Ruinous Textures

Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek, and René Pollesch are some of the most innovative and influential German-language playwrights of the 20th and 21st centuries. It is remarkable that all three of them have chosen to inscribe the ruinous in their texts. Therefore the research project, scheduled for a two-year stay at the Dept. of Germanic Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and a subsequent year of follow-up work at the Dept. of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna, will explore the manifestation of ruinous structures in these writers works. The project will examine how the ruinous has undergone a transformation and find out if the concept has gained a new meaning in the wake of catastrophes, such as 9/11, hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, and the global financial crisis. It will seek explanations for the fact that primarily western, U.S.- American urban sites are connected to the ruinous, and discuss how the cityscapes are portrayed, and what specific constructions of the subject/self are linked to those. Furthermore, it is important to establish whether the selected texts themselves represent something like waste lands and whether this kind of spatial notion of text has been shaped by other artistic disciplines. For the purpose of analyzing texts by Müller, Jelinek, and Pollesch, the project will place these amidst relevant materials from philosophy, architecture, sociology, economics, and urban development. In addition, the combination of Walter Benjamins concept of translation and Mieke Bals travelling concepts will allow a careful reconstruction of the translation processes of the notion of urban waste lands, the development of which can be discerned in the selected texts. This scholarly undertaking can be placed in the context of ruin studies, an intellectual area of inquiry spearheaded in the U.S., particularly by Julia Hell, whose studies have demonstrated that increased interdisciplinarity is conducive to new findings and an appropriate response to the complexity of discourse about the ruinous. Due to the fact that Prof. Julia Hell will be serving as mentor, the applicant, Dr. Teresa Kovacs, is convinced that she will be able to acquire the latest knowledge and methods in this area and bring this expertise back to the German-speaking community of scholars. The proposed investigation is innovative in its theoretical and methodological approach and will be the first to correlate the works of Müller, Jelinek and Pollesch.

No additional funding sources recorded.