Ancient Spaces as Spaces of Movement in the Postclassical Era: Factography, Imagination, Construction

The Research Group E-I investigates artistic forms of the transmission of knowledge concerning spaces of antiquity. In this respect long-term chains of transformative processes are to be observed through which the interrelationships between space and knowledge established in antiquity have been altered by historical agents through specific epistemic and medial claims. The aim is twofold: to analyze these knowledge-based processes of transformation in precise areas of investigation on a reliable material basis on the one hand; on the other to formulate relevant statements concerning the history of the transformation of space and knowledge through the consolidation of research results. For this reason, the research group takes up the all- encompassing topic of the artistic transmission of knowledge about space in the post-classical era in the context of the following precisely formulated contoured topic areas: (1) spoliation and transposition, (2) travels through spaces of antiquity, (3) the fictionalization and resemanticization of antique spaces in epics and novels of the Middle Ages and early modern period, (4) concepts and semanticizations of the Beyond in the Middle Ages and early modern period. Interdisciplinary research into the processes of formation and transformation of the interrelationships between space and knowledge in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period, however, calls for an integrative and sufficiently elastic concept, albeit one that is by no means arbitrary and which serves as a methodological foundation while remaining receptive to procedures of abstraction as well as of concretization, and which is adaptable to the participating disciplines. As for our research group, the concept of space as an area of movement has a heuristic function; it has proven to be an especially stable concept because the term space of movement pictures the dynamism of the concept of space which is applied by the group. We conceive of space as being generated performatively on a variety of levels through actions, perceptions, language, etc. In accordance with this emphatically dynamic conception, the term space of movement also clarifies the irreducible processual quality of formation and transformation. The concept of a space of movement remains open; it is not bound to the ontological status of the object, nor is it restricted to specific disciplinary methodologies; it implies nothing normative, but serves instead as an exclusively heuristic concept. The application of the concept of the space of movement leads toward a multiplicity of concrete individual results, particularly in the framework of the qualifying projects; moreover, it has proven possible to provide research on spoliation with a new perspective, to differentiate concepts of space in literature in historical terms, and to criticize cartographic procedures in the framework of scientific reconstructions

Aspekte visionärer, ritueller Dichtung bei Henry More?

In diesem Beitrag wird der Versuch unternommen, die Gedichte der Psychodia Platonica des Cambridger Platonikers Henry More vor dem Hintergrund ritueller, theurgischer Texte des spätantiken Neuplatonismus zu verstehen, um sich auf diese Weise der zentralen Rolle, die der aitherische Seelenleib (ochema) als Inspirationsmedium für diese Dichtung spielt, hermeneutisch anzunähern. Als rituell-performativer Text theurgischer Qualität thematisiert die Psychodia Platonica nicht nur metaphysisch-theologische Inhalte, sondern nutzt diese und ihre sprachliche Gestalt zugleich, um zu einer spirituellen Veränderung bei den Rezipierenden anzuleiten

Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research

In their article Toward an Aesthetics of Adaptation in Empirical Research Marion Behrens, Christian Kell, and Pascal Nicklas discuss the requirements and potential of empirical research into the reception of adaptations: adaptation is one key strategy in the creation of literature and art in general. The creative process and product of adaptation has its counter-part on the side of reception. Empirical research into the aesthetics of adaptation aims at the experimental elucidation of the physiological background and the establishment of a model describing the perceptual underpinnings of the act of seeing an adaptation as adaptation. This implies evolutionary biological reasoning concerning the memory tasks required for this kind of perception and experimental work showing neuronal, psychological and perceptual specificities contrasting acts of reception of artistic and non-artistic stimuli. A particularly promising arena for model building research lies in poetic language and rhetorical structures of repetition

Re-Novating Troy: Chrematistics, Imagination, and Hybrid Temporalities in Chaucer's Troy stories

It is the purpose of this essay to show how, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troy stories (The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde), literary innovation figures as temporal and categorical purification and hybridization. I aim to show that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde implicitly stages literary innovation in terms of the textual strategies that are explicitly described and simultaneously enacted in his House of Fame. At the risk of oversimplification, my view of a Chaucerian poetics of literary re-novation runs something like this: The texts mentioned suggest, I believe, that poetic composition first and foremost begins at the nexus of a continuous multiplication of narratives and the concomitant necessity (and impossibility) of mapping, of distinguishing foregoing and authorized traditions. Categorizing narratives into traditions, however, results, at best, in an illusion of authorized knowledge. Within the fictional economy of Chaucer’s works, the purification of tradition inevitably leads to hybridizations, as new poetry ultimately emerges in the construction and subsequent deconstruction of narratives from contexts, especially temporal contexts

Aemilia Lanyer, "The Description of Cooke-ham" (1611)

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The Idyllic and Picturesque Elements in the Travelogues by Alojz Medňanský and Jozef Miloslav Hurban

The present paper looks through the prism of picturesqueness as an esthestic category and the idyll as a genre to examine the way of depicting the sceneries in the travelogues written by Alojz Medňanský (Malebná cesta dolu Váhom v Uhorsku / The Picturesque Journey down the Vah in Hungary, 1826) and Jozef Miloslav Hurban (Prechádzka po považskom svete / The Walk around the World of the Považie Region, 1844). Before the actual analysis and interpretation of particular travelogue extracts, the attention is paid to certain typological similarities/differences of picturesque and idyllic scenery as well as the establishment and development of the esthetic category of picturesqueness. At the same time the ideological potential of an idyll or the concept of picturesqueness is noticed, while the particular way of fulfilling the potential in the selected texts is monitored. The chosen approach makes it possible to grasp and classify the typology of scenery employed by the writers in question, and also to understand its function within the whole meaning plan of either travelogue. The paper mainly builds on the research and the findings of E. R. Curtius, K. Stibral, C. Jungová and E. Lobsien

"A white paper": anamnesis and the character of the child in Early Modern English literature

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Der Autor als Schreiber und Herausgeber : Perspektiven auf die Paratexte von Brentanos „Godwi“

In Brentanos ›Godwi‹ [wird] das eigentümliche romantische Verfahren des Anbildens und Aneignens als »Uebersetzung« bezeichnet. Neben der Übersetzung aus fremden Sprachen – man denke an das Schlegel-Tiecksche Projekt der Übersetzung Shakespeares – kann sich der Begriff der ›Übersetzung‹ auch auf die intermediale Transformation von Zeichensystemen, etwa die Auflösung von Bildern in Sprache, oder auf die editoriale Tätigkeit beziehen. Ein sprechendes Beispiel hierfür ist die von Arnim und Brentano besorgte Sammlung und Überarbeitung von Volksliedern in ›Des Knaben Wunderhorn‹. Die beiden Herausgeber praktizierten ein editorisches Verfahren, das sich nicht mit der Transkription in die Schriftsprache begnügt, sondern eine sehr weitreichende »literarische Stilisierung« des Ausgangsmaterials vornimmt. Das gemeinsame Merkmal dieser verschiedenen Modi der Übersetzung liegt darin, daß ihnen jeweils eine eigentümliche Bewegung des Zitierens zugrunde liegt, mit der das Original in einen anderen Kontext manövriert und dort neu gerahmt wird. Dabei strebt die Übersetzung nicht die »Ähnlichkeit mit dem Original« an, sondern nimmt eine modulierende »Wandlung und Erneuerung des Lebendigen« vor, durch die sich das Original ändert. In gleicher Weise legt das Konzept einer anbildenden und umbildenden ›Neuen Mythologie‹ nahe, daß die »alte Natur und Kraft« der Poesie mit einer neu ins Werk zu setzenden »Kraft zum Bruch« interagiert