Poetiken des Parasitären
Internally funded project
Start date : 01.01.2019
Project details
Scientific Abstract
The project “Parasite Poetics in Scandinavian Literature” explores the epistemic, poetological, and ecocritical functions of parasitic relations in Scandinavian texts and films. The relevance of parasitism manifests in four scenarios: 1) in the borderline figure of the sponger and the (uninvited) guest, often involving questions of social and political dynamics and also the literary-social phenomenon of patronage in the arts, co-authorship, and ghostwriting; 2) as an intertextual phenomenon incorporating parasitic and participatory writing processes and the linked relations between pretext and post-text, and between text, paratext, and context (also intermedially in the form of literary and film remakes); 3) poetological processes resembling parasitic irritations, infiltrations, infections and corruptions from the inside, incorporating the transformation of de- or re-composition; and 4) as a dynamic complex relation in the context of one or more ecosystems.
This project will be the first to focus on eco-parasitic aesthetics in Scandinavian literary and audiovisual fictions from the eighteenth through to the twenty-first century. It will chart a course through literary history, exploring philosophical, political, intertextual, poetological and ecocritical approaches to parasitic systems, figures and rhetoric. The dual foci of the project, encompassing both poetological aspects and posthuman/ecosystemic elements, will cover the main developments in the application and evaluation of parasitic principles. The aim of the project is to examine the generative strategies of parasitic systems and/or their transference in epistemological, sociocultural, and poetological systems, to map their various irritations and variations, and explore their potential to modify and expand worldviews – both in terms of aesthetic principles and in the post-humanist conceptualization of human-environment-interactions. One particular angle that has not been pursued hitherto is the understanding of parasites as ecosystem dynamics that challenge the anthropocentrism of human worlding, in that they question, irritate or subvert the traditional subject and scenarios that uphold the human-nature dichotomy.
