Atlantic Crisscrossings: The Theory Apparatus between America and Germany, 1965-2008

• Applicant: Gregory Jones-Katz, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560418441

Atlantic Crisscrossings: The Theory Apparatus between America and Germany, 1965-2008 will use a wealth of archival materials and the reappraisal of published texts to historicize the important strand in literary studies of theory’s production and reception in-between America and Germany in relation to neglected contexts, including those of publication, academic politics, key institutional settings, and cultural events and trends. Theory, as I define it, is an intellectual hybrid, a set of interpretive techniques united by the goal to unearth cultural objects’ structure and how this structure shapes said objects’ meaning. The story will begin in 1965, when the National Endowment for the Humanities in America and the Institut für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at the FU Berlin, both which supported the expansion of literary studies, were founded, and ends in 2008, after the rise of diversity discourse left theory behind as a master discourse, and when a global financial crisis affected knowledge production in and thus between America and Germany, helping usher in a post-literary (studies) world. While historicizing the years 1965-1989, the project will focus on the academic-intellectual network that crisscrossed literary studies in America and West Germany. While historicizing the years 1989-2008, thus after the beginning of German reunification, the project will consider Germany as a whole. It is my premise that what Michel Foucault called a dispositif—what I deem a “theory apparatus,” that is, interpretive equipment comprised of institutional, material, and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures, including centers, conferences, events, organizations, publications, presses, persons, and universities—crystalized theory in literary studies across the North Atlantic in response to particular needs and for a precise moment. My hypothesis is that, instead of the customarily told European origin-story, theory in and between America and Germany emerged in literary studies, above all comparative literature, due to its being the most permeable field for transatlantic crisscrossings. Theory was produced through acts of transformation and translation “with the purpose of knowledge production” by an apparatus, becoming persuasive cognitive goods “transferred across disciplinary boundaries” that helped institute and sustain the “Age of Theory”—that is, until the post-literary world’s advent. Ultimately, Atlantic Crisscrossings will provide a new perspective on the history of theory and intervene into the fields of transnational intellectual and cultural history and the history of higher education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants