Organisers: Dîlan C. Çakir, Martin Kuhn, Felix Lempp, Nadine Redmer, Merisa Taranis, Viola Völlm, Dominik Wabersich
Scholarly Networks and Solitude
Sometimes
it is voluntary and other times, as in lockdown, it is imposed. Even
before the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of solitude was recognised as a
serious issue for literary and scholarly writing, as well as reading.
How to handle solitude, but also the need for solitude, is different for
every form of reading and writing, and in Literature Studies the
ambivalence of solitude raises questions that go well beyond the
contexts of literary production. While working alone at a desk may be
regarded as disciplined, for early career researchers, interaction and
exchange with a network is also essential. There are in fact numerous
arguments for the establishment of a network of young researchers, whose
members come together and work to strengthen the interaction between
postgraduates and ECRs, irrespective of their institutional affiliation.
In
order to address this need, as postgraduates and ECRs, our aim is to
organise an annual conference with the support of the German Schiller
Association (DSG) and the German Literature Archive Marbach (DLA). In
addition to the opportunity to present their research, this will allow
ECRs to get acquainted with the DLA and its museums and to discuss
issues affecting ECRs outside the immediate field of their research.
While
the network aims to invite scholarly dialogue, it also aims to
facilitate opportunities for free and informal exchange between
participants and experts about career paths and the challenges in
obtaining qualifications and in the post-qualification period. In
addition to this, skills workshops will be offered. The first conference
of this kind will take place 3-4 November 2022, and will be dedicated to the broad theme of reflections on solitude:
1. Research papers reflecting on solitude (interdisciplinary)
2. A workshop on ECRs and mental health
3. Tour of the archive and the museums in Marbach
4. Evening event
For
(1.) abstracts reflectingon the issue of solitude accompanied by a
short CV of the applicant are highly welcome. Note it is still possible
to attend the conference without giving a research paper.
You do
not have to be a member of the German Schiller Association or a Schiller
researcher in order to submit an abstract. External submissions are
welcome!
● Presentations can be given in German or in English.
● The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2022.
● The conference is planned to take place in-person.
Submissions should consider the following:
Literature and Solitude
Solitude
is an ambiguous phenomenon: while it is understood on the one hand as
exclusion from a society, isolation, or social anxiety, on the other
hand, positive conceptions of solitude emphasise the individual sense of
freedom and autonomy, and the creative energy that is released by it.
Conceptions of solitude are linked here to aspects of mental and
physical health, and to conceptions of happiness.
While nowadays
search engine results for the term ‘Solitude’ principally name
publications concerning the pandemic, the conference intends to address
reflections on solitude in literature, philosophy and art in the current
context of Covid-19 but as well beyond the latter. What are the
prevailing forms and characteristics of solitude in different places and
times? How are they individually experienced and shaped by literature?
Who seeks solitude and who avoids it? What duties and freedoms does an
individual have in a society that may support or condemn isolation? Is
solitude a means of stimulating creativity and self-reflection or an
elite privilege involving an egoistic and antisocial mind-set? What is
its relationship with the related concepts of boredom and loneliness?
When is sociability preferable to solitude? Is there an ‘Aesthetics of
Solitude? Are there any trends that can be demonstrated through
increased use of specific motifs or narrative patterns? Who writes about
solitude? To what extent are literary production and literary reception
solitary tasks, or forms of ‘interaction-free communication’ (Luhmann)?
In an era of globalisation and digitisation, how are research findings
in the fields of sociology and psychopathology on the subject of
solitude expressed in literature? Is solitude gendered? To what extent
is solitude defined as a place of longing?
Due to its ambiguity,
the concept is also relevant to the field of literature: reflections on
solitude and literature can relate to the thematic level or indeed to
those of reception or aesthetics and production. Thus neither the act of
reading, nor literary production, have been construed as a solitary
activity since the birth of the modern era.
Even in the eighteenth century, the literature of the Enlightenment considered this problem: In Rêveries du promeneur solitaire
(1782), for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau calls for a conscious
retreat into solitude for the purpose of self-reflection. Sophie von La
Roche began her major work, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim
(1771), in reaction to her solitude and boredom. Besides Christian
Grave and Joseph von Sonnenfels, the popular philosopher Johann Georg
Zimmermann also devoted himself in several texts in the eighteenth
century to the question of solitude, in which he also opposed lone
contemplation with the human ‘drive to socialise’. Contemplation and
creativity in solitude and the longing for recognition and security in
society also defined the field for literary reflections on solitude in
subsequent centuries. Romantic loners, such as Ludwig Tiecks Christian,
sought a path between social integration via marriage and isolated
hiking on the Runenberg (1804). In his Letters to a Young Poet
(1929), Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young author Franz Xaver Kappus
to utilise the severity of solitude for his writing, and Stefan Zweig
demonstrated in his work The Royal Game (1944) what the
psychopathological consequences of imposed solitude can be with the
character of Dr B. In exile, authors seek support in solitude and make
efforts to form networks – for example, Hilde Domin repeatedly urged her
friend, Nelly Sachs, to support her career. In contemporary
post-migration texts like Deniz Ohdes’ Streulicht (2020) or Sasha Mariana Salzmann’s stage work Us Braids
(2014), the solitude of the protagonist can often be interpreted as a
mode of being, which stages their condition in the space between their
homeland of their (grand)parents’ generation and their own country of
birth. In Marius Goldhorn’s Park (2020) however, solitude seems
to the narrator to be a postmodern feeling of loneliness, meaning that,
despite the networking effects of globalisation and digitisation, he
seems only to perceive the world passively.
This brief overview
being neither exhaustive nor prescriptive illustrates how, again and
again, literature, the literary scene, and Literature Studies prove the
multifaceted uses of the motif of solitude. On the one hand, solitude is
cast as a requirement for inventive creativity, a means of exploring
belief and the soul, and a mode of deepening engagement with nature and
self-knowledge. On the other hand, it is also viewed as the result of
societal alienation, a lifestyle of melancholy, and the result of
discrimination and exclusion.
More information about the work of the German Schiller Association can be found here: https://www.dla-marbach.de/ueber-uns/traegerverein-dsg/
