Aesthetics and Practices of Forgetting in Scandinavian Literatures (Prof. Dr. Stephan Michael Schröder) A culture of memory does not only include remembering, but also forgetting – and especially in recent years the achievements of forgetting have been emphasized in various disciplines (cultural studies of memory, philosophy, history, ethnology, psychology, neurobiology, etc.). But what does forgetting do for and in literature? The research project does not focus so much on the discursive thematization of forgetting, but rather on the question of what an aesthetic of forgetting looks like and in which literary practices forgetting manifests itself. The conceptual preparations are currently underway for the project, which is to be submitted as a research proposal in the course of 2020.
The Cultural History of Early Automobilism in Denmark (Prof. Dr. Stephan Michael Schröder) Hardly any other development has shaped the societies and culture of the 20th century as much as the triumphal march of automobilism. It is often forgotten that the car initially met with considerable resistance – especially in Denmark, where the state authorities were almost hostile to it. In a historiography dominated by the jubilee writings of automobile clubs, etc., these critical discourses are scourged as evolutionary aberrations, but the conflict between representatives of automobilism and its opponents was about the question of how modernity should be shaped. The access to contemporary newspaper discussions, which has become much easier thanks to digitilization, the parliamentary discussions in the context of the first car laws, the evaluation of the business and association press and the use of literary and cinematic reflections of the practice of driving make it possible to analyze the critical discourses of the opponents of automobilism in their own right and to relate them to today's debate on the future of automobilism.
German Children's Books in Finnish – Translations in the Process of Establishing Finnish as a Literary and Cultural Language (Prof. Dr. Marja Järventausta) The development of Finnish into a literary and cultural language took place in the second half of the 19th century. In this process, literary translations have made an important contribution to the development and establishment of the standard language norm by putting into practice the rules discussed in the respective literature. The subject of this project is Finnish translations of German children's books, which have been published in several editions and/or in new translations. The focus of interest is not on the translations themselves, but on the linguistic forms used in them. The comparisons of translations are intended to show the development and establishment of literary norms.
History of German language textbooks for Finnish as a Foreign Language (FFL) (Prof. Dr. Marja Järventausta) The first German-language textbooks for FFL were published at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century in publishing series for modern foreign languages. In this project, German-language textbooks and grammars for FFL are to be systematically indexed and bibliographically recorded until the middle of the 20th century. Detailed analyses on the grammatical, lexical and text-thematic levels will determine which source material was used in the conception of the respective textbooks and which focal points were set in the selection of the subject matters (e.g. which vocabulary, which grammatical categories, which thematic focal points etc.). The aim is to contribute to the history of FFL outside Finland which has hardly been investigated yet.
A Shared Film Culture? Denmark and Germany in the Silent Period, 1910–1930 (Prof. Dr. Stephan Michael Schröder in cooperation with Danish colleagues from the University Copenhagen and the Danish Film Institute) Asta Nielsen is still remembered as the great Danish diva of the silent era. But it is often overlooked that only four of the more than 70 films she appeared in were produced in Denmark; the rest were produced in Germany. Along with more than 30 other leading Danish film people, including Carl Th. Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen, and Urban Gad, Nielsen played an important role in establishing and constructing film culture in Germany. There was traffic in the other direction as well: a number of German film people, particularly screenwriters, put their mark on the Danish cinema. But how can we account for the significance of the cultural exchange between two of the most important film-making nations in Europe during the 1910–1930 period? That is the main research question this project seeks to answer. The main working hypothesis we derive from it is that the flowering of Danish cinema in the 1910s and of German cinema in the 1920s is better explained through this cross-pollination than from a purely national perspective and that we can therefore speak of a common film culture. The project is financed by Danish foundations 2019–2021. The project's homepage: https://www.dfi.dk/node/47288
Text-Sound Composition in Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s (Working title) (Karolin Pohle) This project examines the intermedial art form of text-sound composition in an interdisciplinary manner, i.e. both literary and musicological, in the context of the avant-garde. The corpus comprises the works of the five main representatives Sten Hanson, Åke Hodell, Bengt Emil Johnson, Lars-Gunnar Bodin and Ilmar Laaban. In addition to the realized text-sound compositions, the source texts will also be considered.
Annales Ryenses – Rydårbogen. Transmission and Translation of medieval annals (Anja Ute Blode, M.A.) This phd-project examines intercultural networks concerning text and manuscript transfer during the North European Middle Ages. The textual corpus comprises all four manuscripts containing the Annales Ryenses/Rydårbøger. Content-related and formal variations will be examined as well as dependencies between the manuscripts. For each manuscript a new manuscript description will be available. Furthermore, a study of the reception and context of transmission of this annals in Scandinavia and Northern Germany will be made. Material philology, polysystem theorie and cultural transfer provide the theoretical framework for this project.
