René Porschen

Academic career

2006 – 2015

Studied literature at the University of Erfurt, thesis on (e)utopian writing in Arno Schmidt's Schwarze Spiegel(1951).

WiSe 2017/18

freelance lecturer at the University of Erfurt

Since January 2020

PhD student with a dissertation project on dinosaurs as an ambivalent knowledge figure (see PhD sketch)

inbetween:

Freelance work in theater (Theater im Palais e.V. Blaue Bühne e.V.) and social work (Talentcampus Weimar), plus strolling through life landscapes

PhD – project outline

Dinosaur! - A journey to the ambivalent figures of knowledge of paleopoetics. (working title)

Dinosaurs are classic mythical figures of (post)modernity. Extinct yet ubiquitous; absolutely inaccessible except for the one way of interpretive (re-)construction, they manifest a conception of nature that cannot be negotiated with, which cannot be deciphered and which cannot be included. As liminal figures, they oscillate between knowledge and nescience, between institutional authorization, public discourse, imaginative speculation and, ultimately, ongoing revision. In texts, films and even in scientific discourse, they repeatedly emancipate themselves from their 'creators', refuse to be defined, overcome topological fixations and finally reverse the anthropocentric balance of power and perspective in the most spectacular way - man creates dinosaurs / dinosaurs ate man ...

The (comparatively short) literary history of the dinosaur is not just a history of paleontological knowledge construction, contextualization, and paleopoetic articulation of that knowledge in narrative texts. Above all, it is also the story of real historical despair before the abysses of the deep time and the attempts to treat the nihilistic insult that went with it. It is a history of contradictions in scientific concepts; a story of sense and alternative sense in an attempt to make the world, time and vital being comprehensible beyond anthropogenic empiricism.

This history is not only reflected in the paleopoetic figurations of corresponding texts, but literary fiction and paleo-scientific speculation are in constant dialogue with each other. They refer to each other, sometimes critically commenting, sometimes contextualizing in terms of history of knowledge, but increasingly relativizing the anthropocentric exceptionalism of modern geohistory. The dinosaur thus not only refers to concepts of otherness, which is articulated in geochronological and psychophysical dimensions - it is not only the radically different being, the alien from another time - rather it points to areas that are beyond the human horizon of influence and knowledge, but immediately constitute its existence. The genesis, extinction and (maybe) survival of the dinosaurs are just as much a part of our everyday lives as part of the history of the planet.

The dissertation project is therefore intended on the one hand to show how saurian figures in literary and popular scientific texts (mainly from the 20th and 21st centuries) function as carrier figures of a knowledge that is made usable to justify an anthropocentric exceptional position in an order that is presented as natural. At the same time, it wants to work out how subversive elements in the poetic description of dinosaurs denied these orders of knowledge, affected drafts of an alternative 'order of nature' or openly criticized man's access to his non-human environment. This implies both the outline and the critical revision of a historical course that was subject to constant changes in the history of ideas under the weight of a nonhuman/postmodern/speculative turn and under the influence of eco-criticism.

The following texts are the subject of the investigation:

• Homchen - Ein Tiermärchen aus der oberen Kreide (1902) by Kurd Laßwitz.
• The Lost World (1912) by Arthur Conan Doyle.
• Das Iguanodon (1915) by Max Dauthendey.
• The Land That Time Forgot / The People That Time Forgot / Out Of Time's Abyss (1924) by Edgar Rice Borroughs.
• Besides a Dinosaur, whatta ja wanna be when you grow up? in Dinosaur Tales (1983) by Ray Bradbury.
• Jurassic Park (1990) and The Lost World (1995) by Michael Crichton.
• Raptor Red (1996) by Robert T Bakker.
• Primal (TV series 2019/2020) directed by Genndy Tratakovsky.

(Academic/literary) areas of interest

• Paleopoetics/prehistoric fiction/literary figuration of extinct species
• cosmic horror, weird fiction etc.
• Speculative materialism, panpsychism, speculative evolution etc.
• Stupidity, idiocy, lack of understanding, etc. as epistemological/aesthetic/etc. perspective
• Poetic potential of barrier-free languages
• (E)utopian potential in dystopian future designs
• ...

Courses

SoSe 2018 ff.

Leichtere Literaturen? Zum poetischen Potenzial barrierefreier Sprachen

mit Dr. Heike Rosenberger und Christoph Schaffarzyk 

WiSe 2017/18 

Motivgeschichte der Blödigkeit 

mit Prof. Dr. Kai Merten

Memberships

• Nachwuchskolleg Texte. Zeichen. Medien. Universität Erfurt.
• Erfurter Netzwerk zum Neuen Materialismus (ENNM).
• Gesellschaft der Arno Schmidt Leser e.V.
• Theater im Palais e.V.
• Freundeskreis Blaue Bühne e. V.
• Deutsche Lovecraft-Gesellschaft e.V.

Lectures/Workshops/Conferences

October 2016 

Postapokalyptische Naturidylle? – ‚etym’methodische Feldversuche einer eutopischen Genesis

Lecture at the 31st Annual Conference of the Society of Arno Schmidt Readers

Published as Postapokalyptische Naturidylle in Schwarze Spiegel in: Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft der Arno-Schmidt-Leser 2017/18

February 2022

Wie lesen? Interdisziplinäre Lektürestrategien in Geschichts- und Literaturwissenschaft.

Moderation, contribution and organisation

In collaboration with Claudia Elisabeth Kaufmann and Christian Martin Bolze.

Event link

May 2022

Barrierefreie Vermittlungsmöglichkeiten des literarischen Werkes. Benn in Leichter Sprache/Einfacher Sprache

Impulse lecture/workshop on Saturday, 7 May. 2022 for the annual meeting of the Gottfried Benn Gesellschaft e.V.

Event link

Articles

• Heike Rosenberger & René Porschen: Lesen leicht gemacht – Literatur und Leichte Sprache. In: Verband Sonderpädagogik – Landesverband Thüringen e.V. (ed.): vds-Thüringen Heft 13/2016/2017/2018, Weimar, p. 15-17.
• Postapokalyptische Naturidylle in Schwarze Spiegel. In: Armin Eidherr (ed.): Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft der Arno-Schmidt - Leser 2017/18.

Reviews

• The L(e)ast Lovecraft - The Last Lovecraft: Relic of Cthulhu. In: Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft e.V. (ed.): Lovecrafter, 8/2021, Flensburg, p. 18-20.
• Irre(n) ist ko(s)misch - Der Schrecken im Flöz. In: Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft e.V. (ed.): Lovecrafter, 6/2019, Flensburg, p. 22-24.
• Beisitzer am Tisch der Tyrannenechsen - Primordia von Greig Beck. In: EPPP-Graduiertenkolleg (ed.): LIT ERA TUR. Segelschiffe, 1/2019, p. 27f.
• Ein Antimärchen vom bürokratischen Kosmos - Philip Schobers Debüt Gideon Fink. In: EPPP-Graduiertenkolleg (ed.):  LIT ERA TUR. Sirenen, 2/2020

Prosaic (selection)

• Kokon. (2020) © Edition Outbird, Imprint in Telescope Verlag, 1st edition, ISBN: 978-3-95915-131-3.

Journalistic/interviews etc. (selection)

• Ungarns unaussprechliche Kulte – die Magyar H.P. Lovecraft Társaság. In: Deutsche Lovecraft Gesellschaft e.V. (ed.): Lovecrafter, 4/2018, Flensburg, p. 10-17.
• Kleine Anatomie des Buches. Seite zwei, das Frontispiz. In: EPPP-Graduiertenkolleg (ed.): LIT ERA TUR. Et/was tun? Lesen, arbeiten, lesen, spielen, lesen. 3/2021, p. 41f.