Barbara Bausch, M.A.
Curriculum
Barbara Bausch is a researcher and lecturer in Literary Studies. She studied at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and the Freie Universität Berlin. As an academic teaching assistant assigned by the Robert Bosch Foundation, she taught at the University of Sumy in Ukraine where she also managed international cultural projects. In 2018, she started her Ph.D at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies (FU Berlin), which included a visit to the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago in 2019. She completed her dissertation in 2022 on Ror Wolf’s ›poetics of disruption‹ in the context of experimental prose writing from the 1950s to the 1980s. Up until March 2023, she held a postdoc position at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology at FU Berlin. Her research interests include prose writing and prose theory, contemporary literature, and forms of political writing.
Publications (selection)
- Standortbestimmungen. Strategien der Selbstpositionierung in der Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. with Julia Weber, series edition AVL, Berlin 2023 [in preparation].
- Spielformen der Störung. Ror Wolfs radikaler Realismus im Kontext experimenteller Prosa der 1950er–1980er Jahre, Bielefeld 2023 [Dissertationsschrift, in preparation].
- „‛should I call it horror’? Reflecting Realism by exploring Contingency: Ror Wolf’s Adventure Series Pilzer und Pelzer”, in: Jens Elze, Realism: Origins, Challenges, and Politics, London 2022, pp. 107–131.
- Vítězslav Nezval: Akrobat. ed and with epilogue by Barbara Bausch and Anna Luhn, translated by Barbara Bausch and Eva Dymáková, Leipzig 2021.
Research project: Uprising. The Force of Form in Contemporary Political Writing
In recent years, an increasing number of new works in contemporary literature have revisited the question of how to write politically engaged fiction today. At the same time, and apparently closely related to this, authors have become more interested in the representation of power and powerlessness. My research project aims to review current German literary texts (e.g. Heike Geißler, Roman Ehrlich and Dorothee Elmiger) to see how this interrelation becomes apparent in their writing. How do they approach the idea of power/-lessness, potential shifts of powers, and the un-/availability of power? How is power earned, given or taken away? These questions are politically motivated: The project aims to show how the literary representation of power, and more so powerlessness, illustrates the (perceived) inability to act under existing social conditions. Considering a powerlessness often felt in the face of current real-world political, social, and ecological changes and upheavals, an experience which has been broadly discussed and highly mediatised in current discourse, the project will explore the potential of a ›literary uprising‹. The project follows the central idea that contemporary literature shifts its focus – and maybe also places its hope – on the force of form in its specific (literary) potency. But how can such a force of form be expressed, what can it mobilize, influence or impact? And from where do these forces of formal uprising emerge, how are they generated in contemporary literature?
Research results: Uprising. The Force of Form in Contemporary Political Writing
In contemporary literature, a depicted exhaustion of forces goes hand in hand with the exploration of forms beyond classical littérature engagée, which refers to a feat of literary production. Looking at the texts examined, such as Heike Geißler's Die Woche and Liegen. Eine Übung (both 2022), Wolfram Lotz's Heilige Schrift I (2022), Enis Maci's WUNDER (2021) or Dorothee Elmiger's Aus der Zuckerfabrik (2020), common characteristics can be identified among all the differences. Firstly, a questioning of the dichotomy of activity and passivity, which stages passivity as touchability and sensitivity, but also as withdrawal as a mode of engagement. Secondly, a thematization and mostly re-evaluation of not-knowing, which is offensively exhibited as an attitude of the characters as well as the authors and marked as a productive mode of searching. Thirdly, and consequently, an open form in which a strong desire to form coincides with the instabilization of traditional forms. This text organization in loose 'constellations', which I understand with Andrea Krauß as figures of representation and reading, can be read as an attempt to translate powerlessness and not-knowing into a literary form - and thus also into a mode of reading that induces an intensive, active, formative reading, but at the same time keeps the possibility of other readings open. The texts under consideration attempt (instead of offering dys- or utopias) to open up spaces for experience and reflection, which direct the gaze out of the textually created world and into the present. In other words, they place reading as an aesthetic practice at the center of attention: as an act that can be considered an intrinsically community-building practice, as an arena of social self-understanding and, ideally, generates and sets in motion new forces beyond reading.