Narratives of Female Exhaustion around 1900 and 2000
Negotiations of exhaustion, gender and work in literature and medicine
The project aims to highlight and systematize female exhaustion narratives around 1900 and 2000. By combining discourse analysis and a gender theoretical perspective with a narratological approach, the project renders discourses of exhaustion, femininity and work in their respective formations of motifs and structures visible and analyzable.
Geopolitics of Literary Translation
The Literary Colloquium Berlin and the Streams of Translation in Europe
The project examines the development of the Literary Colloquium Berlin (LCB) into a centre of literary translation funding in a national and European context. The aim of the project is, firstly, the historical reconstruction of this development, and secondly, a translation-sociological field-analysis and interpretation of the translation transfers undertaken by the LCB.
Philological Laboratory
New Models of Approaches to Art beyond Criticism
The project’s objective is to develop ways of approaching formations of meaning that are not guided by the prevailing model of criticism. Critical tools developed in the disciplines shall be used in a more cautious and thoughtful way in order to satisfy one’s own experience of art. It is about admiring things as a critic, to be driven by curiosity, to give in to surprise – in short: to exceed one’s own knowledge.
TransPacifica
Middle European Observations of a New Global Center (1900–1945)
The Transpacifica group is conducting fundamental research into the German perception of the relations between China, Japan, and the USA during the imperialist era and the two World Wars. The research project examines the emergence between 1900 and 1945 of a pivotal geopolitical triangle in the Northern Pacific with the three upcoming world powers as its vertices. The associated dynamics of such a development was considered to have the potential to shift the center of world history onto the Northern Pacific region, leading up to the marginalization of Europe.
Aristotelian Negotiations
Interweaving tragedy theory and the history of knowledge
The development of the European tragedy involves a pervasive transformation in the imagination of tragic elements. What are the consequences in terms of cultural history and gender politics?
Community as Retrotopia?
Belonging in Literature and Video Art
The comparative study at the intersection of literature and cultural anthropology analyzes imageries of community in selected literary texts and video artworks within the context of categories such as belonging, recognition, and solidarity.
Phono post
Media Archaeology of Voice Mail
Greetings from the gramophone: in the first half of the 20th century, one could send acoustic greetings through phono post, which this project is archiving and analyzing for the first time.
