A) Theatrum mundi - mundus theatri. Constitutive Conditions of the Drama around 1700 B) "Weltanschauung" and Text Production. Forming - Narratives - Distribution

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Christian Meierhofer
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392948579

A) The project deals with the drama between Baroque and early Enlightenment, which is a neglected genre, and asks for the constitutive conditions of form and historical discourse around 1700. The drama is quite suitable for such a study because it leads - in its genre-related development beginning with Gryphius's and Lohenstein's martyr drama and ending with Gottsched's textual example for issues of the Enlightenment - from a Christological, salvific and end time history perspective to a still undetermined setting of literary functions and conditions. Here, a new organisation of drama and theatre culture takes place and, accordingly, has to recode its "contemporariness". Therefore and from a viewpoint of media and knowledge history, the amount of the recently acquired Theatrum-Literature comes into focus. It has a significant influence on the cultural practice of enactment strategies and on the textual effects of presence. Not least, all these aspects serve to problematize that descriptive pattern of literary and époque history that often and still classifies the period around 1700 as an alleged phase of degeneration and crisis. For this purpose, the project considers especially those texts which yet have been rarely explored or not at all.B) The project is concerned with the historical formations of the discourse of Weltanschauung and its occurrence within literary and journalistic text production, which significantly determines the process of modernity in its self-reflexions. The project aims at the specific textual formation and conventions of representation, at the comprehensive narratives of cultural-historical influence as well as the particular processes of distribution and the modalities of public treatment. The projected conference is designed as an international and interdisciplinary forum, which concentrates the relevant perspectives from science, book, media and press history and puts them in a complementary relation with the analytical expertise of literary studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants