Dr. Annika Klanke

Narrating Care. Literary Representations of Cura/Care from the 16th Century to the Present Day
Habilitation project

This project examines the ambivalences and contradictions of care from a historical longitudinal perspective: Care is life-sustaining and life-enabling, yet it can also exert controlling, restrictive and coercive effects, as it is usually given and received within asymmetrical relationships characterised by dependency. In its cyclical, repetitive temporality, it appears as the antithesis of progress and productivity, yet, as feminist theory has shown, it is their hidden prerequisite.

The starting point is the thesis that care, as a fundamental condition of human existence, simultaneously constitutes a representational problem for literature. It cuts across the key categories of aesthetics and theory: to the linking of art to freedom from the necessities of life and to the ideal of autonomous subjectivity around 1800; to the ‘aesthetics of the event’ of the avant-garde; to the concept of the ‘event’ in structuralist narratology; and to the ironic distance of postmodernism. Nevertheless, literature depicts care in every era, often in inconspicuous places; it frequently becomes legible only by reading between the lines and at the level of form.

This project explores these tensions across genres using canonical German-language texts from the 16th century to the present day (including Hans Sachs, Grimmelshausen, La Roche, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter, Kafka, Jelinek and Güçyeter). It focuses on the ways in which care is represented at the level of motif and, in particular, at the level of form: on allegory and personification, as they characterise the reception of Hyginus’s ‘Cura’ fable; on narrative voice and focalisation; on temporal structures of repetition, cyclicality and interruption, on constellations of characters, marginal figures and gaps, as well as on genre choice and forms of address. The guiding assumption is that worry becomes legible precisely where texts address their representational problem formally. The aim is to develop an open typology of literary representations of care that reflects the historical shifts in the structures of care from the early modern period to the present day.

Methodologically, the project combines tropological and figurative analysis with narratological form analysis (narrator voice, focalisation, temporal structure, genre, address) and an examination of embodied actions that is sensitive to power and domination. It is situated at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, and the history of gender and affect.

Beyond historical reconstruction, it addresses a question of literary theory: to what extent can literature itself be understood as a caring practice? In doing so, the project contributes to a literary and cultural history of care from the early modern period to the present day, to the debate on the practical dimension of the aesthetic, and to the critical expansion of narrative-theoretical categories. At the same time, it examines—from a historical perspective—a contradiction within the social scientific, moral-philosophical, political and feminist debates on care: care is sometimes presented there as an ethical figure of salvation, which risks obscuring its entanglement with asymmetry, domination and violence. In this way, the project explores literature as a space for reflection on the contradictions inherent in care and concerns, and renders the contemporary orders of care legible against the backdrop of their long history.

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The Murmur. Literary Ambiguity and its Appropriation by the New Right in German-language Literature since 1945 · third-party funded project, in collaboration with Mareike Gronich (Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies)

The project investigates an aesthetic in German-language literature since 1945 that can provisionally be characterised as ‘whispering’: highly polysemic texts that evoke hidden levels of meaning, the interpretation of which requires specific knowledge of symbolic codes as well as literary-historical and theoretical discourses. Characteristic features include rhetorical devices of ‘obscuritas’ as well as thematic complexes such as decadence, otherness or feminisation, ranging from the early post-war period (e.g. Ernst Jünger, Heimito von Doderer) through the ‘Tendenzwende’ period (e.g. Botho Strauß, Peter Handke, Martin Walser) right up to the present day (e.g. Monika Maron, Simon Strauß, Uwe Tellkamp, Christian Kracht).
Such texts find particular resonance in the hegemonic cultural work of the so-called ‘New Right’**, without the authors themselves necessarily belonging to this milieu. Rather, the literary ambiguity of their texts gives rise to divergent interpretations, some of which are critical of the establishment and emancipatory in nature. The project therefore consistently distinguishes between a level of literary production, at which ambiguity is generated aesthetically, and a level of reception, at which New Right actors strategically exploit this openness for their literary policy. It is therefore expressly not intended to make any statement about the authors’ views or intentions.
The project pursues three objectives: Firstly, it carries out conceptual work in literary theory on the aesthetic techniques of ‘whispering’ and makes this hitherto vague concept operational; secondly, it analyses the New Right’s follow-up communication across media platforms – from literary podcasts and YouTube formats, through *Sezession* magazine, to the *Seitenwechsel* book fair in November 2025 in Halle/Saale – itself as a whispering, yet in this context intentional, practice of multiple coding (such as a ‘dog-whistle’ strategy); and thirdly, it relates these findings to the central concept of polysemy in literary studies, which was established in aesthetic theory after 1945 (Adorno, Iser/Jauß, Eco) as a safeguard against political co-optation. By examining literary production, strategic reception and institutional framing in conjunction, the project addresses a disciplinary gap and opens up perspectives for a critical reformulation of fundamental assumptions in literary theory. Beyond the theoretical question, it aims to generate reflections relevant to practice: It develops a set of tools for identifying and contextualising insidious modes of writing, thinking and interpretation that are required in literary outreach (e.g. in cultural journalism and literary centres), in political education and in educational institutions (schools, universities, adult education) due to the growing influence of New Right actors.

** The so-called ‘New Right’ is an intellectual and journalistic movement within the German-speaking far right which cultivates a völkisch-nationalist, masculinist, anti-egalitarian conception of social order and primarily conceives of politics as a struggle for cultural interpretative sovereignty (‘metapolitics’). Historically, the New Right draws prominently on the Conservative Revolution of the interwar period; further intellectual points of reference include the French Nouvelle Droite centred on Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, from which it has adopted both the concept of ‘ethnopluralism’ and the strategic idea—turned against Gramsci—of a metapolitical ‘cultural revolution from the right’, as well as the anti-liberal thought of Carl Schmitt and Armin Mohler.

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Representing Experience, Interpreting Experience: Contemporary Feminist Essay Writing
PhD project completed in February 2025. The study will be published by transcript in 2026.

The (doctoral) thesis offers a comprehensive German studies analysis of the contemporary literary field of feminist essay writing. It centres 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-speaking literary scene: the study examines a broad corpus of authors, ranging from Margarete Stokowski to Mely Kiyak and Carolin Emcke to Enis Maci. At the same time, the German-language production of feminist essays is situated within international developments in order to highlight its interconnections with global literary and political movements. The study highlights both the emancipatory potential of feminist essay writing and its ideological limitations, and traces the genesis of the genre since the 1990s in relation to the history of the genre, feminist theory and social transformation.