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Four new books: Congratulations, Lucas Knierzinger, Daniel Lüthi, Thibault Martinetti, and Clea Wanner!
Four graduates of the Doctoral Program publish their works which they wrote at the University of Basel.
The Doctoral Program in Literary Studies congratulates four alumni on the publication of their works. They are all based on their dissertations written as part of the DPL and reflect the breadth of the program's interphilological orientation.
Clea Wanner's Entfesselte Körper. Ästhetische Reflexionen zum modernen Menschen im frühen russischen Film (Schüren Verlag, 2022) was written in Slavic Studies. It examines how cinema in the first decade of narrative cinema, 1908–1918 in the late Tsarist Empire, formulated cinematic concepts of corporeality and thereby influenced the idea of the New Man in Russian modernism. The study combines practices from theater and dance as well as cultural, artistic and literary discourses with developments in film aesthetics and film theory.
Thibault Martinetti's Les Muses de l'entomologie. Poétiques et merveilleux de l'insecte de Réaumur à Maeterlinck (Honoré Champion, 2023) combines three important works of the 19th century – L'Insecte (1858) by Jules Michelet, Souvenirs entomologiques (1879–1907) by Jean-Henri Fabre and La Vie des abeilles (1901) by Maurice Maeterlinck – as an expression of entomological literature as a genre defined by both analogous and genealogical relationships between the works. Entomologists are united by their desire to express their extraordinary wonder at insects, their sublimity and ability to confound language and understanding, but also by the motivation to create entomological knowledge whose poetics disrupt the conceptual boundaries created by humans to distinguish animals.
Daniel Lüthi's Mapping a Sense of Humor: Narrative and Space in Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels (Mythopoeic Press, 2023) offers new perspectives on the self-reflective nature of British author Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. In his series of novels, the latter showed a critical perception of world-creation popular in the fantasy genre by creating both a parody of fantasy à la Tolkien and a secondary world in its own right, constantly reminding its readers of its fictionality and providing not only humorous but also reflective stories.
Lucas Knierzinger's Nachleben im Arbeitsmaterial. Dokumentation und Format nach 1900 bei Bertold Brecht, Peter Weiss und Heiner Müller (Wallstein Verlag, 2024) shows how, around 1900, documentation emerged as a cultural technique linked to ideas about the ability to organize in the modern flood of information. Lucas Knierzinger uses three case studies – on Bertolt Brecht's model books, Peter Weiss's notebooks and the various formats in which Heiner Müller processes his conversation recordings – to examine the relationship between documentation and format, thus opening up a history of documentation in the 20th century that explores new concepts of literary work and the "afterlife" of artistic works.