Dr. Annika Klanke

Narrating care(s). Literary representations of cura/care from the 16th to the 19th century
Habilitation project

The project examines the ambivalences and contradictions of care ("Sorge") from a historical perspective: care is life-sustaining and life-enabling, yet it can equally produce controlling, confining, and violent effects. In its cyclical temporality, it appears as a counter-image to progress and productivity — and yet, as feminist theory has shown, it is the very precondition that these obscure. The project pursues these tensions through a broad corpus of canonical German-language texts from the 16th to the 19th century, focusing on two modes of representation: allegorical personifications of Cura/care (among others Hans Sachs, Herder, and Goethe, drawing on Hyginus' fable of Cura) as well as narrated, dramatized, and lyrical acts of caring (among others Grimmelshausen, La Roche, Schiller, Stifter, and Droste-Hülshoff).

Methodologically, the project combines the analysis of tropes and figures with a power- and domination-sensitive examination of embodied practices, positioning itself at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, gender history, and the history of affect. Beyond historical reconstruction, it pursues a question of literary theory: to what extent can literature itself be understood as a caring practice — or precisely not? In doing so, the project reconstructs, on the one hand, central aspects of a literary and cultural history of care from the early modern period to the Sattelzeit; on the other hand, it contributes to the debate on the practical dimension of the aesthetic. It also addresses, from a historical perspective, a contradiction evident in social-scientific and moral-philosophical care research as well as in current political, media, and feminist debates on care: here, care at times appears as an ethical figure of salvation, whereby its own entanglement in asymmetry, domination, and violence threatens to be obscured.
In this way, the project casts a critical, historically informed eye on present-day imaginaries, conceptions, and models of care, examining literature as a space of reflection for the contradictoriness of care and caring.

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"Raunen." Literary Ambiguity and its Appropriation by the New Right in German-Language Literature since 1945 · Third-party-funded project, together with Mareike Gronich (Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies)

The project examines an aesthetic in German-language literature since 1945 that may provisionally be described as "raunend" (loosely: insinuating, murmuring, suggestive between the lines): highly polysemic texts that evoke hidden layers of meaning whose interpretation presupposes a specific knowledge of symbolic codes as well as of literary-historical and theoretical discourses. Characteristic features are rhetorical procedures of obscuritas along with motif complexes such as decadence, foreignness, or effeminization—from the early postwar period (Ernst Jünger, Heimito von Doderer) through the Tendenzwende (Botho Strauß, Peter Handke, Martin Walser) to the present (Monika Maron, Simon Strauß, Uwe Tellkamp, Christian Kracht). Such texts find particular resonance in the hegemonic cultural work of the "New Right," without the authors themselves being attributable to that milieu; rather, their ambiguity opens up divergent and at times also power-critical and emancipatory readings. The project therefore consistently distinguishes between a level of literary production, on which ambiguity is aesthetically generated, and a level of reception, on which actors of the New Right strategically exploit this openness for their cultural politics. Any claim about the convictions or intentions of the authors is thus expressly not intended. Methodologically, the project pursues three directions: first, it undertakes literary-theoretical conceptual work on the aesthetic techniques of "Raunen" and renders this hitherto vague concept operationalizable; second, it analyzes the New Right's affiliative communication across an interlinked media network—from literary podcasts and YouTube formats through the journal Sezession to the book fair Seitenwechsel—as itself a "raunende" practice of multiple coding, though here an intentional one (for instance as a dog-whistle strategy); and third, it relates these findings back to the central literary-studies concept of polysemy, which in aesthetic theory after 1945 (Adorno, Iser/Jauß, Eco) was mobilized as a safeguard against political appropriation. By considering literary production, strategic reception, and institutional framing together, the project addresses a disciplinary blind spot and opens up perspectives for a critical reformulation of foundational literary-theoretical assumptions. Beyond this theoretical question, it aims at practice-oriented reflection: it develops a set of tools for identifying and contextualizing "raunende" modes of writing, thinking, and interpretation—tools that connect to literary as well as civic education and to projects in defense of democracy.
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Representing experience, interpreting experience. Feminist essay writing of the present
Dissertation project completed in February 2025. The study will be published by transcript in 2026.

(doctoral) thesis offers a comprehensive German-language examination of the contemporary literary field of feminist essay writing. It focuses on the question of how essayists represent subjective experience and what aesthetic, ethical, epistemological and political functions these forms of representation fulfil. The focus is on the German-language literary scene: a large corpus of authors ranging from Margarete Stokowski to Mely Kiyak and Carolin Emcke to Enis Maci will be analysed. At the same time, the German-language production of feminist essays is embedded in international developments in order to visualise their interconnections with global literary and political movements. The study illuminates both the emancipatory potential of feminist essay writing and its ideological limitations and traces the genesis of the genre since the 1990s in interaction with the history of the genre, feminist theory and social transformation.