Organised by Barbara Bausch, Anna Luhn and Ansgar Riedißer, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies", co-funded by the Dahlem Junior Host Program 2026 and the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies.

Literature and incomprehensibility are closely linked. Literary texts may become incomprehensible over time, offer an understanding only selectively to certain readers, or deliberately play with obscurity. Paradoxically, it is these phenomena of irritation, of superficial or partial incomprehensibility, that profoundly shape what we have come to understand as literary communication. Literary language often disrupts expectations and finds surprising ways of communicating within and beyond established parameters of language use. Reading literature thus provokes a reflection on conventional uses of language and their limits – the experience of reading an incomprehensible text calls into question preconceived notions of understanding.

Right now, the majority of widely accessible chatbots and applications based on Large Language Models are programmed to provide seemingly objective statements, phrased in a readily accessible way. Faced with this strong paradigm of treating language as a supposedly neutral vessel for knowledge and information transfer, discussing the difficulty and the friction of literary communication gains a new urgency. Therefore, it seems no coincidence that German literary criticism has recently seen a renewed interest in the 'licences to obscurity' (Spoerhase) that since antiquity have allowed literary texts a complex way of communicating, the 'riddles of prose' (Gamper) that shape narrative styles, and the history of incomprehensibility (Al-Taie, Christen). With hermeneutic notions of understanding being challenged and transformed into a critical theory of understanding in philosophy (Bertram), we think that it is the right time to discuss the potential of incomprehensibility.

In the workshop, we want to use incomprehensibility as a conceptual lens through which new perspectives on (literary) communication, (literary) language, and critical text-based scholarship can be gained both against the backdrop of the history of the discourse on incomprehensibility as well as the current media revolution.

Programme

18:00–20:00 | Literatur und die Freiheit des Verstehens. Gespräch mit Georg W. Bertram (auf Deutsch/ in German)

10:30–11:00 | Ansgar Riedißer, Barbara Bausch & Anna Luhn (Freie Universität Berlin): Huh? Welcome and Introduction

11:00–12:30 | READING SESSION: Poem by John Ashbery with Ansgar Riedißer, Barbara Bausch & Anna Luhn

12:30–13:30 | Lunch

HISTORY AND POETICS OF INCOMPREHENSIBILITY

13:30–14:30 | PD Dr. Yvonne Al Taie (Universität Kiel): Amplifying the Grains: The Figure of Shell and Seed as the Incomprehensible Extension of the Grainy Style

14:30–15:30 | Dr. Manuel Ghilarducci (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Figurations of Obscurity and Unintelligibility in Cyprian Norwid's and Đorđe Koder's Poetry

15:30–16:00 | Coffee Break

DIFFICULTY AND (MIS)COMPREHENSION

16:00–17:00 | Dr. Jana Weiß (Europa-Universität Viadrina): Kafka's Jargon and Celan's Umlaut. On Multilingualism and Incomprehensibility

17:00–18:00 | Dr. Hannah Wallenfels (diffrakt. zentrum für theoretische peripherie): When Understanding Fails. Philosophical Perspectives on the Limits of (Mis)comprehension

18:00 | Walk & Dinner at Miss Wu

(LITERARY) COMMUNICATION AND (LITERARY) NOISE

10:00–11:30 | Prof. Dr. Lori Emerson (University of Colorado Boulder): Information Theory and the Problem of Noise in the Illegible Text

11:30–12:30 | Dr. Barbara Bausch (Freie Universität Berlin): Subverting Communication. On the Poetics of Noise

12:30–13:30 | Lunch

13:30–14:30 | Dr. Anna Luhn (Collegium Helveticum): Incomprehensibility as a Preservation Strategy: Mobilising the Literary Against New Word Orders

14:30–15:30 | Ansgar Riedißer (Freie Universität Berlin): Just Difficult. How Literature Studies Speak about Poetic Incomprehensibility

15:30–16:30 | Final Discussion