Special Issue # 7 (2.2023)

Interpretations of longer literary texts are skillfully selective: they emphasize certain passages and neglect others. How does this selection process proceed and how would a theory of interpretation have to be conceived in order to adequately take into account the practice of skillfully focusing attention?

This paper presents the CAUTION project, which approaches the narrative phenomenon of unreliable narration by means of various computational methods (automatic and manual annotation, argument visualization, and deep learning). The project contributes to answering theoretically and methodologically relevant questions about unreliable narration, but also about literary interpretation in general, as well as about the potential of computer-assisted approaches in this context.

This paper outlines a project that investigates the generation of implicit assertions in literary fictions, i.e., propositions related to the real world that a respective work of fiction suggests without explicitly formulating them. The project combines questions of literary theory with methods from the field of digital humanities.

This article introduces a dissertation project developed at the Münster Collaborative Research Center 1385 Law and Literature, the starting point of which is the occasional collision between personal rights and artistic freedom. Specifically, the question of to what extent fictional texts can violate personal rights is discussed.

The thesis that art is a model of reality proves to be heuristically fruitful when advanced in terms of model theory. In the context of digital narratives that replace readings with decisions and shape narrative actions by means of artificial intelligence, literary model research investigates the control mechanisms of a literary system and then examines the extent to which these become significant for the poetology of the respective (digital or classical-analog) representational format and achieve the status of a discursive directive.

This dissertation project investigates how the aesthetic properties of literary texts can be captured and appreciated using a hermeneutic method. This paper outlines how the project combines different approaches of hermeneutics and analytical aesthetics for this purpose.

The project deals with the visual dimension of poetry and the possibility of its analytical description. For this purpose, the arrangement of verses and words, markings and other typographic structures of non-experimental poems since the end of the 18th century are investigated within the framework of model analyses.

The article presents the theoretical proposals that the Bonn Research Training Group »Gegenwart/Literatur. Geschichte, Theorie und Praxeologie eines Verhältnisses« is developing. In addition to the fundamental theorization and historicization of the relationship between ›present‹ and ›literature‹, the focus is on the consequences of the »practice turn« for contemporary/literature research, the theoretical foundations of its intellectual historiography, and especially the significance of referencing.

New literary studies methods are needed to address the changing and ephemeral nature of literature emerging in digital media. This paper outlines the difficulties faced by literary studies in this regard and proposes to look to the methods of dance and theater studies for methodological approaches that incorporate the specifics of digital literature.

The term ›postmigration‹ represents a contemporary condition in the German-speaking world that is receiving equal attention and application in the arts, culture, and academia. This article explores the question of how the postmigrant perspective can be made useful as a category of analysis for cultural and, in particular, literary studies.

The DFG network brings together literary studies, theatre studies, and artistic research in order to productively advance theoretical research into contemporary German drama. The aim is to search for new impulses for a contemporary theatre text theory in a transdisciplinary manner and to intensify the analytical exchange on contemporary drama.