Lilith Tiefenbacher, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"
Doctoral Research Project

Tiefenbacher's dissertation project focuses on three contemporary women poets – Alice Oswald (b. 1966), Anne Carson (b. 1950) and Barbara Köhler (1959–2021) – whose works are profoundly shaped by their engagement with texts from Greek antiquity. The project departs from the observation that, through their re-readings of ancient texts, all three authors move beyond both iconoclastic corrections and traditionalist imitations. Their engagements with the ancient canon are characterised neither by idealisation nor by competition but, so the project's guiding hypothesis suggests, by a vital philological interest that unfolds through specific practices of reading, writing and translation.

The project's aim is to analyse these practices comparatively and to examine them under the rubric of Joyful Philology. Proceeding from the assumption that Köhler's, Oswald's and Carson's writings are not merely informed by classical philology but themselves engage in philological work, the dissertation investigates the distinctive nature of their knowledge of antiquity and the poetic forms in which this knowledge is articulated. It asks at which points these poets, as contemporary poetae philologae, expand the boundaries of academic philology and how they reconfigure their knowledge of classical philology through idiosyncratic – or, indeed, 'joyful' – practices of reading, writing and translation. The project is based on the premise that the joyfulness of the authors' philological approaches can be described only through close engagement with their works. At the same time, however, these approaches promise to generate productive impulses for literary studies when brought into dialogue with contemporary perspectives from feminist critiques of scholarship, reparative hermeneutics and performance studies. The analysis therefore develops along three axes of research, discussing the poets' poetic philologies: a) as speculative archaeologies; b) as intimate engagements with the ancient canon; and c) with regard to their performative dimensions.

Rather than offering isolated readings of individual works, the dissertation seeks to illuminate the poets' philological methods and poetic decisions through comparison while also situating them within current theoretical debates. In doing so, it aims not only to make a comparative contribution to the study of the poeta philologa at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but also to demonstrate that contemporary poetic texts can function as 'laboratories' for a living engagement with classical antiquity.

 

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Michael Gamper (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020), Prof. Dr. Hans Jürgen Scheuer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)