Project Details
Projekt
GRK 2806: Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures
Subject Area
Literary Studies
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462197929
The graduate training group (GRK) proposed here seeks to analyze contemporary literatures since 1945 in relation to different public spheres and cultural contexts. The project relies on a wide concept of literature, which encompasses sociocultural, political and institutional conditions, intermedial relations and media competition, literary life and marketing. Corresponding to its expertise, the GRK seeks to address literatures in English, German, French, Spanish and Russian, including smaller literatures and so-called ‘minority’ cultures on different continents that use former colonial and settler-colonial languages. The project takes up comparative and transnational perspectives and includes practical, material, social, medial, ethical and economic aspects. We focus on literatures, which have been shaped by the everyday experience of globalization, post/industrial technological development and changing forms of the public sphere. We conceive of public spheres as shifting and possibly overlapping social manifestations of consciousness informed by cultural life, rather than reducing them to instances of a supposedly stable political or economic system and function. Thus, we need to think of public spheres as plural coexistences and juxtapositions (public segments and counter-publics), literatures have to be seen in their various relation to. The GRK’s goal is to investigate the conditions enabling the emergence and the effectiveness of literatures in different public contexts, their cultural specificities, potentials and functions first as seismographs of frequently contradictory cultural developments, secondly as generators of a vocabulary to articulate the multilayered experiences of the present, and thirdly as forums for the articulation of publicly relevant issues. In five thematic sections, the GRK’s dissertations will assess the ways in which literatures are tied into, depend upon and help shape public life: (1) literary strategies of garnering attention, (2) literatures’ public conditions, (3) medial and material forms of literature, (4) literary knowledge production (5) literary ethics and politics.The GRK will enable highly qualified, internationally recruited doctoral students to develop their dissertation projects in an intellectually stimulating, cooperative and mutually supportive research environment shaped by an openness in method and attitude, and to produce substantial, internationally visible research results. Our concept for directing dissertations rests on the establishment of a stimulating research environment that provides all members with sufficient time and all the infrastructural resources they need to foster their research.
DFG Programme
Research Training Groups
Applicant Institution
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Spokesperson
Professor Dr. Dirk Niefanger
