Dr. Annika Klanke

Narrating 'Sorge': Literary Representations of Care/Cura the Early Modern Period to Nineteenth-Century Poetic Realism
(Second Book Project/Habilitation Project)

The project examines care as an ambivalent figure as well as an aesthetic and social practice in German-language texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. At its core are reflections on the conceptual history of care, the reconstruction of a genealogy of literary models of care, and the analysis of literary representations of caring practices. The study focuses, first, on allegories and personifications of care (e.g., in works by Hans Sachs, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe) and, second, on narrated acts of care (e.g., in works by Grimmelshausen, Goethe, Sophie von La Roche, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Wilhelm Raabe). Methodologically, the project combines trope and figure analysis with a power- and domination-sensitive investigation of embodied practices. In doing so, it develops a genealogy of literary representations of care that does not smooth over their ambivalences but instead makes them analytically productive. The project thus contributes, from a literary and cultural-historical perspective, to an embodied approach to gender studies: it reconstructs how gender is produced, experienced, and regulated in and through care within literary texts, viewed from an intersectional perspective. In this way, the study also develops the foundations for a literary history of care that examines the aesthetic, social, moral, and affect-political regimes through which care has been historically constituted.

Representing Experience, Interpreting Experience: Contemporary Feminist Essayism
(Dissertation Project; completed in 2025, book forthcoming with transcript in 2026)

The dissertation offers a comprehensive study within German literary scholarship of the contemporary literary field of feminist essay writing. At its core is the question of how essayists represent subjective experience and what aesthetic, ethical, epistemological, and political functions these representations perform. The study focuses primarily on the German-language literary field and examines a large corpus of authors ranging from Margarete Stokowski and Mely Kiyak to Carolin Emcke and Enis Maci. At the same time, the German-language production of feminist essays is situated within international developments in order to highlight its entanglement with global literary and political movements. The study explores both the emancipatory potential of feminist essay writing and its ideological limitations, while tracing the emergence of the genre since the 1990s in relation to genre history, feminist theory, and broader processes of social transformation.