Die FSGS hat erneut erfolgreich Mittel für ein Visiting-Fellowship eingeworben: In den Jahren 2023-2025 wird an der FSGS eine Projektgruppe um Einstein-Visiting Fellow Karen Leeder - Professor of Modern German Literature und Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature, University of Oxford - forschen. Die Förderung erfolgt durch eine Kooperation der Berlin University Alliance und der Einstein Stiftung Berlin. Wir freuen uns sehr!

Zusammenfassung des Projekts:

The project AfterWords asks what it is to come after, to follow, to consider oneself, as an artist, as always already late or for a work to always be related to a previous model. The focus is on German poetry of the twentieth century and beyond, but this is also placed against a larger tradition and within international context. Innovatively bringing together academics and practitioners, AfterWords will offer structured snapshots from across the twentieth century onwards: focussing on the defining tenets of modernism, the post-war turn, and post-1990 culture of the Berlin Republic. In tracing the trajectory of poetry during this time span, it will of necessity engage with key political concerns and aesthetic questions of the age. Cumulatively, it will also draw out a thread of argument which sees poetry considering itself as a genre after the fact: fragmented, belated and working on its own ends. In this sense the project situates itself within a growing and vital literature exploring lateness, belatedness, old age and the psychoanalytic notion of 'Nachträglichkeit' but also the examines figures such as the epigone and the opsimath that signal poetry's sense of its own situatedness. Within a broader sense it triggers debates around authority and ontology: the crisis of always coming after a mode of reflection, the power of which is perhaps lost, contested or eroded; but also pursues the new afterlives a work can find in translation, performance or intermedial versions. How far are the poet and the work of art caught up in a process of breaking with, and then following upon a prior model and thus caught in temporal entanglements that simultaneously speak of invention and nostalgia, authority and repetition, departure and return? Perhaps the paradigmatic figures of such a relationship are the ruin, the repetition and the spectre all of which will reverberate through all strands. But the project looks towards theories of lyric voice (strand 1); examples of lyric attention (strand 2); forms of transmission (strand 3) and in a projected further strand which offers an opportunity for a continuation of the project, modes of lyric engagement - ecocriticism and the natural world (strand 4). In doing this it will contribute in a larger sense to a theory of the lyric and situate this within its temporal and aesthetic entanglements.