PhD students 2nd cohort

Julia Schreiter (born 1987) studied German language and literature, art history and cultural history at FSU Jena. After her academic studies, she completed an editorial traineeship at an architecture magazine and later worked as an editorial journalist for various business magazines. She has been a PhD student at the ‘Romanticism as a Model’ research training group since October 2018.

Literary Aspects of Play in the Works of Robert Walser, Wilhelm Genazino and Matthias Zschokke – a Gradual Reception History of Romanticism

In many works of Robert Walser, Wilhelm Genazino and Matthias Zschokke, one encounters moments that can be subsumed under the quality of lightness and the metaphor of floating. The tragic is disrupted by aestheticisation, metafiction and the focus on linguistic and formal aspects.

This process is analogous to the literary methods of creating individual characters or entire texts that was established by Ludwig Tieck and Joseph von Eichendorff. Using Wolfgang Iser’s definition of the methodical term “Textspiel” from Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre, this dissertation intends to define and differentiate these analogies.

Iser works with the four categories of play – agôn, alea, mimicry and ilinx – which were used by sociologist Roger Caillois and from which Iser derived his four positions. Iser used these to define moments of conflicting intra-textual positions as well as the reader’s expectations (agôn), chance (alea), imitation (mimicry) and subversion (ilinx). The aim of the PhD project is to analyse how these forms interact with the works of the respective authors. The project also aims to show to which extent the aspects of play used in romanticist texts coincide with those of later authors, wherein these distinctions lie, and what effect those differences have on character design and textual accounts.