Fluvial Aesthetics in the Río de la Plata Region

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Dünne
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528964865

The project will examine fluvial aesthetics as a constitutive element of an alternative geohistory of literature in the Rio de La Plata region, which critically engages with the genealogy of Argentine national literature and its canonical foundational narrative since the 19th century. According to this traditional narrative, the pampa (the flat grasslands extending westward from Buenos Aires and especially southward into the interior), is described as a “desert” (desierto) that functions as an empty surface of projection for the becoming of the nation. The project proposes an alternative paradigm to redescribe the transnational geo-aesthetic of the Rio de La Plata region: one that does not start from the assumption of a passive, empty ground in need of civilization, but rather from an inherently dynamic, active territoriality as found in aquatic or, more precisely, fluvial spaces. In the aesthetic modeling of fluvial spaces –according to the hypothesis from which the project proceeds– civilizational founding discourses, with their exclusively human actors, are being replaced by inherently contradictory (un-)founding scenarios. These scenarios design ecologically influenced models for describing the interweaving of natural-space and cultural-technical processes in a superimposition of different temporalities, from event history to the long duration of geohistory. The theoretical and cultural-historical framework of the project is constituted by the question of the special significance of Latin American river landscapes in the present context of the Anthropocene. In terms of literary studies, on the one hand, a connection with a long-standing aesthetic tradition of the representation of the fluvial as an object of literature can be established. On the other hand, it is also a matter of describing 'liquid' aesthetic form-building processes that enable a creative transformation of firmly established modes of narration and representation in literature and film. During the three-year duration of the project, the project leader and two doctoral students will investigate different forms of fluvial aesthetics in essays and narrative texts, in poetry, and in films. They will cooperate closely with a Mercator Fellow who will be involved in the research from the beginning. They will be in close exchange with relevant Romance scholars in German-speaking countries as well as with literary and film scholars and river researchers in Argentina and the Americas. In this way, not only can the peculiarities of fluvial aesthetics of the Río de la Plata be examined in different media and genre traditions, but comparative references to other river landscapes in Latin America can also be established.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Argentina, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Jens Andermann; Dr. Franca Beatriz Maccioni; Professorin Dr. Graciela Silvestri; Professor Javier Uriarte, Ph.D.