Program Area World Literature

While the notion of world literature emerged together with the national philologies in the 19th century, it also competes with them and offers ways to overcome their divisions. Today, world literature refers to the specific global conditions shaping the realm of literature and to the effects globalization has had on literary production and its reception in a rapidly changing society. However, world literature also suggests that literature is more than just a representation or reflection of particular realities—it creates worlds and shapes realities. Our goal is therefore not the study of all the world’s literatures but an exploration of how different literatures form and help understand certain worlds.

The ZfL’s long-standing study of East-European literature is a good example. Eastern European cultures belong to a politically, ethnically, and religiously fraught region at the “margins” of Europe. In light of recent crises, research into the region’s literature and culture prompts a critical examination of Europe’s hegemonic self-presentation.

Projects of this program area, completed or processed in the past

(selected, chronologically sorted by year of completion)

• Post-Global Aesthetics 2023–2024
• Metaanthropology. On the History of Ethnography in the 20th Century 2020–2024 Disseration project
• Literature in Georgia. Between Small Literature and World Literature 2020–2023
• Of Awful Connections, East German Primitives, and the New Black Berlin Wall. Germany and German History in African-American Literature 2019–2023
• Al-Andalus and the Origins of Orientalism: “Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān” and its Journey through the European Enlightenment 2021–2023
• Style and Kitsch around 1900 2019–2022
• Moscow – Berlin – Paris: Walter Benjamin’s “Neue Optik” 2021–2022 Dissertation project
• Representations of History in British and German Popular Culture Since the 1980s 2022
• History of (German) Literary Histories 2021–2022
• Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the Limits of Art under Postcolonial Conditions 2020–2021
• Early Modes of Writing the Shoah. Practices of Knowledge and Textual Practices of Jewish Survivors in Europe 1942–1965 (PREMEC) 2017–2021
• Affective Realism. Contemporary Eastern European Literatures 2017–2019
• Writing Life. Varlam Shalamov: Biography and Poetics 2016–2020
• Batumi, Odessa, Trabzon. The Cultural Semantics of the Black Sea from the Perspective of Eastern Port Cities 2016–2019
• The Broken Medium. An Austrian Modernist Theory of the Event 2018–2019
• The Afterlife of the Muse. Balzac, Henry James, Fontane 2019
• Unity and Multiplicity. Epic Poetics in Late Humanism and Early Enlightenment 2018–2019
• Epic Poetry as Field of Experimentation (1918–1933) 2017–2019 Dissertation project
• Forms and Functions of Relations to the World 2017–2019
• Contemporary Israeli Prose in German: National Literature or World Literature? 2019
• Childhood and the Interaction between Mankind and Nature in Walter Benjamin 2019
• Poetics – Marketing – Formal Concession? The Reception of Peritexts in Canonical Works 2017–2019
• World in Weimar. Goethe’s “Römische Elegien” and the Augustan Poetry 2017–2019 Dissertation project
• Hebrew Literature as Modern Literature. Jewish Writers as Critics of Enlightenment 2015–2018
• Iconic Presence. The Evidence of Images in Religion 2015–2018
• An Intellectual Biography of the Writer and Philosopher Susan Taubes (1928–1969). A Study of the Paradigmatic Significance of Her Life and Work in the 20th Century 2014–2018
• Poetic Rhythm around 1800 2016–2018
• Figurations of the Barbaric in the 18th Century. A Genealogy of the Concept of Culture in International Law, the Philosophy of History, and Literature 2015–2016
• Cultural Semantics of the Black Sea Region 2014–2016
• East-Western Cultures of Affect 2014–2016
• Cultures of Text and Religion 2014–2016
• Translations in the Transfer of Knowledge 2014–2016
• Translation, Knowledge, and Culture – On Freudian Psychoanalysis and Vilém Flusser’s Translation Theories 2016
• Representing Time in Capitalist Realism in Contemporary German and English Literature 2015–2016
• The European Subject and the ›Homo sovieticus‹ 2011–2013
• Figurations of the Martyr in Near Eastern and European Literature 2005–2015
• Jeremiah – Prophet of Doom. Memory Traces in the Works of Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel 2014–2015
• The Cultural Semantics of Georgia between the Caucasus and the Black Sea 2012–2015
• Susan Taubes Edition 2008–2014
• Tragedy and Trauerspiel 2011–2013