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

Tiefenbacher's dissertation project focuses on Alice Oswald, Anne Carson and Barbara Köhler, three contemporary poets who have each developed their own, yet in crucial ways comparable, response to the question of how to engage productively with the difference between antiquity and the present. Their re-readings of ancient texts go beyond mere contemporary correction or imitation: Returning to the literary beginnings of Western poetry, the three authors employ reading and writing methods in which literature is confidently intertwined with music, theatre and painting.

The aim of the project is to conduct a comparative analysis and discussion of these re-readings, asking how the poets uncover within the Greek texts traditions, (linguistic) figures and communities that have often been forgotten in the history of their reception. The guiding hypothesis is that their works – as contemporary responses to these traditions – not only offer original perspectives on early Greek poetics, but also open up possibilities for narrating literary history differently: beyond binary oppositions such as voice vs. writing, male vs. female, or epic vs. lyric. Moving beyond the analysis of individual works, the project seeks instead to illuminate, in a comparative perspective, the philological approaches, poetic decisions and performative methods that shape their re-readings; to situate them within translation theory; and to discuss them in relation to broader questions of literary history.

 

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