Project Details
Projekt
From bystander to actor: literature, collaboration, and participation
Applicant
Professor Dr. Dirk Wiemann
Subject Area
European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
Term
since 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 496295891
An important trend in contemporary literature is the turn towards emphatically collaborative and participatory formats, which - according to a main thesis of this project - correlates with the need for new forms and forums of collaboration postulated in the Research Unit as a whole. While the increased conjuncture of collaborative and participatory procedures and processes in the neighboring fields of the visual and performing arts has already been widely acknowledged and discussed as a 'commonist turn' toward communal creation (Gemeinschaffen), it has received comparatively little attention from literary studies. Arguably, one reason for this neglect is the institutionalization of literature as an "intimate" event, whose participants (authors and readers) are ideally conceived as solitary individuals who carry out the process of text production or reception on their own and communicate about their individual writing or reading experience at most post fact. With the perspective of developing a descriptive-theoretical model for a conception of literature as collaboration, the Project pursues four closely related goals: first, it examines contemporary forms of collaborative co-authorship; second, it addresses the question of the possibilities and limits of collaborative reception; third, it arrives at a thick description of an exemplary collaborative literary event in a comprehensive case study of the British Refugee Tales campaign; and fourth, in an in-depth examination of the Indian concept of sahitya, which conceives of literature as a project that is always already collaborative, it aims to provincialize the globalized Western concept of literature with ist inherent privatizing effects. The project team, consisting of the project leader, a doctoral student (preferably from a South Asian context), and the Mercator Fellow, will curate three workshops and collaborate on a series of publications written individually or in collaboration.
DFG Programme
Research Units
