Reading the Danube. (Trans)national narratives in the 20th and 21st centuries

• Applicant: Dr. Olivia Spiridon
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424340365

The objective of the project is to research identity-forming narratives about the Danube in the 20th and 21st century from the point of view of cultural studies. The investigation focuses on image and text media – literary texts, photographs and films – in which the Danube is shaped for certain social communities and becomes a vehicle of identification. They are to be analysed for both their inherent narrative logic and – in a second step – their cross-media interrelationships and transcultural translations. Two research institutions are collaborating on the project: the Austrian Academy of Sciences/Institute of Cultural Sciences and Theatre History (Vienna) and the Institute of Danube-Swabian History and Regional Studies (Tübingen). The project also involves cooperation with noted research institutions located in other cities in the Danube region (Bratislava, Budapest, Novi Sad, Bucharest and Sofia).The focus of the research project is not the river landscape itself but the ways in which landscape, narrative and identity interrelate, narratives assign meanings to the river, and those meanings are exploited for diverse conceptions of identity. The assumption is that the Danube is embedded not in one, but in a variety of regional, national and transnational narratives, some more familiar than others, and that these narratives are interwoven and can sometimes be seen as translations or updates of other river narratives. In the project, with its explicitly transnational and interdisciplinary orientation, advanced research methods and tools of cultural science are being used such as those of cultural narratology and cultural-scientific spatial theory. These theories facilitate a cross-media understanding of narratives and research of their cultural function on the one hand and the distinction between the physical and social aspects of space on the other. The research is organised in two phases. The first is devoted to the media-specific collection and examination of material (photography, text and film) in libraries and photo and film archives and to analysis and contextualisation of the corpus, with a part of the project devoted to Vojvodina in order to study narrative overlaps at certain geographical points of intersection. In the second phase, the various areas are combined, cross-media connections established and case studies developed.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Reinhard Johler
• Cooperation Partner: Privatdozent Dr. Christoph Leitgeb