The workshop is organized by Isabel von Holt (Freie Universität Berlin) und Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard University) in the context of the Dahlem Junior Host Program.

In the 1970s, Michel Foucault famously coined the concept of biopolitics or “bio-power”, which centers on the disciplined biological body. Since then, the body itself has become a focal research object in literary and cultural studies. In the Unites States, for instance, Donna Haraway has analyzed the changing conceptions of the body in the age of information technology and bio-medicine, while Katherine N. Hayles has described the increasing cyborgization and virtualization of the body in the “posthuman” age. This side of the Atlantic, the focus on the body has been a different one. Since the late 1990s, a “new longing for substantiality” (H. U. Gumbrecht) and the rise of what recently has been termed a “new Realism” (A. Koschorke) in the humanities have put a new emphasis on questions of reality, materiality, and presence. The physical body plays a pivotal role here: How can we grasp corporealities in the digital age, when the boundaries between reality and virtuality are becoming increasingly blurred? How do these ideas of corporeality correspond with those of previous times, such as for example the early modern „gelebte Leiblichkeit“? And with what kinds of poetic strategies does literature attempt to make such transformations palpable?  

The workshop aims to explore how literature represents and dismantles corporealities by at the same time re-creating them on its own terms and challenging its very own modes of representation. The papers to be presented in this workshop will discuss poetics of the body, corporealities, and biopolitics in literary texts from the 17^th century to the present in order to identify continuities and iterations of these concepts. In contrast to Foucault’s notion of epistemic „ruptures“ that arguably mark the threshold between early modern, classical, and modern thought, the approach of this workshop is to detect subcutaneous dynamics that transition throughout different orders of knowledge over the course of a longue durée.

Speakers: Klaus Birnstiel (Universität Basel), Mario Grizelj (LMU), Irmela-Marei Krüger-Fürhoff (FU Berlin), Isabel von Holt (FU Berlin), Nicole Sütterlin (Harvard)

The workshop is open to the public. Presentations and discussions will be held in German.

Contact: isabel.vonholt@fu-berlin.de

The program is available here.