Projects
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 ...
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 plentiful, the pious and the poor. Images of Flanders in German translations of Flemish literature during the First World War (1914-1918). University of Antwerp
Robespierre: changing images in the mirror. The figure of Maximilien Robespierre in German 20th century literature. KU Leuven
Diese Dissertation fängt an mit der Feststellung, dass Robespierre im langen 19. Jahrhundert als ein zu lösendes Rätsel aufgefasst wurde. Er fungiert im kulturellen Gedächtnis als Chiffre für den prototypisch tragischen Konflikt zwischen Ideal und Realität bzw. Utopie und Terror – in einer Zeit, als der königliche Körper als Zusammenhalt des sozialpolitischen Bunds verlorenging. Diese Dissertation bringt verschiedene Elemente in der Rezeption ...
A rhetorical-narratological approach to figurativeness in narrative settings, applied to eventful German prose literature between early modernity and poetic realism (1660-1880) Ghent University
The research project undertakes a systematic analysis of the interference between complex figurative and stylistic processes, on the one hand, and layered narrative settings, on the other, in a historically differentiated corpus of eventful narrative texts (Grimmelshausen, Forster, Kleist, Meyer, Keller, Raabe). Special attention is being paid to the cotextual embeddedness of the figurative processes and to the ways in which they elicit the ...
Remembering the Possible. Literature, Affect and Activist Memory in Germany, 1848-1900. KU Leuven
This project will map and analyse literary forms of activist memory in Germany, written in the period from 1848, when socialist activists started to regroup after the failed revolution, up to 1900. This project aims to achieve two main goals. First, it will argue that literature is a particularly well-suited discourse to explore the activist political mind. Specifically, this project will profoundly change our image of the German labour ...