Climate's Time. the Temporalization of Nature in Modern Literature

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Eva Horn
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 244511515

From Antiquity to the Enlightenment, "climate" has been conceived as a spacial category explaining the differences between local mentalities and cultures by referring to their meteorological conditions. This changes at the end of the 18th century: Herder historicizes the ancient anthropology of the climates; Buffon and Cuvier discover a geological "deep time" of natural history marked by climatic cataclysms. From a category of space and local meteorological conditions climate turns into a category of time and global conditions, thereby opening up a vast and mysterious field of global climate history. From the discovery of the ice age at the beginning of the 19th century up to today's climate research, climate emerges as a way of "formatting" and representing time. The project focuses on the aesthetic ways of representing climate as time, and the exchange between literature and scientific research on the history and mechanisms of climate. Modern experiences of time, however, are marked by conflicting "Eigenzeiten" (indivudal timeframes or a-chronia) and tensions in the experiences of time, such as geological deep time vs. human historical time; subjective vs. chronometrical time; slowing down and acceleration in the process of modernization. Climate becomes the medium to represent and negotiate these tensions. The project will analyze the way in which literary descriptions of weather, of landscapes, seasons or scenarios of climatic disasters reflect upon these tensions within modern experiences of time. Coldness, e.g., can be an image for the suspension or slow-down of time; heat can be the medium of a return to former stages of cultural and biological development. The project's goal is an analysis of the ways in which literary texts represent and format time as climate. Drawing on a vast basis of literary texts, we will (1) reconstruct the temporalization of climate and analyze its aesthetic representations and transformations from Romanticism to the early 20th century (project part A); and we will (2) investigate the political and social implications of climate disasters and Utopias in modern and contemporary texts and films (project part B).

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1688: Proper Times of the Aesthetic. Time and Representation in Polychronic Modernity
• International Connection: Austria