PhD students 3rd cohort

Dajana Daum, M.A.

Dajana Daum, M.A.
Friedrich Schiller University Jena
DFG-Graduiertenkolleg „Modell Romantik“
Bachstraße 18k | R. 108
07743 Jena
+49 3641 944-196
dajana.daum@uni-jena.de

Curriculum Vitae

2009-2015 Bachelor of Arts in Slavistics and Educational Science at the University of Hamburg

2011 + 2013 Student Tutor for the Introduction to Russian Literary Science at the University of Hamburg

WS 2011/2012 Exchange semester at State University Saint Petersburg, Russia

2014-2015 Student assistant in the research project „Russian and Polish heritage language as a ressource in school?“ at the University of Greifswald“

2015-2019 Master of Arts in „Literature-Arts-Culture“ with main subject Russian Literary Science at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

WS 2017/18 Student Tutor for South Slavic Literary Science at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

10/2021 PhD student and research associate at the Research Training Group “The Romantic Model”

PhD Project

Communism as a romantic place for longing in Andrej Platonov's literary works

The starting point of this project is the assumption that the works of the Russian author Andrej Platonov (1899-1951) have utopian features, which can be found in a particular representation of Russian post-revolutionary society and its striving or waiting for communism. Communism becomes a romantic place of longing, as it contains a new promise of oneness with the world. This place is stylized as a destination, sometimes for individual happiness, sometimes for society. The perspective fluctuates incessantly between the compatibility and incompatibility of these levels, which contributes to the fact that the communist utopia sometimes emerges as a dystopia. This is only one of many opposing directions that lead to a double perspective in Platonov's works. Building on this, the dissertation project aims to investigate how an updated model of Romanticism can be extracted from the author's literary texts.
Another important aspect will be Platonov's work's assumed relationship between early romantic social utopian conceptions and philosophical standpoints. This is mainly about the possibility of freedom and individualism and their relationship to structures of domination and external determination. What specific historical conditions enable or promote the actualization of a romantic model? A bridge is to be built from the early romantic philosophy of Novalis, through Marx's early writings, to Platonov's development of an emphatic concept of nature based on a paradigm of love.
With a poetology of "anticipation" (russ. predčuvstvie), Platonov gives the artist prophetic traits since his work would contain a kind of future based on the present, which would be visible in representations of "true" feelings. Every "authentic "feeling would let the subject foresee the conditionality of one feeling. This contributes to a picture puzzle that shows the existence and perishing, possibility and impossibility of something simultaneously. Explicit and implicit poetological reflections form yet another level on which an actualization of Romanticism in Andrej Platonov potentially occurs.