Forms of the Whole

In recent decades, the humanities have generally been suspicious of holistic ideas. ›Totalitarian‹ regimes of the 20th century in mind, such hesitations regarding the whole are easily understood. But meanwhile ›the whole‹ has returned and insists: in the discourse of globalisation and in global phenomena such as climate change and migration, in the reactivation of concepts such as religion, the people and the nation, in debates about universal values and rights, but also in the form of ›holistic‹ approaches in medicine and psychology. And with data, the whole is available virtually and digitally. Hence there are good reasons today to reconsider and reinvestigate the whole.

But how do you put the whole in perspective? What perspectives are available? Because any whole depends on the possibilities and limits of its representation, this year's Annual Conference will focus on FORMS OF THE WHOLE: epistemic, symbolic, political and, last but not least, literary. Is any whole necessarily made up of parts, and what do these parts have to look like so as to credibly refer to a unity that transcends them? Under what aesthetic or medial conditions can a whole be fixed at all? Can it be understood figuratively and recognized at a glance, or does a whole only disclose itself through laboriously channeled processes of understanding? How have literary genres, such as novels, epics or poems, reacted to these challenges at different time periods? What forms does the whole assume in scientific discourses or disciplines whose modern self-understanding often depends emphatically on the idea of a systematic unity of their objects? Moreover, what are the political implications of the whole, its conscious organization, its rhetorical pretensions or calculated deflection in literature, history and law?