Anti-classicisms in the cinquecento

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Marc Föcking; Professor Dr. Florian Mehltretter; Privatdozentin Dr. Angela Oster
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398229063

Italian literature in the sixteenth century is subject to and reflects on pluralization, but it cannot be said to embrace pluralism or relativism in the modern sense. Its tendency to authorize writers, texts and systems of poetics taken from - predominantly, but not exclusively - classical antiquity engenders a normative dynamics often referred to by the simplifying term renaissance classicism. This tendency is, however, manifold and should really be referred to by the plural renaissance classicisms, depending on which classical or vernacular models are being authorized and in which literary genre. Correspondingly, the various tendencies to destabilize or to subvert or contradict these manifold and historically dynamic classicisms need to be distinguished as so many anticlassicisms, in order to avoid unifying their scope and intentions in an unhistorical and uncritical manner. The project proposed by German and Austrian cinquecento specialists seeks to differentiate and analyse these anticlassicisms as to their scope (on a scale between radical poetological dissension to merely sectorial opposition in a given literary genre) and to their alternative models, be they authors or texts, as well as the degree of difference or erosion with respect to their classicist counterparts, ranging from implicit system disturbances to open, intended antagonism, with a view to establishing an overall picture of this field of phenomena for the first time.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Professorin Dr. Susanne A. Friede