Pass pro toto. Official and Poetic Narratives of the Person

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Mona Körte
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 530288510

The project examines the passport as an official document for identifying a person in competition with and correspondence with poetic narratives of the person. Informed by media cultural studies and literary studies, the research interest focuses on the passport as an official artifact and miniature narrative of the person and analyzes the interrelations between administrative definitions of identity and poetic localizations of the person in small and large forms of prose. For this purpose, the project focuses on three phases in the literary history of the 20th and 21st century: classical modernism, literature around the turn of 1989, and contemporary literature. Against the background of conflicting and cooperating, aesthetic and official genre pretensions of classical modernism and literature around 1989 (sub-study 1) as well as contemporary literature (sub-study 2), common topoi such as bureaucratic language enforcement, impassable borders, and unsuccessful identification performances by people and technological devices are analysed in order to illuminate the specific functions of the passport. Historically and systematically, the project draws on the etymological and media-technical preconditions of the passport: The term passport derives from the Latin verb "passare," which in the meaning of "to pass by," "to go through," or "to pass" indicates modalities of movement. The nominalization of passare to passport gives expression to a semantic shift that no longer indicates only movement, but the management of movement. The passport has since come to stand for permission to pass through or for the identification card that makes travel possible, and is regulated by different authorities depending on the time and place. The passport becomes of great symbolic weight because it reduces the 'whole' human being to a few data. Functioning in this way as pars pro toto of the human being, it enables the addressing and processing of personal data in the 19th century in the course of technical innovations. Since the beginning of the First World War, with the obligatory passport photograph, its identification function has been in the foreground. The innovative approach of exploring the passport as an official document for identifying a person in terms of its poetic implications is already expressed in the project's title. For the chosen neologism "pass pro toto" irritates the rhetorical relation between official identity document and person and underlines the compositional aspect of the administrative as well as the poetic investment and mode of perception of the person. In order to investigate this relation, the project productively relates heterogeneous fields such as media and cultural history, criminology, and the history of knowledge of small forms, and analyses the passport as a proto-narrative, as a relational ensemble of data, and as a poetic framework.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants