Writing Totalitarian Experience: Reflections on National Socialist Language and World View in the Literary Writings of the Rote Kapelle
ID
MSCA-22-SEPP01
Supervisors
Project description
Literature has always posed a problem to totalitarian regimes. The inherent polysemic character of literature is difficult to align with the manichaeic world view of National Socialism or Stalinism. The purpose of the proposed research project is to investigate the narrative devices and argumentative structures used to deconstruct National Socialist Language and the discursive fields of völkisch ideology in a selected corpus of literary texts by German authors belonging to the anti-Nazi resistance group Rote Kapelle. The texts and authors that could be part of the corpus are: PLN. Die Passionen der halykonischen Seele (Werner Krauss), Der Deutsche von Bayencourt (Adam Kuckhoff) and Memorial (Günther Weisenborn). This corpus can, however, still be altered in the course of the research project. The first area of the research focuses on the narrative devices and argumentative structures used by the above authors to criticize and lay be bare the cold political pragmatism of Nazi ideology and policy and offer alternatives and means to subvert dictatorship. In this context, the language-critical impetus of these authors should be closely scrutinized. The researcher should analyze the philosophical, religious, and political modes used in the texts to reflect upon the ways how the “new” Nazi language presented itself as a “new manner of thinking” (Victor Klemperer) which is opposed to the “ancient world” and is fixed as a foreign body. The second area of the research project should develop the idea of “alienation” which extends from discursive strategies to modes of thinking, the latter being modified by exterior as well as interior marks of stereotyping. What, moreover, is the grid of reference in the Rote Kapelle texts: intertextual references made, literary and philosophical traditions influenced by. Methodologically, this research project should ideally combine a historical and a context-based approach (sociology of literary and Critical Discourse Analysis) with a text-analytical one (close reading).
About the research Group
Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings
The Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings brings together researchers in the field of literary, theatre and performance studies. CLIC offers scholars an interdisciplinary network to stimulate research along three key concepts: Media, Genres and Spaces.
MEDIALiterature, theatre and performance traditionally belong to specific medial systems. However, these systems often interact in hybrid, intermedial ways. Definitions of intermediality range from a broad view on crossings between distinct media such as literature and theatre, to a more specific focus on the incorporation of one medium in another (e.g. the use of images or documentary material in literary texts). Methodological issues, too, challenge both practitioners and scholars.
GENRESThe generic classification systems of literature and media, based on stylistic and structural features, are never neutral or ahistorical categories. They produce and communicate meaning, and also change over time, in response to specific socio-cultural but also political and economic contexts. Authors and artists often consciously renew, transgress or mix genre conventions, and thus influence the reception of literature and theatre.
SPACESSpace has become an ever more influential and highly diversified theoretical category – ranging from the urban space of modernism to the contact zone of postcolonial theory and the rhizomatic network of the megalopolis. Through imaginary topographies and theatrical scenographies, transnational and multilingual identities are negotiated and disputed, as are new forms of politically committed artistic production.