Navigation items and banners
Head
Research Associates
Dr. Philipp Jeserich / PhD Jobst Welge
Objective
This part of the project is concerned with the problem of the specificity of aesthetic experience, as it applies to literary artefacts. On the one hand, the project is concerned with the artistic specificity of literature, which also entails aspects of inter-art relations, including the problem of hybrid forms. On the other hand, the aim is to determine the specificity of the literary artefact with respect to related, non-literary texts (autobiographies, philosophical texts, political-ethnographic texts, essayistic and documentary texts). Three sets of questions will be investigated. First: What are the strategies of speaking about the aesthetic experience
of works of art that may be identified in pragmatic texts, on the one hand, and in de-pragmatized (literary) texts, on the other hand? Secondly: Can we identify in the texts of either sort specific traits or modulations with respect to the practice of speaking about different art forms (music, visual art, literature)? Thirdly: If one assumes that literary texts concerned with the experience of art contain themselves a potential of aesthetic experience, how can this experience, as it affects the reader, be characterized? In this context we will also discuss the problems and possibilities of the transposition of experience from one type of art form (music, visual art) into another type of artefact, namely a literary, or non-literary text.
Subproject 1: Experience of Music into Language; Illusion; Pleasure
(Prof. Dr. Joachim Küpper)
Continuing a line of inquiry in a section of the first phase of investigation, attention will now be directed toward the practice of speaking about the semantically controverse phenomenon of music. The investigation will be concerned with two sorts of texts: As for the realm of pragmatically functionalized texts, the focus will be on such genres as the concert guide, musical programme, or (neswpaper) review. As for the realm of aesthetically functionalized texts, the focus will be on the narrative literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century (de Stael, Huysmans, Proust, Th. Mann). The questions addressed will fall into two groups. On the one hand, there is the problem of the communicability of aesthetic experience, including the question of their transsubjective dimension. The second complex concerns the common traits, and especially the differences in the thematization of music in the textual genres named above. Especially significant is the question, whether the de-pragmatized, aesthetic genre of the novel speaks about musical phenomena in a way that is objectively distinct from the pragmatic texts. This project also aims at a close cooperation with project B3 (Koch), the production of a contribution to the relation of illusion, irony, and aesthetic efffect.
Subproject 2: Experiencing Literature into Language
(Dr. Philipp Jeserich)
For this second phase of the investigation, the goal of this project is an analysis of the practice of speaking about aesthetic experience of literature in the texts of literary theory, on the one hand, and in literary texts, on the other hand. Of central importance is the question of what are the strategies involved in the communication of aesthetic experience of literature in non-literary and literary texts. The interest is not so much what counts as aesthetic experience, but rather the question of how aesthetic experience of literature is handled and represented in language. First, I will investigate central concepts of literary experience of literary works in the realm of twentieth century literary theory (Roman Ingarden, Hans Robert Jauß, Wolfgang Iser, Karlheinz Stierle). Complementing this, the second part of this project will draw on the insights of the first part while comparing and contrasting them with selected literary works which explicitly thematize the aesthetic experience of literature. Here I will again draw on works from the twentieth century, mostly autobiographies, for it is in these texts that writers often dwell intensively on the aesthetic experience of other authors’ literary works.
Subproject 3: Speaking about Art and Nation
(PhD Jobst Welge)
This project is dedicated to the investigation of the external functionalization of the aesthetic. Of special importance is the question, how in post-Romantic texts the discourse of art and aesthetic experience has shaped literary subjecitivity, as bound up with the representation of national ‚identity.’ The focus will be on texts by Madame de Stael (Corinne; On Germany), Goethe (Italian Journey) and H. Heine (French Painters). In these texts, the discourse about art (visual art, music, literature) is part and parcel of the literary description of the experience and validation of the nation. We are facing an apparent paradox: aesthetic autonomy vs. national contextuality and social-moral function. Here the question arises, how the experience and the description of art may contribute to the representation of a ‚foreign’ national character, as well as to the representation of the author’s own identity. Another part of this project will be dedicated to the role of Italian music/opera in the work of the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, for here the communal function of music is also related to the problem of nationhood.
