Life without a cure. On the tension between disability and medicine in German literature of the 21st century

The dissertation project examines the representation of the interface between disability and medicine in German literature of the 21st century with regard to the concept of healing. Historically, disability and medicine are in a field of tension, at the centre of which lies the concept of 'healing'. The concept of curability and incurability has characterised the historical discourse on health, illness and disability. Since the 1960s, the concept of normalisation, which aims to achieve a medical cure for disability, has led to criticism of the medical model of disability and the establishment of the social model. Nevertheless, people with disabilities are a large social minority who are dependent on medical care but are disadvantaged in their access to it.

This dissertation project considers literary trends in 21st century German literature in the context of illness/disability narratives and the discursive fields of Literary Disability Studies. Novels such as Juli Zeh's Corpus Delicti (2009), Thomas Melle's Die Welt im Rücken (2016), Frédéric Valin's Ein Haus voller Wände (2022) and Paula Fürstenberg's Weltalltage (2024) will be analysed. The central questions are: What is the state of the unhealed body/psyche and in what way do they relate to medical spaces such as the clinic and medical discourses? How does literature link the history of the extermination of the 'incurable' (Nazi era) with the current institutionalisation of people with disabilities? Where is disability located in the context of biomedical optimisation? Which narrative techniques are used to depict the lack of expectation of healing or the conscious rejection of healing?

The texts analysed address the socio-cultural and political contexts of life without a cure and expand public awareness of disability through cultural representations. The analysis also highlights the constantly changing boundaries between normality and deviance in modern society and the role of medical spaces and institutions.

Contact person:

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Urte Helduser

The dissertation project is based on the observation that various of Michael Ende's texts have their vanishing point in written narrative. His novels in particular seem to be explicitly conceived for the medium of the book, which is reflected in the material and typographical design of the books, among other things. The integration of material aspects as narrative devices is interpreted as an expression of Michael Ende's poetics based on writing. To this end, the dissertation takes up current developments in mediality and materiality research: Based on the concept of 'Schriftbildlichkeit' (Krämer), which emphasises the iconic dimension of writing, as well as the concept of 'Buchhaftigkeit' (Boyken), the narrative functional potentials of the two- and three-dimensionality of Ende's texts are examined. The corpus analysed includes Ende's successful novels for children and young adults as well as texts whose target audience is assumed to be adults and, as far as possible, unpublished and fragmentary drafts. However, the literary texts are not only used to develop poetological considerations, but can also be interpreted as the result of a 'work politics' (Martus). On the basis of Ende's correspondence with the publisher, I will work out how Ende actively influences all aspects of the materiality of his texts and how he uses his increasingly consolidated position as a successful author to assert his poetics vis-à-vis the publisher.

Contact person: Sandra Eilts

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Thomas Boyken

Dance mania(r).
The literary representation of dance between control and loss of control (working title)

Based on the hypothesis that dance and its literary representation in the 18th and 19th centuries are integrated into a health discourse and are thus actively involved as regulators in the constitution of social orders, various textual witnesses are examined for their discursive function. Dance and manner books, medical articles in relevant family journals and specialised scientific articles on dance form the first object of investigation. These texts formulate an educational and/or enlightening interest that is analysed for its normative function. If dance as a regulative is both constitutive and selective, its literary representation must reflect which knowledge is valid and which practices are utilised. In the second part of the project, dance scenes from fictional texts of the 18th and 19th centuries will be analysed. The question here is which knowledge is used and how it is dealt with. Does a reproduction or aestheticisation of knowledge take place in fictional literature or is the discourse-forming part of fictional literature developed through protest?

The aim is to investigate whether and in what way the tension between control (disciplining) and loss of control (intoxication, madness), which is inherent in dance, is discourse-forming in the literary texts of the 18th and 19th centuries. The aim is to show how the literary representation of dance reflects the standardisation and disciplining process of ('social') bodies. With the thesis that it is above all medicine that links medical categories to moral behaviour with an interest in "public health", the extent to which dance is functionalised in its ambiguity in order to evoke certain forms of behaviour will be analysed. In doing so, dance, which as a regulative shows the difference between normality (healthy) and abnormality (sick/pathological), becomes a document of a social development process that outsources the abnormality to 'other spaces', such as the institution and the stage.

Contact person: Sabrina Dunja Schneider

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Urte Helduser

The dissertation examines current discourses on posthuman corporeality in contemporary literary utopias/dystopias and explores the extent to which the posthuman harbours risks and opportunities along the lines of the tension inherent in this genre. A connection is postulated between the critical medium of dystopia and the futurologies of trans- and posthumanism in terms of the history of ideas and formal aesthetics, which can be explored 'along the lines of the body'. Posthuman corporeality is not only essentially characterised by digital technology, but also connects different fields of knowledge in politics, economics and ethics under the aspect of biopower.

Contact person: Anna-Christine Pilz

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Sabine Kyora

Photography and Literature.
On the significance of photographic works and working methods in German-language literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries (working title)

Literary works in which photographs are printed as a constitutive element of the plot will be analysed to determine whether these so-called "photo-texts" can be regarded as an independent literary / intermedial genre.

Contact person: Ina Cappelmann

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Sabine Kyora

The reception of the historical avant-garde in West Germany between 1945 and 1960 (working title)

Based on the thesis that a reception of the historical avant-garde did not only take place in the late 1950s and 1960s, as most research suggests, but was already resumed or continued from 1945 onwards, the dissertation aims to analyse the reception of the historical avant-garde between 1945 and 1960 in the Western zones and the Federal Republic of Germany on the basis of selected literary-critical and essayistic writings. The planned dissertation aims to close a research gap by analysing the early (non-literary) writings of various post-war authors (including Alfred Döblin, Gottfried Benn and Peter Rühmkorf) as well as essayistic and literary-critical contributions from selected journals (including Zwischen den Kriegen, Studentenkurier and Texte und Zeichen) with regard to their reference to the historical avant-garde and its function. The aim of the work is to work out the reception of the historical avant-garde and to relate it to the debates on the state of literature in the literary field of West Germany between 1945 and 1960.

Contact person: Daria Engelmann

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Sabine Kyora

Christian Schmitt: Unstable equilibrium. Mediations of the idyll in the 19th century (Hanover: Wehrhahn 2022).

Ella M. Karnatz: Authorship, genres and digital media. Michael Köhlmeier, Sibylle Berg, Cornelia Funke and Markus Heitz in the German-language literary field of the present (2010-2020) (Bielefeld: Transcript 2023).

Supervisor: Prof. Dr Sabine Kyora