Chair of English Studies: Literature

The Chair of “English Studies: Literature” is devoted to the study of literature in the English language – except for US-American literature. This means that although there is still a strong focus on British literature(s) in what we do, literature that has emerged and keeps emerging in Caribbean, African, Asian, and Southeast Asian countries, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is equally important.

Literature functions as a cultural seismograph in that it is capable of registering and negotiating the smallest commotions that a society undergoes. Yet certainly, literary texts do not only passively register, but also actively participate in, meaning-making processes. To understand what literature does, therefore, it will not suffice to look at it as an isolated phenomenon: the cultural, social, political, and economic contexts in which literary and other cultural texts are embedded have to be taken into account as well. In this sense, literary studies is always also an inter- and transdisciplinary undertaking: it requires an openness not just to its close sibling, cultural studies, but also to disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology, the natural sciences, and economics, to name but a few.

Why literary studies? If we agree that human societies are meaning-making communities and as such keep reinterpreting the world, any attempt at understanding a society presupposes an ability to decipher the various discourses through which its historically specific values, norms, and truths are created, upheld or questioned. In other words, it presupposes an ability to read the world as if it were a text. Of course, this suggestion is a lot more complicated than it sounds. A text is so much more than letters on a page or a screen. As cultural materialists remind us, discourses have concrete material effects and are themselves conditioned in various material ways, just as affect theorists remind us that reading is decisively influenced by non-textual factors, such as emotions. The point, however, is the following: since literature, as a cultural seismograph, has always sought to capture and actively negotiate the complexity of the world, the very skills that enable us to analyse and interpret intricately wrought literary texts can also assist us in our efforts to make sense of what is going on around us. Literatures that have come out of cultures foreign to us offer the additional advantage of training us in understanding otherness and so of allowing us to ultimately attain a critical distance vis-à-vis our own culture and position: by exposing ourselves to otherness in an open spirit, by imaginatively assuming another’s point of view, we put ourselves, our values and ‘truths’, into perspective.

Accordingly, just like our sister chair, the Chair of “English Studies: Culture and Literature”, we are fully committed to foster and promote diversity. We practice a cultural-studies-oriented literary studies in that we consider literature to be a privileged means of creating awareness of how power and knowledge are discursively connected in their specific, historically situated contexts. To do so, we avail ourselves of a number of literary and cultural theories and approaches, e.g. British Cultural Studies (as a theoretical ‘school’ of thinking), discourse theory (à la Michel Foucault), deconstruction, theories of ‘race’ and ethnicity, affect theory, new materialism, postcolonial theory, gender and queer theory, ecocriticism, economic criticism, new formalism, aesthetics, etc.

Our main areas of research are: