Principal investigator: PD Dr. Tim Lanzendörfer

Reading in the Age of Trump: The Possibilities, Politics, and Futures of Literary Studies (Now) is a DFG-funded Heisenberg grant project led by PD Dr. Tim Lanzendörfer. The project investigates the current state of literary theories and literary studies through the lens of reading, understood here as a theoretical problem. It is build on three principal pillars:

1. Contemporary literary theory, the problem of critical reading, and the modes of reading that should shape literary studies' engagement with the world. In this part of the project, a discussion of the last decade or so of Anglophone literary theory will lead to a new theorization of the project of literary studies as an academic discipline. It will conclude in a monograph, currently entitled “Reading in the Age of Trump: Literary Studies in the Postfactual University."
   
   
2. Contemporary literature and its interest in reading, expressed both as metaphorically coded, as formally and structurally presupposed, and as directly represented. Reading protagonists, metaphors of reading in contemporary fiction, and ways in which novels facilitate or complicate their own reading are all part of this wide-ranging effort at re-reading reading in the contemporary novel. This part of the project will conclude in a shorter monograph, currently entitled “Reading Reading in the Contemporary American Novel."
3. The public face of literary studies and its social uses, investigated as  part of a larger desire to think through the relevance of the public literary humanities especially in the “age of Trump" and all that that means. This project will conclude with a short German monograph entitled “Nichtfaschisten Machen, oder: Literaturwissenschaftsvermittlung und die Frage, warum wir Bücher nicht nur lesen sollten.“

The DFG-funded research project „Play|Experience: Art and (Post)Critique in Transmedial Contexts between Games and Literature" is partially related to this project.

Project Investigator: Max José Dreysse Passos de Carvalho, MA

Play|Experience is a DFG-funded research project that investigates the narratives of videogames from a variety of theoretical as well as empirical angles. Central to this endeavor is the category of (aesthetic) experience, which stands as a contentious notion at the heart of numerous debates across the contemporary humanities.

The project is after the specificities of ludic experiences, which it seeks to draw out by juxtaposing them with analogous discussions on experiantiality in literary contexts. At the same time, it takes the controversies surrounding recent forays into the primacy of aesthetic experience, including but not limited to literary postcritique, as jumping off points to question the status of experience across diverse aesthetic forms altogether. Does aesthetic experience even matter? Why? How? Vice versa: is there anything other than experience that matters about art? If so, what? The project starts out from the assumption that the study of games is particularly suited to producing insights into these form-transcending problems, but it also argues that these more general, theoretical concerns on aesthetics, art, and narrative, can help us improve our understanding of games.

Among other things, Play|Experience hopes to develop our methodological grasp on the ways game narratives are usually talked about: what distinguishes the review from the critique from the postcritique? What, across all of this, is the status of interpretation? These problems the project addresses in light of the commodified reality of commercial game production today, which is as marked by ruthless and exploitative labor practices as it is by manipulative monetization schemes. Inevitable too, then, is the question of how art and commodity relate to one another.

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities):

https://www.forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de/index.php/en/projects/democratic-vistas

Spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz and Prof. Dr. Gunther Hellmann
30 Professorial Members, among them Prof. Dr. Heike Schäfer