by (Post)Doctoral Researchers (Cohort 1)

Dissertation

  • by Eyk Akansu
  • Cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

Publicity of Poetry in the GDR: The Series Poesiealbum (1967 to 1989/90)

The Poesiealbum can be considered as a phenomenon of the so-called poetry wave, which began with the famous poetry evening initiated by Stephan Hermlin at the Academy of Arts in Berlin (Akademie der Künste) on December 11, 1962. While pivotal, the publicity of poetry is generally not only dependent on recitation or performance, but also its publication and distribution by publishers and booksellers.

In the GDR, this publication and distribution depended on the approval of the Head Administration for Publishing and the Book Trade (Hauptverwaltung Verlage und Buchhandel) in the Ministry of Culture. The expert opinions written for this purpose establish opportune readings. With those readings, the discourse on what is poetically expressible can be traced and the history of the Poesiealbum can be supplemented with a source genre whose systematic analysis has yet to be conducted.

This project aims to contribute to this discussion by conducting such a systemic analyis, differentiated by its application of both synchronous and diachronic comparisons, for example according to the poets’ origin or generation. The approach is inspired by discourse analysis and combines close and distant reading methods of various sources.

Dissertation

  • by Annette Becker
  • Cohort 1  (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

Malagasy Present in the Focus of Photo-Literary Works

Using qualitative research design, Annette examines contemporary publications by Malagasy photographers and writers. These cultural artifacts of literary production produce, archive, and transport explicit and implicit forms of social knowledge, creating a specific discursive space that connects local and global public spheres in the context of Madagascar’s socio- economic, cultural, and media landscape. Thus, the methodological analysis and interpretation of this particular form of literary expression offers an opportunity to understand current discourses of the Malagasy public sphere itself and its global interconnections, as well as to reconstruct the concrete conditions of creation, production, and distribution of literature in Madagascar in an exemplary manner. The research methodology therefore combines ethnographic and interpretative methods of empirical, reconstructive social research in an iterative approach based on sociology of knowledge, practice theory, and postcolonial theory.

Dissertation

Comparative Studies on Censorship in Brazil and the GDR

Henrique’s project aims to assert a link between Brazil and Germany through a comparative analysis of the bureaucratic structure of censorship in the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and the GDR. By comparing the books Zero, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, and Rummelplatz, by Werner Bräunig, and their respective censorship reports/justifications by the bureaucratic offices responsible for repression, the aim is to identify similarities in the censorship structure in both countries. The accompanying readings of uncensored works that are equally critical of the regimes, such as Sargento Getúlio, by João Ubaldo Ribeiro, and Der geteilte Himmel, by Christa Wolf, are intended to deepen the understanding of the relationship between censorship and the public sphere.

Dissertation

  • by Patrick Graur
  • Cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

The ‘Aktionsgruppe Banat’ in the Field of Tension between Literature and the Public (1965-1984)

This project aims to analyze the conditions under which a literary group Aktionsgruppe Banat emerged in socialist Romania (1), the production and reception of a specific form of Romanian-German literature in the 1960s to 1980s (2), as well as the cultural-historical relevance of the concepts of authorship, identity construction, and the relationship between literature and the public sphere (3) from a literary-sociological and intercultural perspective. Although the Aktionsgruppe Banat only existed for a short period of time (1972–1975) before being disbanded by the Romanian Securitate, authors like Richard Wagner (1952–2023), Johann Lippet (*1951) and Anton Sterbling (*1953) played an important role in the public sphere negotiating Romanian-German subjects.

This work aims to produce a close reading of the literature produced—primarily in the form of poems and short prose—and establish a connection to its performative practices, intermedial experiments and publicity campaigns. In this way, the project broadens the view of this politically controversial phase in Romania’s German literature after 1945.

Dissertation

  • by Danijel Katić
  • Cohort 1 (since 2023)
  • Dissertation written in German

Yugoslav Partisan Films in the Field of Transnational Media Landscapes: Aesthetics, Reception and Distribution

The work examines the Yugoslav partisan film of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The films “The Battle of the Neretva” (1969), “The Fifth Offensive – Encirclement Battle of the Sutjeska” (1973) and “One is Sarajevo” (1972)form the corpus. The work examines the extent to which these film texts were subject to transnational negotiation processes in terms of visual and formal language and how this inscription in turn contributed to addressing the transnational public. The analytical consideration focuses on the period 1969–1973; the transnational influence was noted as early as 1946/1947 and, acting as a reference, was integrated into the analysis. In addition to the film texts, non-film elements such as film reviews, film articles, film posters and current distribution phenomena (DVD and Blu-Ray releases) are included.

Dissertation

Mediating Otherness in Cultural Discourse: The Planetary Posthuman Subject in Afrofuturist Science Fiction

Arunima Kundu’s project explores how Afrofuturist science fiction participates in the cultural discourses on the human condition by creating examples of planetary posthuman subjects who dismantle binary oppositions based on discourses of race and otherness. It engages with the scholarship on posthumanist theory and the concept of planetarity to come to an understanding of a “planetary posthuman.” The concept of the “cyborg lends” a concrete form and an embodiment to a posthuman subjectivity with a planetary consciousness, creating an embodied planetary posthuman subject. The aim is to examine how an Afrofuturist planetary posthuman could contribute to public discourse and to cultural development in the United States and North America. This project takes an intermedial methodological approach to a close engagement with and analysis of Hollywood science fiction films and contemporary science fiction literature, including novels and comic books.

Dissertation

  • by Noran Omran
  • Cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

The German-Language Beat Literature: Constitution, Construction, and Consecration

The point of departure for this doctoral project is the observation formulated by the German- language alternative scene itself that the journals which began to circulate in 1968 obeyed a staged chaos. Visually, deliberately disordered page contents outlining the political, literary, and religious revolution of this time of upheaval are presented to the audience in a page design characterized by thematic pluralism and typographic heterogeneity. Colourful—both visually and content-wise—overloaded booklets deliver what at first glance appears to be a confusing chaos compiled in bricolage style. On closer inspection, however, the apparent arbitrariness turns out to be discursively justified, as an element of strategic distinction in the contemporary culture industry. The staged heterogeneity of the journals, the amateurish impression of their design, production, and distribution, and their ostinato tendency to network through mutual citation reveals a logic of its own, whose functioning, effect, and cultural-historical location of which my project aims to uncover. Particular attention is paid to the formation of networks between supposedly unrelated/incongruent U-journals.

Synchronously published journals, such as Ulcus Molle Info (1969–1990), Gasolin 23 (1973–1986) and Boa Vista (1974–1983), each define their specific understanding of a literature of/in the underground for themselves, as well as in their interaction with each other, in their exchange with novels and anthologies of, the transnational underground scene, in their interaction with the cultural artefacts of the English-speaking beatniks of the 1950s and 60s, in their recourse to the surrealists and dadaists of modernism, and in their sharp distancing from high- and mid-culture. This rhizome-like network of references–how it establishes itself, how it makes itself known, how it communicates and distinguishes itself, which readings it opens up, what cultural-poetic relevance it has–is what the planned study wants to make visible with the means of a cultural-history oriented media and material philology, both in breadth and in the form of close readings.

Dissertation

Whiteness as Usual? The Racial Politics of the 21st-Century Prize Novel

My project analyzes the anti-black and white supremacist practices that continue to shape the selection processes of three major anglophone literary prizes, as well as their effect on the public reception of the prize-winning literature. I argue that the 21st century sees an increase in prize-winning novels that carry great potential to foster racial literacy in the US public, which is however not fully explored, since those texts are still circulated and read within a literary field whose dynamics rely on anti-back discrimination. I follow Lani Guinier’s definition of racial literacy as the capacity to understand racism as systemic and continuous condition in the US with various effects on individual lives, and to acknowledge the agency of racially minoritized individuals in this environment (Guinier 100–115). On the example of six award winning novels, honored between 2000 and 2020, I first examine how those texts have an inscribed potential to transport racial literacy to their readers. Second, I analyze the conditions of the award selection process in the respective years (e.g. jury members, author background, information about the nominees, public statements about the selection criteria) to relate the racial literacy incribed into the novels with the way the racial stratification of the literary field is dealt with by the prize institutions. In a final reception analysis of the novels as prize winners in different media channels, I seek to determine which effect the novels’ prizes had on the public reception of their racial literacy.

Dissertation

  • by Laura Sturtz
  • Cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

Literary Interventions from Postmigrant Counter-Publics

The project examines strategies of literary intervention in contemporary German-language literature. Drawing on a plural concept of the public sphere and on postmigrant approaches, it investigates how literary texts irritate, disrupt, and renegotiate dominant narratives of migration, racism, and belonging. Public spheres are understood as plural and potentially conflictual; the postmigrant counter-public emerges as a space of counter-positioning, resonance, and the audibility of marginalized voices. The novels 1000 Serpentinen Angst by Olivia Wenzel, Drei Kameradinnen by Shida Bazyar, and Dschinns by Fatma Aydemir, whose strategies of literary intervention form the focus of the analytical section, employ narrative techniques such as autofictional and subversive narrative voices, you-narratives, and literary practices of archiving marginalized histories.The dissertation project understands the selected texts, which are characterized by their critical engagement with contemporary German-language culture, as a form of interventionist political writing and thus as part of a broader discourse between literature and the public sphere.

Dissertation

The AI Perspective: An Examination of Human and Artificial Co- Existence in North American SF Discourse

Located at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, critical posthumanism, the ethics of artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and media studies, the dissertation project examines how literary, public, and scientific discourses depict differentiated understandings of AI. It examines how human and AI coexistence is portrayed in contemporary science fiction literature, and how these representations challenge anthropocentric norms in favour of a more posthumanist approach. This research looks at science fiction novels that depict different forms of AI that challenge anthropocentric notions of knowledge, consciousness, communication, rights, and morality, to show how literature can be a medium for debate and a form of exploration of different knowledge-making approaches.

Habilitation (second book)

  • by Antonia Villinger
  • Post-Doc, cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Habilitation written in German

Coal Texts: Coal as an Energy Source in German-Language Literature after 1945

The climate crisis and the demand for an energy transition are significantly shaping the current socio-political discourse. In this context, questions about energy supply in particular are taking center stage, which is why the choice of different energy sources and the resulting effects on the environment, society and the economy are being discussed intensively. This change can be clearly observed in the public reception of coal as an energy source; for example, in the controversial debate about whether closed down coal mines should be put back into operation.

Literature also plays a central role in these discussions, as it critically examines the relationship between humans and the environment and reflects on socio-historical and cultural-political issues. The research project is dedicated to these social, economic, and ecological transformation processes and the resulting contemporary cultures. Following research contributions from the Environmental and Energy Humanities, Material Studies and Ecocriticism, the research project’s aim is to comprehensively examine the representation of coal as an energy source in German-language literature after 1945.

Dissertation

Short Storytelling in the 21st Century: Conditions for the Emergence and General Potentials of Short Narrative Forms in the Present

The dissertation project aims to quantitatively examine the conditions under which short narrative forms in the 21st century arise, as well as their potential of utilization. For this purpose, the theoretical understanding of these forms since 1945 is focused on, the uses of these writing styles are traced through a literary-historical lens, and their manifestations in contemporary practice are explored. Based on these considerations of the theory and practice of short narrative forms, assumptions regarding their creation conditions and utilization potentials are deduced and operationalized into empirically testable hypotheses. The subsequent empirical testing of these hypotheses is carried out based on two corpora. The data corpus compiled for this purpose gathers metadata on books, literary journals, competitions, and social reading platforms within which short narrative forms were published during the observation period (2008-2023). It also includes information about the individuals and entities involved in their creation or dissemination. The text corpus comprises 1,608 short narrative forms published in artifacts included in the data corpus. The selection of texts was based on various content-related and research-economic selection criteria. Depending on suitability, the hypotheses are tested using statistical analyses of the data corpus or statistically-probabilistic analyses of the text corpus (topic modeling); the results obtained are qualitatively classified and presented using selected case examples.

Projects by Doctoral Researchers (Cohort 2)

Dissertation

Constructing Agency: Postmigrant Writing as a Resonance Space for Counter-Narratives

From a literary and cultural studies perspective, this dissertation project examines how postmigrant writing constructs agency in literary form. The focus lies on narrative and aesthetic strategies that critically reflect, shift, and reconfigure hegemonic discourses as well as power relations and regimes of visibility within the dominant society. Particular attention is paid to counter-narratives that deconstruct deficit-oriented ascriptions and open up alternative subject positions. Postmigrant writing is thus understood as a literary resonance space—a site for counter-narratives in which marginalized perspectives become visible and agency becomes experientially accessible. The project analyzes the novels Identitti(2021) by Mithu Melanie Sanyal, Adas Room (2021) by Sharon Dodua Otoo, and Vatermal (2023) by Necati Öziri. These texts negotiate political spaces of the public, the private, and the communal, and shift the focus from static identity categories toward open processes of negotiation. In doing so, they articulate an understanding of plural societies and develop a literary “we” that conceives of social diversity as a strength and actively inscribes itself into contemporary discursive and intellectual culture.

Dissertation

Ageing and Desire: Older Women in Contemporary Erotic Literature

My dissertation explores how contemporary writers imagine desire, intimacy, and sexuality in later life. I focus on stories about older women, tracing how recent novels, short stories, and online erotica represent ageing bodies and intimate renewals. These works challenge the idea that sexuality fades with age, instead presenting erotic life as a process that can evolve, intensify, or resurface in unexpected ways in later age. By combining literary analysis with approaches from reception theory, I study not only how these texts portray ageing bodies and intimacy but also how they invite readers to connect to them – for instance through empathy, discomfort, or identification. I am especially interested in how both print and digital forms of writing give visibility to experiences that are often silenced or marginalised, creating new spaces for reflection and conversation about ageing and sexuality.

Dissertation

Mitschreiben: Scriptural Documentation of Political Trials in the FRG and its Publication

Germany has a special history of documenting political criminal trials. Since these are not recorded by the state, or at least not uniformly, actors from civil society have at various times resorted to a practice that makes documentation of the proceedings accessible to the public: the practice of taking notes (Mitschreiben). Starting with the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1965), this cultural technique has been used repeatedly to document the endangered knowledge from the trials. With the documentation of the NSU trial in Munich (2019), the so-called Lüneburg Auschwitz trial (2015), and the trial following the terrorist attack on the synagogue in Halle (2020), a tradition is being continued that began with Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein and the publication of his transcript from the Frankfurt Mammoth Trials. This dissertation project examines the phenomenon of transcripts published in book form and the associated practice of transcription from a media and cultural studies as well as a sociological perspective. By reconstructing the contexts in which they were created on the basis of archival research and qualitative interviews on the one hand, and a close reading of the texts on the other, the aim is to develop as comprehensive a picture as possible of this documentary writing practice. Although the focus is on the writing scene (Rüdiger Campe) in court, the personal positioning of the co-writers and the production and distribution conditions of the finished book publications are also analyzed.

Dissertation

  • by Jasmin Hilpert
  • Cohort 2 (since 2025)
  • Dissertation written in German

Current Challenges for Safeguarding Journalistic and Publicly Relevant Ethical Principles as well as Quality Standards in the face of the use of Artificial Intelligence from the Perspective of Media Professionals

The application of artificial intelligence in journalism is transforming the selection, production, and distribution of media content at an unprecedented pace. This development is widely acknowledged to hold considerable potential for an established profession such as journalism, both as a central (sub-)system of the public sphere and with regard to the professional practices of media practitioners in particular. However, in the absence of credibility as a foundational principle, this potential may rapidly turn into a risk for the public sphere and for democracy. The public sphere, as a socially and culturally highly influential arena of communication, negotiation, and structural transformation, is indispensable to democratic opinion- and will-formation within society. The use of artificial intelligence in journalism contributes to further structural transformations of the digital media public sphere and is accompanied by processes of disintermediation and re-intermediation. This dissertation examines these developments in greater depth and formulates practice-oriented regulatory principles that must be observed from the perspective of media professionals in order to ensure adherence to ethical standards within journalistic practice. By doing so, it aims to establish a binding framework for action that enables the practice of high-quality journalism as a vital subsystem of society and thus maximizes its benefit for the public.

Dissertation

  • by Dominik Jakobs
  • Cohort 2 (since 2025)
  • Dissertation written in German

Literature as a Room of Resonance: On the Interrelationship between Literature and the Public Sphere in France, based on Michel Houellebecq and Virginie Despentes

The project aims to examine the relationship between literature and the public sphere(s) in France, based on the premise of mutual interdependence. Just as the current French contemporary novel can be seen as a room of resonance for a sociologically attested malaise, a ‘malaise contemporain’, literary discourse or the literarization of a problematic relationship with the world has an impact on the public sphere, as is evident in the example of so-called ‘scandalous authors’. The planned research project aims to explore both sides of this interrelationship. The paradigms of investigation are Michel Houellebecq and Virginie Despentes. In the novels of both authors, a level of contemporary and social diagnosis can be discerned, which is why they are assigned to a tendency of (neo-)realism that, following in the footsteps of Zola’s naturalism and Balzac’s realism, addresses the conflicts of contemporary society and trends of the zeitgeist. With the help of literary sociological, narratological, and discourse analytical perspectives, the project promises new insights into the feedback effects between literature and society, among other things through the analysis of narratives and narrative themes in their reciprocal reception in literature and the public sphere.

Dissertation

  • by Eva Obier
  • Cohort 2 (since 2025)
  • Dissertation written in German

S. Fischer Die Frau in der Gesellschaft: A Women’s Literature Paperback Series in the Light of the New German Women’s Movement from 1975 to 1990

The project focuses on the paperback series Die Frau in der Gesellschaft (The Woman in Society) published by S. Fischer Verlag, which made iconic texts of the Second-wave feminism accessible to the German public for the first time. The project traces the genesis of the popular paperback series and explores its connection to Second-wave feminism in Germany through exemplary readings.

Dissertation

Building Embodied Publics: A Multimodal Corpus Study of Corporeality and Audience Engagement in Poetry Slam

Poetry Slam is a popular contemporary form of public literature in which texts are not only read but embodied in performance and collectively experienced. While existing research on performance poetry mainly focuses on texts, performances, or audiences in isolation, systematic large-scale approaches analyzing the interrelation of corporeality, performance, and audience reception remain scarce. The doctoral project addresses this gap by conceptualizing poetry slam as an embodied public literary practice. Building on an existing digital corpus of more than 3800 German poetry slam texts, the project expands this dataset with audiovisual performance recordings and empirical audience reception data. Using a multimodal mixed-methods framework, textual, performative, and receptive dimensions are analyzed jointly to examine how corporeality shapes meaning-making, co-presence, and affective publics in performance poetry.

Dissertation

Literary Engagement in the Digital Era: Understanding Reading Patterns and Communities on Databazeknih.cz

This dissertation examines the Czech digital social reading site Databazeknih.cz within the broader digital literary sphere. While digital reading platforms have transformed literary culture by shifting discussion into interactive online spaces that appear to democratize participation, they often embed commercial logics and algorithmic curation that shape how books are discovered, discussed, and valued. Focusing on a non-Anglo-American, non-algorithmic platform, this project investigates how interface design and the absence of recommendation systems influence reading behavior and literary diversity, challenging the generalizability of Goodreads-based research and offering a comparative account of how platform design shapes digital literary culture, public discourse, and reading practices. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining discursive interface analysis with large-scale data scraping and network analysis.

Dissertation

A Counterpublic of Care: Practices of Care in Contemporary Inuit and Sámi literature

With a focus on contemporary Inuit and Sámi literature, this project explores an Indigenous notion of care. It is interested in how practices of care are depicted in literary texts, including care between humans as well as in human-nonhuman relations with a focus on care for the environment. The project is situated in the Arctic, as this region seems to be a magnifying glass of today’s most urgent problems. It is already more impacted by climate change than most other regions in the world, giving us a glimpse into what the future might hold. Following Schultermandl et al., I will argue that Inuit and Sámi literature contributes to the formation of an Indigenous Counterpublic through affective worldmaking.

Dissertation

  • by Luise Prager
  • Cohort 2 (since 2025)
  • Dissertation written in German

Difference-based Distinctions in the Literary Field: A Mixed-Methods Study of Contemporary German-Language Literature (2010–2025)

The dissertation examines the function of concepts of difference in the narrative structure of literature and in the formation of the literary field of contemporary literature. The research design therefore combines quantitative and qualitative methods in a mixed-methods approach consisting of stylometric network analysis and hermeneutic text analysis. The data is based on a corpus of 168 novels, consisting of the nominees and winners of the Aspekte Literature Prize and the German Book Prize from 2010 to 2025.

Dissertation

Institutional Poetics: Fiction and Poetry Creative Writing Programs as Sites of Power

The dissertation focuses on understanding university creative writing programs (CWPs) as distinct sites of power within the US-American literary field. This means that the intersection of socio-political identities (e.g. gender, race, and class) with literary value and the university as a predominantly white institution of the cultural elite is necessary to understanding the literary practice imparted by the foundational institution of US-American literary production. My project explores how the social forces and power relations at the university translate into the classroom, assignments, extracurriculars, and texts authored by current students and canonized graduates. I then argue that due to their position within the ‘subfield of small-scale production’ within the literary field and their promotion of writing as a teachable craft, CWPs impart approaches to writing that result in an aversion towards genre fiction and a privileging of artificially complex texts that are marked by formal experiments, constant shifts in narration or representations of time, as well as an autopoetic reflection of literary form, authorship, and the CWP itself. This obsession with literary form is a result and reproduction of the distinct social rules that shape understandings of literary value by the subfield of small-scale production and primarily appeals to other literary professionals (i.e. editors and publishers) to whom it is meant to signal that writer-students produce literature worth critical acclaim.

Dissertation

  • by Lina Standke
  • Cohort 2 (since 2025)
  • Dissertation written in German

Creating New Public Spheres: Children’s and Youth Magazines of Re-Education

The project focuses on children’s and youth magazines of the German Re-Education period, that is, the years 1945–1949. It investigates how these magazines, addressed to a young readership, contributed to the formation of a new democratic public sphere in Germany after the end of National Socialism. At the same time, the project requires an interdisciplinary approach. On the one hand, the magazines are to be examined as objects of children’s and youth literature and thus doing justice to their high degree of audience orientation. This involves reconstructing the concepts and notions of childhood and youth, as well as of educability, that are inherent in the magazines of Re-Education. In this context, it is productive to understand the magazines as actors that reconceptualize childhood and youth during this period of transition. The project therefore draws on recent research on age / childhood as a socially and performatively constructed category. On the other hand, the magazines are to be examined explicitly with regard to their materiality. In this respect, the study builds on recent discourses and methods in periodical studies, such as Madleen Podewski’s concept of “small archives.” Podewski argues for understanding a periodical as a compact artefact rather than merely as a text. This perspective implies that a single issue or article can hardly generate meaning on its own or be representative of other periodicals. Accordingly, the project examines entire runs of magazines, wherever possible over extended periods of time and in comparison with other contemporary magazines, as these constitute such archives.

Projects by Associated Doctoral Candidates

Dissertation

(Counter)hegemonic Representations of Maleness and Masculinities in Contemporary North American Indigenous Literature

Chiona’s project looks at literary texts by North American Indigenous authors published since the 1960s. She analyzes how these texts problematize North America’s hetero cis-patriarchy and how they re-imagine normative, hegemonic notions of masculinities. Since issues of national Indigenous identity and issues of sexuality / gender identity have often been conceived of as separate issues in the public sphere, the texts emphasize the necessity of merging issues of Indigenous identity and a diverse understanding of genders. As masculinities become especially legible when not performed by a white, male, cis, hetero, able-bodied, middle-class person, the project does also look at constructions of queer masculinities. Reading the selected texts reparatively allows a focus on reparative practices that decolonize dominant colonial understandings of gender. Thus, the project frames joy, hope, humor, decolonial love, and intimacy as “radical embodied reparative practices of resurgence.”

Dissertation

‘I bet you think we’re a cult’: Rethinking Alternative Religious Movements in US Literary Production since the 1980s

The doctoral project concerns itself with the representation and negotiation of religious fringe groups (new religious movements / “cults”) in American literary texts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Through a combination of literary text analysis and religious studies analysis, this project aims to explore the extent to which literary interpretations of alternative religious movements engage in effective social criticism and contribute to the project of rethinking religion in a post-secular society. The aim of the doctoral project is to contribute to the discourse in the field of “literature and religion” with an introductory analysis of the literary discourse on religious fringe groups and to highlight the strategies for dealing with religious plurality that are produced in the selected literary texts.

Dissertation

  • by Jonas Meurer
  • Cohort 1 (since 2022)
  • Dissertation written in German

Friedrich Georg Jünger after 1945: Publicity – Networks – Reception

The dissertation explores the position and positionings of the poet, novelist, essayist, technology and cultural critic Friedrich Georg Jünger (1898–1977) in the literary and cultural field after 1945. On the one hand, the aim is to carefully reconstruct the processes and practices that gave the former ‘conservative revolutionary’ (Armin Mohler) public visibility since the immediate postwar period. On the other hand, the resulting effects – how Jünger’s publicity was contextualized, negotiated, or evaluated by various actors – are analyzed.

In this analysis, special attention is paid to right-wing conservative intellectual milieus and counter-publics, as they represent a constitutive factor of influence for the history of Jünger’s reception. Methodologically, the project lies at the intersection of theories of authorship, discourse, field, and network.

Dissertation

Blurred Boundaries: Internet, Authenticity, and the Individual in 2-st Century US Literature

In my dissertation, I explore how twenty-first century US literature concerns itself with new media technologies and their effects on the individual and the novel. Foregrounding the fiction of Jennifer Egan, Ben Lerner, and Lauren Oyler, I aim to investigate how these works redefine traditional notions of boundaries in relation to conceptualizations of “authenticity” and genre; boundaries between history and fiction, physical and virtual spaces, as well as public and private notions of the self. Despite evidence of blurred boundaries, I hypothesize authors privilege physical space and personal collaboration over virtual spaces and online discourses. Finally, I aim to explore the public function of these works, proposing they operate as democratic counterpoints to rising illiberalism visible on the internet.