New Young Scholars’ Network on ‘Narrative Liminality’ funded by German Research Foundation

The chair for North American Literature at the TU Dresden takes part in a new young scholars’ network which is being funded by the German Research Foundation, starting September 2017.

The network proposes the notion of ‘narrative liminality’ as a category for the study of US American modern culture. In so doing, the network aims to inquire into the cultural processes and negotiations that take place in the borderlands between narrative and other discourses situated at the fringes of narrative symbolic form – such as the database, or the game.

Starting out from the hypothesis that ‘narrative liminality’ gains particular cultural currency in contexts of sociocultural transformation, dynamization, and self-reflection, the network aims to explore how this category has served as a key idiom in the negotiation of American modernities.

For the years to come, the network plans to host a series of workshops and conferences focussing on this subject.