Research Programme

Chair: Prof. Dr. Susanne Lüdemann (Department of German Studies)
Vice Chair: Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring (Department of English Studies)

From heroic sagas of antiquity up to the present-day revival of family romance and life writing,
world literature offers a rich archive of family matters. Literary studies have not as yet explored
this archive except in terms of social history, using literature as a socio-historical source or,
alternatively, as a medium of socialisation and intergenerational engagement. The Research
Training Group we propose takes quite a different approach. We understand ‘family’ as an imaginary institution (Castoriadis) and an imagined community (Anderson), decisively shaped
and brought about by literature as a transcultural and interdiscursive medium of social
reflection. We thus proceed on the assumption that whatever is conceived as ‘family’ is largely
negotiated through cultural master narratives and iconic images. They (pre)figure kinship
systems and gender roles, structures of feelings and relationships, fundamental family norms
and conflicts just as the strategies to deal with them, in this way also offering occasions to
construct and contest the symbolic order whose normative power and claims must
continuously be reaffirmed, justified, revised, criticised, modified, deconstructed, appropriated
or rejected. In this process, ‘family’ operates not just as an important module in all attempts at
creating order but also as an elementary figure of allegiance and release – a figure uneasily
encompassing ancestry as well as offspring, heteronomy as well as autonomy, identification
as well as alienation, a figure therefore of literature itself which also always comes into itself
by means of binding and releasing (desis and lysis). For this reason, Mikhail Bakhtin already
identified ‘family’ as one of the basic formal devices (chronotopoi) of world literature. Our
Research Training Group brings together experienced and early stage researchers from all of
LMU’s literature departments, ranging from Classics to contemporary writing. The first project
of its kind in literary studies, we propose to explore ‘family matters’ in comparative and
theoretical approaches, and with a view to their historical and cultural specificities, including
transcultural and postcolonial perspectives. We aim to work towards a systematic account of
the literary paradigms and discourses that produce ‘the familial’ and so establish a
comprehensive archaeology (Foucault) of the family imaginary. At the same time, we plan to
address and question historical master narratives such as Hegel’s philosophy of history,
Riehl’s notion of ‘the whole house’ (“das ganze Haus”), or Freud’s origin story of parricide,
which – though scientifically falsified – continue to shape myths of the bourgeois nuclear family.
Working on and through such myths is imperative today, all the more so because current
developments in biotechnology and reproductive medicine are producing new and alternative
forms of parenting (beyond biological sex) that radically challenge our understanding of family
and kinship.

Involved university teachers: Prof. Dr. Tobias Döring (English Philology); Prof. Dr. Therese Fuhrer (Classic Philology/Latin Studies); Prof. Dr. Annette Keck (Modern German Literature, Cultural Theory and Gender Studies); Prof. Dr. Martin v. Koppenfels (General and Comparative Literature); Prof. Dr. Susanne Lüdemann (Modern German Literature and General Literature); Prof. Dr. Riccardo Nicolosi (Slavic Philology); Prof. Dr. Juliane Prade-Weiss (General and Comparative Literature); Prof. Dr. Susanne Reichlin (German Literature of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period); Prof. Dr. Joachim Schiedermair (Nordic Philology); Prof. Dr. Barbara Vinken (French and General Literature).

The College's used languages are German and English.

Excerpts of the research programme and the research bibliography are included below.