Let´s Talk About Death: 21st Century Narratives of the End of Life in the US
Antje Kley
In frequently uncanny ways, ageing, illness, death, dying, and mourning have been and continue to be both constant companions and threatening future `others´ we have little knowledge of (Eagleton 2003). A growing awareness of death scares people anytime and anywhere, and it intercepts culturally specific convictions supporting individual and collective everyday lives, in particular notions of able-bodied `normal´ life and progress. In modern Western societies, the void of meaning created by illness, ageing, dying, death, and mourning is tentatively covered up by medical and insurance protocols, legally and socially regulated care work as well as self-help markets, and by religious rituals which, even though they have lost their appeal for many, often seem the only ground to fall back on.
Drawing on the internationally growing field of Age and Disability Studies, “Death becomes us” seeks to investigate how, at the intersection of discursive frameworks attempting to administer a future of loss, literary writing and other cultural practices and media, particularly in the US, narratively trade in uncertain and threatening futures under the sign of death.
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RTG Literature and the Public Sphere
What are the social, political, economic and media conditions under which literature emerges? And what effects does literature have on its immediate environments? These are the issues addressed by the Research Training Group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Differentiated Contemporary Cultures.” It aims to examine contemporary literature since 1945, in different languages and cultural contexts, and with regard to changing and fragmenting public spheres. It is characterized in particular by its praxeological concept of literature, which includes socio-cultural contexts, political frameworks, institutional conditions, the literary world and literary life in its analysis. (spokespersons: Prof. Dr. Antje Kley and Prof. Dr. Dirk Niefanger)
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Hemispheric Ecological Citizenship: Sustainable Alternative Societies in
Recent Utopian Fiction from the Americas
Claudia Pereira de Jesus
In times of global crisis and uncertainty, narrative literary works
serve not only as sources of pleasure but also as catalysts for social
and political transformation. Across the American hemisphere, spanning
languages, cultures, and national borders, recent utopian fiction
presents alternative societies that critique historical and contemporary
injustices in order to imagine more hopeful presents and futures.
This volume examines how such texts articulate a constructive vision
through the concept of hemispheric ecological citizenship, proposing a
collective understanding of humanity that reaches beyond the nation –
traditionally conceived as a site of exclusion and discrimination of the
Other – and instead situates dislocated citizens within a convivial,
sustainability-oriented framework that prioritizes balanced
relationships with nature.
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Self-Help in the Digital Age: TED Talks, Speculative Fiction, and the Role of Reading
Loredana Filip
In an age where science and technology hold sway and the humanities face a crisis, this book explores the evolving role of literature. It delves into how American self-help culture shapes contemporary ideals of success, mindfulness, and happiness, with a particular focus on its influence in science communication, notably in TED talks. Moreover, it underscores the enduring relevance of literature in the digital era by analyzing speculative novels that challenge established norms, including those propagated by TED. These novels include Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. They question the Western preference for visual perception, which perpetuates a human-centric worldview. By focusing on literary synesthesia in the readings, this book emphasizes sensory experiences and human-nonhuman interactions. It adopts the concept of research as assemblage and uses a diverse range of theories and approaches, while it foregrounds critical posthumanism and new materialism. Ultimately, it advocates for a less anthropocentric approach to reading and presents literature as a “transdisciplinary life science” capable of fostering a “kinship of posthumanity.”
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Literary Crafticipation: Craft and Emancipation in African American Literature
and Literary Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century
Johanna Pelikan
Johanna Pelikan’s postdoctoral project “Literary Crafticipation: Craft and Emancipation in African American Literature and Literary Culture of the Long Nineteenth Century” explores the entangled relationship between craft and emancipation in African American literature of the long nineteenth century. Approaching craft as a conceptual rather than a purely physical activity, the project investigates how the persistent presence of crafting, understood as the skilled, hand mediated transformation of raw materials into meaningful objects, is bound up with African American emancipatory efforts. The project considers how, for example, sewing in Harriet Jacobs’ narration shapes her flight into freedom, how woodworking informs Booker T. Washington’s postbellum accounts of industrial education as a path toward emancipation, and how Frederick Douglass’ narration of writing and printmaking as craft practices shape the emancipatory power of authorship and an arising Black literary public. It also considers how the printed narrative itself is not merely a vehicle for but an object with emancipatory power rooted in its very crafted nature. Moving beyond the conception of craft as mere representation of socioeconomic reality, the project proposes a multilayered entanglement of craft and emancipation in long-nineteenth-century African American literature and literary culture, which is captured in the term crafticipation.