PhD students 1st cohort

Dr. Hendrick Heimböckel's CV and publications can be found on the website of the Institut für Germanistik at the University of Osnabrück.

Totality and Otherness – The Aesthetics of the Absolute in the Prose of the German-Speaking Generation of the 1890s

This PhD project on the German-language prose of the 1920s to the 1950s emerges from an historical systematic investigative frame of reference: Which representative forms in German-language romantic prose (1795–1830) are realisations of reflections on the ‘the absolute’, a key expression in the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism? Can a production model of aesthetics for figure development in narrative texts and a reception model of aesthetics for endowing with existential meaning be derived from the semantic features and function of these styles in the particular contexts of action? Considering the deviations and constants in the content, are these models integrated into the prose of the 1920s to the 1950s in light of the scientific, technical, social and political developments, changes and pauses that occurred?

The point of departure for the analysis undertaken in this thesis is the literary representations of the phenomenon of the epiphany. The expression ‘epiphany’ as a religious term refers to a transcendental experience that is associated with the appearance of a divine being. While the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism turn epiphanies into a phenomenon of textual reflection by means of theorising the absolute, romantic narrative literature portrays both religious and profane epiphanies by means of the perception of figures. In these epiphanies encounters with other people, nature and art evoke transcendental experiences. The phenomenon of the epiphany acts as a model for narrative experience and can contribute to the existential giving of meaning for readers. The task of the research is accordingly to analyse epiphanies and other representations of reflections on the absolute in romantic narrative literature, their abstraction to production and reception models of aesthetics and their application to the corpus from the 1920s to the 1950s in terms of their deviation and constancy.