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Reading Reading. On an Aesthetic Practice (2024–)

Barbara Bausch, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
Professional-Track Postdoctoral Project

In the face of global predicaments in which there is an urgent need to fundamentally rethink social relations amidst a spreading feeling of powerlessness, contemporary literary production is reacting with a re-evaluation of political writing. It is not only in German-speaking countries that a reflection on the potency of aesthetic practices through intensified work on the literary form can be observed – namely on an open, unstable, dynamised form that places reading as an aesthetic, community-building and potentially critical practice at the centre of attention. On the one hand, the texts explicitly expose themselves as texts fed by the practice of reading and inscribing themselves in transtemporal discourses and communities; on the other hand, they attempt to model spaces of experience and reflection through their formal design rather than immersive readings. Readers are overtly addressed as participants in a communal "literary work" (Barthes) and encouraged to engage in self-reflective, interventionist reading.

The project is thus dedicated to reading as an aesthetic, i.e. (according to Reckwitz) self-referential, creative, affective, experimental and potentially political practice. Between receptivity and collaboration, reading is an act in which subjects and entities are first formed in a relational exchange. It is an act which, through communication, can create or strengthen cross-temporal and transcultural connections, reorganise the view of the past as well as the present and can be regarded as an arena for social self-understanding.

But reading as a practice between human actors, genres, media or political projects is notoriously difficult to observe—according to Christian von Herrmann and Jeannie Moser, it can only be tracked down "in flagranti". The Professional Track Postdoc project responds to this challenge with a twofold approach. On the one hand, it approaches the subject from the perspective of literary studies via theoretical and literary texts that have transferred the knowledge of reading into their form, asking how processes of inclusion and exclusion are textually staged, modelled and evoked. On the other hand, it sounds out the connection between individual and communal, quiet and loud reading and the creation of temporary and transtemporal communities in actual embodied performance by means of explorative collaborative formats. At the junction of scientific and artistic procedures, the project investigates how literature as a material, social and performative practice that only exists in action is realised and transformed in the practice of everyday, academic and literary reading and how it can be socially effective as aesthetic doing, "a provocation, a rebellion" (Cixous).

 

Events & Formats

Performance/Lesestück | Die Welt z/erlesen (Oktober 2025)

Ein Lesetagebuch, eine Mitschrift, Notizen. Ein Vortrag, ein Versuch nach vorn. Der Welt und all ihren Ereignissen lesend begegnen, lesend antworten, lesend ent- und beikommen. Ein Abend von und mit Heike Geißler und Anna Lena von Helldorff. Das z/erlesene Leben in einer z/erlesenen Welt.

Roundtable | Reading Matters (July 2025)

Against the backdrop of the current transformation of our reading culture, the roundtable with Laura Bieger, Hanan Natour and Heike Geißler aims to foreground the practice of reading literature both as a form of social participation and as a means of reflection for individuals and communities. Part of the EXC 2020 Annual Conference 2025 "Futures of Doing Literature", 9–11 July 2025.

Featured Format | READING READING: IL/LEGIBLE

The format IL/LEGIBLE engages with reading in a transdisciplinary investigation starting from its absolute limit: the illegible. The results of this exploration in the form of essays, performances, visual works and workshop concepts by thirteen artists and scholars from a broad variety of disciplines were presented to the public at an event at daadgalerie in March 2025 and can be further explored in the publication "Illegibilities Reflecting Reading". In cooperation with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program.

Performance Workshop | How to Sing a Picture? (June 2025)

In her performances, the visual and sound poet Kinga Tóth 'sings' visual works by responding with vocal gestures to filmed and projected graphic poems and drawings, understanding these interpretations of her visual poetry as three-dimensional 'living text bodies', or, more simply, as 'readings'. The aim of this workshop is to build bridges between languages and reading practices, and to celebrate the act of creation, of sounding together.

Workshops, Exhibition, Talks & Performances | READING READING ROOM (March 2025)

Paying special attention to the question of what happens when what we perceive as successful reading is blocked, the event highlights reading not only as a functional act of decoding information, but also as an aesthetic, sensual, affective, experimental and political practice in its own right. READING READING ROOM brings together scholars and artists to explore and discuss the precarious practice of reading by reflecting on its absolute limit: the illegible.

Workshop | Mapping Textual Spaces (March 2025)

The workshop by the designers Robin Coenen and Danielle Rosales invites participants to explore reading material as a visual, structural and interpretive process. We will engage with unreadable textual artifacts, seeking new insights through artistic visual analysis and documenting our reading process through mappings.

Seminar | Theorien und Praktiken des Lesens (WS 24/25)

Was Virginia Woolf im Jahr 1926 schrieb, gilt bis heute: "though reading seems so simple – a mere matter of knowing the alphabet – it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it." Forschungsseminar am Peter Szondi-Institut und der Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien, gemeinsam mit Julia Weber.