The Aesthetics and Politics of Touch in Literature and Other Media

• Applicant: Dr. Andrea Erwig, since 9/2018
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 387749687

Touching is contagious. Physical contact and sensual impressions trigger processes of transmission, which may generate physical and affective resonances ranging from electrification to disgust. Literature and related media offer spaces, forms and techniques to represent and reflect on figures of touch. These figures reveal themselves as polymorphous and ambiguous and they elicit questions of both production and reception. Within the broader physiology of the senses touching can be understood as relating not only to the strictly tactile sense, but instead to the whole body and its greater sensual repertory, in active as well as in passive modes. Touch as a sensual phenomenon thus displays a particularly intricate relation to specific contexts. It is this intricacy that makes moments of touch compelling for the fields of literary, media and cultural studies in which the network will conduct its research. In dialogue with other current research projects addressing tactility, materiality and sensuality, the network aims to reconfigure and broaden concepts of touch by focusing on three interconnected lines of inquiry: 1) The network investigates the function of touch from a historical perspective, interrogating the roles that tactility (and its restriction) have played in relation to figuring political and social imaginaries. It is of interest, in this context, how literature and other art forms respond to and organize relationships of proximity and distance. 2) From a systematic perspective, the network also examines figures of thought that relate touch to forms of non-predicative thinking and tacit knowledge. 3) The network further explores touch from an aesthetic and media perspective, for instance, investigating the relationship between the tactile and the digital. The project's methodology is based on an expanded concept of literature and on approaches derived from cultural studies that view literature in reciprocal relation to other media and cultural practices. Participating disciplines include modern literary studies (Comparative Literature; English, German, Romance, and Slavonic Studies) as well as media and cultural studies, philosophy and sociology.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Sandra Fluhrer, until 8/2018