Cultural Magazines from "Modernismo" to Avant-Garde: Processes of Modernization and Transnational networks

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hanno Ehrlicher
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 327964298

The research project will study a vast corpus of cultural magazines of the Spanish-speaking modern age in Spain and Latin-America. In doing so two sub-projects, one with an emphasis on Modernismo (1890 - 1914) and the other with an emphasis on the avant-garde, are intended, crossing fields during the transitional phase of the so-called Posmodernismo (about 1910 - 1920). Both sub-projects are closely connected and are designed to serve the following objectives: 1. Processes of the development of modern literature and its transnational dimension are studied by consistently comparing inter-cultural connections, thus underlining the status of the cultural magazine as a crucial medium of the dynamics of modernization. Within the project continuities and ruptures within these dynamics in Spanish-speaking literatures will be examined, which necessarily could only be partially considered in the prevailing epoch-centered studies on Modernismo and avant-garde so far. The high level of transnational networking, which is characteristic for the "cosmopolitan" Modernismo as well as the "international" avant-garde, is supposed to finally become the object of research, after this phase of studying magazines mostly as part of the national philologies. 2. In conducting this new field of research methods already established and theories on cultural transfer will be used to study modern literature outside the confines of national boundaries, in order to expand their reach to the medium of the cultural magazine. Especially form-oriented approaches such as Itamar Zohars Polysystem Theory or Franco Morettis concept of Distant Reading will be employed to further develop them to meet the specific needs of researching magazines, whose intermediate position between the book and more volatile forms of publication (e.g. newspapers) make it a particularly complex object of research. 3. Cultural magazines will be seen as networks consisting of forms of texts, which do not only connect single actors, but genres and types of texts as well. To research this aspect of magazines as networks, qualitative analytic parameters that require a close reading of carefully selected parts of the magazines will be used, as well as quantitative methods which are based on the entry of (meta-) data of reviews and their visualization.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants