Doctoral Projects

Projects (Cohort 1)

Dissertation

Publicity of poetry in the GDR. The series Poesiealbum (1967 to 1989/90)

The Poesiealbum can be considered 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. In addition to recitation or performance, poetry’s publicity requires its publication and distribution by publishers and booksellers.

This, in turn, depended on the approval of the Head Office of Publishers and 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.

Synchronous and diachronic comparisons, for example according to the poets’ origin or generation, are intended to differentiate the analysis. The approach is inspired by discourse analysis and combines close and distant reading methods of various sources.

Dissertation

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

Censorship systems in comparison: Brazil and 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 Christa Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel, are intended to deepen the understanding of the relationship between censorship and the public sphere.

Dissertation

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 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), 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

Yugoslav partisanfilms as a platform for transnational negotiation and publicity

The work examines the Yugoslavian 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) the corpus1. It 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 1946/19472 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

Her 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

Blurred Boundaries: Internet, Authenticity, and the Individual in 21st Century US Literature

In my PhD, 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.

Dissertation

The Media of German-Language Underground Literature – Networks of Transnational Counterpublics in the 20th Century

The point of departure for the PhD 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, 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, but also their ostinato tendency to network through mutual citation reveal a logic of their own, their 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 in their own right, but especially in their perennial interaction with each other, as well as in their exchange with novels and anthologies, shape the transnational underground scene, in the interplay with the cultural artefacts of the English-speaking beatniks of the 1950s and 60s, in the recourse to the surrealists and dadaists of modernism, in the sharp demarcation from high- and mid-culture, their specific understanding of a literature of/in the underground. 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 media and material philology, oriented towards cultural history, on the surface as well as 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. The conditions of the award selection process in the respective years are then analyzed (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 differen media channels, I seek to determine which effect the novel’s prizes had on the public reception of their racial literacy.

Dissertation

Literary Interventions and Re-Imagined Communities in Contemporary Postmigrant Writing

The dissertation project engages with substantial shifts in the representation and visibility of minoritized authors in the contemporary German cultural sphere and the increasing number of literary interventions that foreground the complexity and radical diversity of German identities and question the uniformity of identity itself. Literary texts such as Sasha Marianna Salzmann’s Außer Sich (2017), Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Serpentinen Angst (2020), Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021) and Fatma Aydemir’s Dschinns (2022) re-conceive, re-define and re- write understandings of foreclosing notions of ’Germanness‘ by centering previously marginalized perspectives and challenging fixed frames of nationality, ethnicity, language, sexuality and family. Through an intersectional approach the project explores the critical endeavor of these novels to aesthetically subvert and intervene in contemporary discourses between the literary 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)

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; after all, there is a 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 sets itself the task of investigating the current situation, i.e. the conditions for the emergence and appropriation potentials of short narrative forms, from a literary-sociological perspective using a deductive mixed-method approach. To this end, the literary-historical development and understanding of short narrative forms in theory, practice and from the perspective of their authors since 1945 will first be traced and then a catalog of characteristics distilled from this. The general approach to the structural phenomenon of brevity, its specific intrinsic values and their consequences for short narrative forms in the present are concretized through an empirical analysis of the field of short narrative forms. Based on Bourdieu’s field-analytical studies, data on publications of short narrative forms in four relevant sub-publics (book market, magazine market, literary events, social reading platforms) from the observation period (2008-2023) are collected, stored in a relational database and statistically evaluated in order to derive the strategies of and relations between the actors involved in the creation, dissemination and reception. In addition, a broad text corpus is derived from the publications examined and evaluated using a computer-aided procedure (topic modeling) with regard to the material and thematic dimensions. With the qualitative classification of the combined results of the empirical field analysis, topic modeling and their exemplary presentation by means of in-depth drilling (individual case analyses), the work provides insights into the socio-cultural, economic and media framework conditions of short narrative forms and their possible effects/functions in the differentiated public spheres of the present.

Projects of Associates (Cohort 1)

Dissertation

›I bet you think we’re a cult‹: Rethinking alternative religious movements in US literary production since the 1980s

Das Promotionsprojekt beschäftigt sich mit der Darstellung und Verhandlung religiöser Randgruppierungen (new religious movements / „cults“) in US-amerikanischen literarischen Texten des 20. Und 21. Jahrhunderts. In Verbindung von literaturwissenschaftlicher Textarbeit und religionswissenschaftlicher Analyse soll erschlossen werden, inwiefern die literarische Bearbeitung alternativer religiöser Bewegungen öffentlichkeitswirksame Gesellschaftskritik übt und sich am Projekt des Neudenkens von Religion in einer postsäkularen Gesellschaft beteiligt. Ziel der Dissertation ist es die Diskurse des Forschungsfelds „Literatur und Religion“ mit einer einführenden Analyse in den literarischen Diskurs um religiöse Randgruppierungen zu bereichern und auf die Strategien zum Umgang mit Pluralität, die in den untersuchen literarischen Texten produziert werden, zu verweisen.

Dissertation

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

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.

Special attention is paid to right-wing conservative intellectual milieus and counter-publics, which represent a constitutive factor of influence for the history of Jünger’s reception. Methodologically, the project refers to theories of authorship, discourse, field and network.