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

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.