Office hour every Wed, 12-13 in my office in M1, 718.
University of Erfurt
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt
GERMANY
University of Erfurt
School of Literary Studies
English Literature
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
GERMANY
Office hour every Wed, 12-13 in my office in M1, 718.
University of Erfurt
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt
GERMANY
University of Erfurt
School of Literary Studies
English Literature
Postfach 90 02 21
99105 Erfurt
GERMANY
Kai Merten studied English Literature, Latin and Psychology at the Universities of Munich (LMU) and St Andrews. After completing his PhD in Munich in 2002, he was postdoctoral research fellow both at the Graduate School ‘Klassizismus und Romantik’ at the University of Gießen (JLU) and, with a research grant from the German Research Council (DFG), at the IASH of the University of Edinburgh. In 2007, he moved on to the University of Kiel (CAU) where he worked as a ‘wiss. Mitarbeiter’ (assistant lecturer). In 2011, he completed his habilitation at the CAU and received the venia legendi for ‘Anglistische Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft’ (British Literary and Cultural Studies). Since April 2015, he has been professor for ‘Neuere Englische Literaturwissenschaft’ (Literature in English since the Renaissance) at the University of Erfurt.
Project-related publication: Kai Merten, ed. Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory, Critique (Series New Critical Humanities). London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2021.
The Erfurt Network on New Materialism (ENNM) examines the neo-materialist currents in recent philosophy as well as Literary and Cultural Theory. Neo-materialist thought aims to re-assess and re-describe external ‘reality’ both after and beyond the linguistic turn. In so doing, it questions as well as transcends the premise that all reality is culturally constructed, while not only falling behind but also integrating this constructionism. Therefore, the group mainly deals with the question whether New Materialism can be used as a method (or as a critique of existing methods) in Literary and Cultural Studies. At the same time, it is sounding the possibilities of a European research network and is therefore participating in a network application on the relationship of New Materialism to literature and aesthetics.
At the moment, we regularly meet in reading sessions while also organising guest lectures and workshops. In September 2019, we held an international conference on the topic of New Materialist Literary Theory.
As a starting hypothesis, the Erfurt Group has observed that there are two main positions in New Materialism: one position argues that all human agency is always already bound up with non-human agencies of the surrounding material world, as is reflected in ‘connection’ concepts such as Karen Barad’s ‘Onto-Epistemology’ or Donna Haraway’s ‘Naturecultures’. The other position claims that, on the opposite, human connections to the material world will never be able to make available the objects in their full potential and ‘being’ at all. This position is taken up in both ‘Object-Oriented Ontology’ and ‘Speculative Realism’.
The network aims to study both these positions while at the same time asking whether they can be, on the one hand, united and, on the other hand, related to literary texts and cultural practices.
Puppet theatre has been in focus since the beginning of the 20th century as an avantgarde cultural practice throughout Europe and also in Thuringia, for example at the Bauhaus in Weimar or the important Waidspeicher Theater in Erfurt, the latter with its roots in modernist GDR puppetry. Situated between different art forms such as installation, object theatre and multimedia theatre, puppetry is a focal point of artistic aesthetics and cultural identity practice.
From this perspective, addressing puppetry in a range of 20th and 21st century novels has a self-reflexive quality, especially since the concept of puppet or 'figure' uniquely allows us to think together object and language, stage and textual page, and abstract concept and concrete embodiment. By examining English-language and non-English-language literary texts, the project will explore the extent to which puppetry can be contoured as a model of contemporary literary aesthetics, contemporary body culture/politics, or even (literary) language in general. A cooperation with the Theater Waidspeicher and especially with the Synergura-Festival is planned.
University of Erfurt (Campus)
Nordhäuser Str. 63
99089 Erfurt
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