Cultures of Knowledge and Science

by Susanne Knaller, Stephan Moebius

The focus of the symposium is not only on individual essays by Simmel on aesthetic objects of investigation as such (such as Henkel or Goethe) or on studies on the sociality of aesthetic practices. Rather, the connection or suspension between sociology and aesthetics that can be found in Simmel's texts will be addressed and his "sociological aesthetics" (Lichtblau), which can be seen in his aesthetic form of writing or in his time-diagnostic analyses, will be worked out. The special feature of Simmel's sociological aesthetics is that it is not concerned with the question of timelessly valid forms of aesthetic perception, but with the analysis of specifically modern forms and fragments of aesthetic experience, which also extend beyond the narrower field of art to everyday life (big city, jewelry, fashion).

Dissertation project by Dimitri Smirnov

How is violence inscribed in literary texts through the reference to aural sensations? This thesis examines how the literary staging of sound and relations of power are intertwined in prose fiction. By referring to sounds, noise and acoustic modes, texts convey the exertion of violence on the diegetic level. However, the auditory dimension has been largely neglected in past analyses of the portrayal of oppression and resistance in literature. In order to elucidate the significance of acoustic phenomena in relation to the political sphere, the study conducts a semiotic examination of literary sounds and the way they are employed in prose fiction.

Four case studies serve to illustrate how the authors use sound in their texts as a means of expressing processes of violence and how the textualization of sounds renders possible a form of writing back. The corpus consists of selected works by postcolonial writers, including fiction in English, French and Russian, allowing for a comparative analysis of three different linguistic and cultural contexts. Contributing to the research of literary sound studies and literary acoustics, this thesis' main interest lies at the intersection of literary studies, sound studies and political theory.

by Karoline Gritzner, Lise-Meitner project leader

This research project explores the ways in which the aesthetic idea of the sublime is embodied, negotiated, and transformed in selected examples of contemporary European drama and theatre practice. The research brings philosophical accounts of the sublime into play with the art of theatre with the aim of foregrounding the philosophical significance of artistic practice and aesthetic experience. The project explores what is distinctively theatrical and performative about the concept of the sublime and it examines how the dramaturgical practices of contemporary theatre allow us to rethink the possibilities of this aesthetic experience.

The hypothesis for this research is that theatre is an event of sensation and thought, and that it provides a distinctive spatio-temporal framework which enables a productive reassessment of the sublime and related questions about representation, appearance, desire, mimesis, and affect. Methodologically, the central aim of this project is to re-contextualise the sublime within the theatrical performing arts in an approach that examines dramaturgical practices as material forms of thought. This means that rather than conventionally philosophising about theatre, the project will identify ways of philosophising out of dramaturgical practices and theatre events, following a methodology of immanent aesthetic critique inspired by the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Alain Badiou. The aesthetic practices and events in question are selected dramatic texts and performances by major European theatre makers whose avant-garde theatrical styles enable a rethinking of human experience at some remove from the instrumental 'means-ends' logic of everyday life. This art of the theatre is concerned with the problem of the body and the possibilities of representation and expression at the limits of the theatrical frame. Specifically, the project focuses on the dramatic theatre by Howard Barker (UK) who calls his work a 'theatre of catastrophe', the radical directorial approaches and productions by Romeo Castellucci (Italy), the multi-media work of theatre and performance artist Jan Fabre (Belgium), and the poetic, feminist collaboration of Ariane Mnouchkine and Hélène Cixous (France). The focus on drama, theater and performance represents a new shift of attention within the discourse of the sublime away from literature and the visual arts (where Romantic poetry, landscape painting, and conceptual art have been the traditional sites of sublime aesthetic experience) towards the performing arts. The project will explore how the art of theatre is capable of offering reconsiderations of foundational aesthetic ideas.

FWF project by project leader: Robert Felfe, assistants: Amelie Klein, Mona Schubert

The project is part of a research group dedicated to various aspects of fundamental relationships between visual arts and techniques. Contrary to notions in art theory and history that imply a contrast between form and material, design and execution, etc., we share a consistent interest in the processes of artistic work, the practical tasks and specific skills on which artistic creation and its transmission were based.

Within this framework, the project focuses on a few selected artistic processes. They are characterized by the fact that factors and contributory causes are implied here, which as such can neither be produced nor fully controlled by the respective artists. These are specific techniques of sculpture and printing in the early modern period (16th/17th century) and the early modern period (19th century) - in detail, these include nature casts, nature self-prints, the photogram and chliché verre.

Based on case studies, the project will demonstrate the extent to which the outlined co-operative aspect of artistic techne was present and emphasized (or deliberately concealed) in the aesthetics of the works. Furthermore, it will examine the ways in which these contributory factors determined and shaped the status of the respective image processes with regard to categories such as authorship, or authority and esteem in the context of other media and arts. On the basis of these particular pictorial processes, a critical re-reading of some of the influential narratives of art history since the 19th century is also planned.

Dissertation project by Riccardo Schöfberger

What differences and what similarities do works of German-language and Italian literature since 1968 show in the representation of masculinities? How can these differences and similarities be explained on the basis of gender concepts? The dissertation project aims to carry out a comparative analysis of literary configurations of masculinity and in this way contribute to the innovative embedding of masculinity research in general and comparative literary studies. The main object of investigation is the motivic polarity between the fluid and pliant nature of individual male figures and the firm and unyielding nature of others. Transnational and local narratives can be taken up for analysis and critically reflected upon.
The comparison of literary configurations of masculinity in works from neighboring cultural areas provides the opportunity to grasp the diversity and ambivalence of this social and
cultural construct. The motif of 'fluid' and 'solid' masculinities refers to the diverse variations and transformations of male narratives and identities within the field of literary experimentation. Stereotypical ideas and dichotomies can be problematized through paradoxes, parodies and masking.
In addition, the question of the relationship between 'fluid' and 'solid' masculinities and their relationship to the female figures can also bring the relational
construction character of masculinities into play. The dissertation focuses primarily on the textual and contextual level, analyzing specific literary figures in their narrative and relational representation and in the interweaving of their literary identity with other fields of discourse. The
background of the socio-cultural context plays a decisive role, as gender codes only ever become meaningful through their appearance in certain gender orders. In doing so, it seems expedient to also make use of discourse-theoretical, post-structuralist and psychoanalytical perspectives of gender studies as well as intertextual, narrative-theoretical and motif-analytical approaches.

by Susanne Knaller

One of the most influential and crucial inventions of modern times is the concept of fact. It regulates the laws of private acting and communicating as well as rules for public performances and patterns of behavior. As such, it takes part in semantic fields like truth, honor, decency, and correctness. Since the 17^th century the question of fact or non-fact became a foundation of systems of knowledge, the sciences, and aesthetics. The conference aims at a discussion of these various notions of fact up to the present day. This includes its function in the arts and the sciences and its impact on aesthetic models and the self-understanding of systems of knowledge. Regarding this circumstance, the conference points to the importance of processes of writing concerning the understanding and handling of fact in theory and practice. Writing facts is one of the most effective procedures to obtain, to realize, to recognize, and to understand facts. A look at processes of writing and their function and impact in the context of understanding fact allows a new look at this powerful notion from a historical, systematic, and theoretical perspective.

Habilitation project by Angela Gencarelli

The starting point of the project is a curious literary-historical finding that encourages an expansion of the spectrum of previously researched text genres of modern literature and in particular their symbolic or allegorical forms: at the beginning of the 20^th century, the bestiary, a catalog-like animal book last widespread in the High Middle Ages, returned in several European and Hispano-American literatures. Once a constitutive component of the religious interpretation of nature, the medieval bestiaries brought together entire series of symbolic or allegorical animal figures, which were not portrayed in words and images for their own sake, but because of their salvation-historical referential character. It is therefore all the more astonishing that this genre of text, which had been suppressed in the course of modern natural history research and disappeared for centuries, became highly topical again at the beginning of the 20^th century, precisely under the conditions of a modern secularized and scientified understanding of nature, and still offers up animal figures for symbolic and/or allegorical reference games. The research project reconstructs this remarkable genre dynamic for the German-language bestiary tradition, which has remained almost completely undiscovered until now despite its breadth and diversity, and seeks to determine the new functions of these reference games in more detail.

• An elegant history of species extinction. On Mikael Vogel's cultural-critical 'bestiary' Dodos on the run, in: Germanica 69/2021, pp. 199-214.
• On the 'end of nature'. Das Artensterben in Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart, lecture as part of the lecture series on the "Kulturthema: Tiere", Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, 6.12.2021
• Bestiaries of modernity. Project presentation at the research colloquium of the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin, February 2021
• Medieval Paratextuality? The Bestiary as a Challenge of Genette's Theory of Paratext, lecture at the conference "When a Text becomes a Book. Theoretical Reflections on Paratextuality, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, November 19-20, 2020
• "Speaking with the tongues" of nature. Imitated animal voices as media of poetic language exploration since baroque sound poetry (Harsdörffer, Jandl, Draesner), in: Tierstudien 15/2019, pp. 111-120.