Projects
Documentary literature 3.0. The document as representational strategy in German literature after 2000 Ghent University
The project aims to show that the third generation of documentary writers differs from the documentary avantgarde (Tretjakov, Brecht, Kraus) and the politicized documentary literature of the '60s (Enzensberger, Walraff) through specific representational strategies. These strategies are geared at audience participation and immersion rather than critique of ideology. Documentary literature 3.0. nstills the spectator/reader with an unsettling ...
Eastbound: The circulation and reception of translations of Dutch literature in the German language area, 1850 - 1990 KU Leuven
Eastbound aims to give insight into the complex mechanism of bringing literature into circulation in a transnational context. In a first step the project investigates the translation flows of literature from the Netherlands and Flanders to the German language area between 1850 and 1990 from a macro perspective based on bibliographic data. This gives i. a. insights into which authors were translated, when and by whom. Based on this initial ...
The Prussian Phantasm. Imaginations of Prussia in 20th- and 21st-Century German Literature. KU Leuven
Since the mid-19th century, Prussia has been mythologised as a vigorous European superpower, which played a pivotal role in the political, socio-economic, intellectual and cultural life of Europe in general and Germany in particular. Conceived as it was as a progressive, enlightened and efficiently-run state as well as a centre of reaction, militarism and imperialism, the legacy of Prussia is profoundly ambivalent. This Janus-faced status has ...
From Rhetoric to Interdiscursivity: Reception of a Cultural Paradigm Shift in German Literature After 1800 KU Leuven
Between 1500 and 1800, rhetoric held a dominant position in European culture. Not only did it serve as a set of formal rules, but it also represented a system of human virtues and a mode of cultural thinking. As such, it was closely tied to absolutist monarchies and Christianity. It played a central role in education until well into the 19th century. However, after 1800 rhetoric lost its social function as an all-encompassing cultural system. ...
From Royal Chamber to Bedroom ? Imaginations of Female Sovereignty in German Women Writers' Literature between Ancien Régime and Modernity. KU Leuven
Women disappeared from public political life after the French Revolution. Their participation in politics was foreclosed by their civil subordination and relegation to the private sphere. For more than thousand years female sovereignty had been a political possibility throughout Europe's Ancien Regime. But in the long nineteenth century, with its angst-ridden gender dichotomies, political discourse erased women’s participation in or even ...
Imaginations of Female Sovereignty in German Women Writers' Literature (1789-1848) KU Leuven
This dissertation investigates the representation of female sovereignty in German literature written by women between 1789 and 1848. It starts from the observation that women became political outsiders after the French Revolution. For a long time, female sovereignty had been a historical reality in Europe: although it never went without controversy, the dynastic power structures of the Ancien Régime made it possible for women to ...
The Poetics of Precarity: Representations of the Worker in German Literature in the Aftermath of the “Great Depression” (1873-1914) KU Leuven
The financial and economic collapse in 2007/2008 has increased the interest for the literary reflection on economic crises and their social consequences. This project takes this contemporary sensibility and the ways in which it is reflected in contemporary political theory as a vantage point to look back at the German social novels in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1873. By focusing on the literary representation of the worker in ...
The poetics of precarity: Representations of the worker in German literature in the aftermath of the 'Great Depression' (1873-1914) KU Leuven
The financial and economic collapse in 2008 has increased the interest for the literary reflection on economic crises and their social consequences. This project takes this contemporary sensibility and the ways in which it is reflected in contemporary political theory as a vantage point to look back at the German social novels in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 1873. By focusing on the literary representation of the worker in his ...