Project Details
Projekt
Algorithmic Self-Forming in 21st Century US-American Literature and Culture (TP 5)
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Regina Schober
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 539990504
The project explores media phenomena and literary negotiations of algorithmic self-forming processes from a literary, cultural and media studies perspective. The "algorithmic self" is understood as a specific manifestation of the "digital self", but differs in the central role of algorithmic processes that shape it through data acquisition, processing and control. It is situated in a relational network of machine, world, human, and technology, which in turn is characterized by specific cultural, media-related, and political conditions as well as potentialities. The analytical linkage between algorithmic self-forming practices and their literary negotiations undertaken in the project draws attention to the cultural as well as media-related and technological 'makeabilities of the self'. The performativity and agency of algorithmic processes point to a central conflict that will be examined in the project: on the one hand, algorithmic self-forming implies individual self-realization, while at the same time it also acts as an instance of control and thus challenges the idea of the autonomous liberal subject. The study analyzes both audiovisual and verbal self-forming practices in social media and their literary reflection in contemporary US-American novels. Algorithmic self-forming, for example by influencers or social media users, is systematically analyzed in terms of its regularity, automation, and integration into platform economies. At the same time, literary explorations of the algorithmic self in the form of life-writing and autofiction are analyzed with regard to the specific affordances of literary self-forming aesthetics. By doing so, the project also systemically analyzes the analogies and differences between algorithmicallity and narrativity. The focus on explicitly female self-narratives results from the special role of women in digital self-presentation practices, which are historically and culturally linked to specific gender norms and expectations, while including an intersectional perspective on gender and other diversity categories. This sub-project contributes a culturally specific perspective of algorithmic processes and aesthetics of digital self-modeling, including potential historical and transcultural dimensions, to the research group 'The Makeability of the Self: Diachronic Perspectives on Self-Forming Processes in Media' (‘Machbarkeiten des Selbst: Mediale Selbstformungsprozesse in diachroner Perspektive’).
DFG Programme
Research Units
