Voices & Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865

• Applicant: Dr. Elena Furlanetto
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457116377

North America and the larger Atlantic World between 1600 and the mid-nineteenth century presents a cultural force field in which concepts of the self and their expression in writing shapeshifted. Coexisting practices of textual self-expression and self-negation at the time resulted in ambiguities and contradictions that informed changing concepts of identity and selfhood. The network will study these divergent agencies while engaging critically with the ideologies apparent in current concepts of individuality. Its goal is to conceptualize the ways in which contemporary scholarship can investigate voices and agencies of the past without superimposing today’s ideologies.Many of the scholars in the network engage with previously neglected authors, texts, and cultural phenomena to intervene in established critical discourses. The network aims to address questions about who is allowed to speak or be spoken to/of, to hear or be heard, to write or be written to/about, to silence or remain silent and what is not yet ready to be spoken. We aim to replace static understandings of ‘in-dividual’ narrators with ‘dividual’ ones in order to reflect on forms of communal, multivocal, and marginal agency. Fissures in the formal coherence of literary and non-literary texts allow us to identify the entangled nature of subversion and acquiescence, pathos and structure, personhood and regulated authorship.The network is anchored around a North American focus but includes a larger Atlantic space, as many of the projects interlock subjects and theories of Postcolonial and American/Transatlantic Studies. Over the course of three years, network members and invited guest speakers will meet for an introductory meeting, four topical workshops, and a final conference. The first workshop will focus on the expression of agency at a time when personal expression took place in self-negating texts, in order to revise our understanding of the personalized voice before the mid-nineteenth century. The following workshop will consider silenced voices of the time, submerged texts in the archive but also the silences within the agencies that did find cultural expression. A third workshop will delve into theories of the archive, determining the extent to which today’s implicit notions of agency inform the methods we employ when turning to historical evidence. The fourth workshop, before the concluding conference, strives to formulate a methodology of critical introspection as a means to counteract the presentism that is often implicit in attempts to ‘give a voice’ to silenced actors of an archived past. The network thus promises to provide a methodology of voices and agencies between 1600 and 1865 that takes into account the positioning of concepts of individuality between the historical period in which they were voiced and today’s critical-revisionist approaches.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Ilka Brasch