Taking as a point of departure the dynamic concepts of form and model, the graduate school explores three major subject areas: theories of form (history of concepts), practices of form (history of genres), and cultures of form (history of transfers). These foci represent the historic and systematic aspects under which the construction of literary form can be approached in specific dissertation projects. Depending on their particular interests, projects will usually be rooted in one of these areas but can of course address more than one of the graduate school’s central subjects.
Under the headings in the left side bar you can find more detailed explanations of the three subject areas.
The systematic approach of the Research Training Group rests on four assumptions concerning the relation between model and form:
1. Specific forms result from a process of modelling (i.e., the creation with the help of model objects) of the real (actual) and the fictional (virtual). Trans-modal modelling of this kind always bears the stamp of its concrete contexts in the history of ideas, discourse, genres, etc.
2. As functional abstractions, models represent more complex objects and processes (they are models ‘of’ something). Conversely, as ideals and prescriptions for future production, reproduction, experiment, regulation and evaluation, they also bring about the formation of new objects (they are models ‘for’ something, cf. Mahr 2004a)
3. Modelling occurs in systemically open medial processes of representation. It functions as an enabling framework for the actualization of emergent phenomena, i.e., as a process that can generate, stabilise, and undo forms by coupling and de-coupling its elements (cf. Luhmann 2000 [1995]). In the context of aesthetics, this is of particular importance for genre formation; as a strategy for knowledge production, the modelling process communicates traditional orders of knowledge and produces new ones.
4. Aesthetic modelling deploys its epistemological potential in two ways. With the help of fictional formats that defuse the pragmatic compulsion towards decision-making (fictionality) or open up new fields of application by way of virtual testing (simulation), aesthetic modelling opens up a space for epistemological negotiations. Secondly, its representational practices are highly relevant for the epistemic design of non-aesthetic discourses (genesis and transfer of terminology, heuristic metaphors, and rhetoric; poeticity).
In the history of aesthetics, poetics, and literary theory, the idea of form has always been protean. Recent scholarly definitions of literary form betray a sense of awe of their subject, nothing less after all than a fundamental concept of philology, which has been termed the “blind spot” of aesthetics by Theodor W. Adorno (Adorno 2004 [1970], 186). In general, historical conceptions of the subject may be said to describe a movement from holistic explanations of form based on evidential experience to difference-based approaches, such as those of systems theory or deconstruction. However, crucial questions still remain unanswered regarding the causes of form transformation and form consistency in processes of change on a national and global scale as well as in the context of media history – indeed, situating them in the context of such inter-discursive research only highlights their poignancy.
The Research Training Group takes as a point of departure Dieter Burdorf’s distinction between an “emphatic” and a “technical” understanding of form (Burdorf 2001, 2). While according to the former concept, every aesthetic and cultural form is ultimately an expression of life itself, a technical concept of form demands that authors employ those aesthetic forms best suited to realizing the intended effects of their respective texts, picking the most appropriate form on the basis of an informed choice from all relevant traditions and developing it experimentally and creatively. Hence, the concept of the text becomes problematic, which in turn stimulates reflections about the concept of context.
In addressing these issues, the Research Training Group engages key topics of literary theory with a firm footing in cultural studies. Thus, the approach centring on model and form addresses a problem that emerged as part of the cultural turn and the (mainly) French and Anglophone ‘theory wars’ and became particularly virulent with the marginalisation of the concept of literary form (cf. Liu 1989). The Research Training Group also responds to the recent increase in interest by literary scholars in the aesthetics of form and modelling, articulated under rubrics such as ‘the new aestheticism’, ‘the new formalism’, ‘genre theory’, or in the debate between narratologists and ludologists. Here, the aim is to combine these different approaches in order to address the question: How can the concept of form be re-configured in intra- and interdisciplinary dialogue as one of the central ‘export-goods’ of literary theory?
Consequently, the Research Training Group assumes a dynamic concept of form in historical perspective, regarding form as a site of tension between stable and mobile elements. The systematic connection between forming and modelling itself is conceived of as subject to historical and cultural change, producing the properties of specific literary objects. Instances of this connection can be observed in the interaction of fictional forms with the discursive, cultural, aesthetic, and medial practices of a given period. This approach is sometimes termed a ‘poetics of culture’, and it foregrounds three closely interrelated project foci: (1) Theories of form as poetics of form (history of concepts); (2) Practices of form as a dynamic principle of genre and transformation history (history of genres); and (3) Cultures of form as the practice of form transfers between cultures and across media (history of transfers). It is the fundamental aim of all projects in the group, both in teaching and in research, to open up and expand the literary concept of form in its exchanges with epistemic, culture-specific and technological modelling. Thus, modelling is understood as both a category in the history of discourse with its own conceptual history in the area of literary and other forms of fiction, and also as an analytical-systematic category facilitating the transdisciplinary comparison and description of literary and extra-literary practices.
Works Cited:
Adorno, Theodor W.: Aesthetic Theory [1970]. London 2004.
Burdorf, Dieter: Poetik der Form. Eine Begriffs- und Problemgeschichte. Stuttgart 2001.
Liu, Allan: “The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism”. In: ELH 56 (1989). 721-771.
Luhmann, Niklas: Art as a Social System [1995]. Stanford 2000.
Mahr, Bernd: “Das Mögliche im Modell und die Vermeidung der Fiktion“. In: Thomas Macho und Annette Wunschel (eds.): Science & Fiction. Über Gedankenexperimente in Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Literatur. Frankfurt a.M. 2004. 161-187.
