Dr. Dariya Manova
Curriculum
Dariya Manova is a literary and cultural scholar. She studied German literature and philosophy at Humboldt-University Berlin. In 2016 and as a member of the binatonal Phd-program “Das Wissen der Literatur” she was a visiting scholar at the German department of UC Berkeley. She completed her dissertation on raw materials, oil and coal narratives in the German popular literature and press of the interwar period in 2019. For her dissertation, which was published under the title „Sterbende Kohle“ und „flüssiges Gold“. Rohstoffnarrative der Zwischenkriegszeit by Wallstein in 2021 she was awarded with the Scherer-Prize. She was a post-doc researcher at Humboldt-University Berlin until September 2021. Her research interests include new materialism, literature and environment, literature and work, discourses of the popular as well as discourses of youth since the 19th century.
Publications (selection)
- „Sterbende Kohle“ und „flüssiges Gold“. Rohstoffnarrative der Zwischenkriegszeit, Göttingen 2021.
- Ölbrand. Zerstörungsphantasien aus den frühen Tagen der Petroleumindustrie, in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Themenheft Unzuverlässiges Erzählen, 2021/1, pp. 122–138.
- Ewige Adoleszenz. Wohnungs- und Sinnsuche im deutschen Gegenwartsroman, in: Studia Philologica, 39/3 (2020), pp. 187–198.
- Abenteuerstoffe, in: Martin von Koppenfels, Manuel Mühlbacher (eds.): Abenteuer: Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, Paderborn 2019, pp. 213–235.
- „Rohstoff für den ‚Roman‘“. Ressourcen und Infrastruktur in B. Travens Abenteuerromanen, in: Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 91/1 (2017), pp. 51–71.
Research project: Youth – Literature – Magazine. Force and Forcelessness of the Youth in Magazines at the Turn of the 19th Century
In my current project I want to analyze, which concepts and images of “force” are connected and identified with the historic understanding of “youth” in the literary and cultural production at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. The project will focus on the role of magazines as a specific publication medium. One of the main hypothesis of the project is that end of the 19th century magazines were “serial archives” (Stockinger, Scherer 2016), which presented themselves as spaces of special creative forces and youthful energy. On their pages and in their self-understanding “youth” is often disconnected from biological age. Thus it becomes timeless and a guiding metaphor, that outlines a new art and literary program. Which decisions about content and form were made and did they help turning the founding plans and programs of the magazines into practice? With which ones did “youth” as a concept get identified?
I want to answer those questions, analyzing selected volumes of the magazines Jugend (1896–1940), Simplicissimus (1896–1944) and Pan (1895–1900). Paratexts, single issues and combinations of text and image will be in the center of the analysis, which aims at the unique connection between the concepts of youth and youthful forces and the medium of the illustrated cultural and literature magazine.
The different marketing and distribution strategies of the magazines made the project of eternal youth either easily accessible or exclusive. This difference raises the question of how youthful forces become a cultural product for sale. In this context it is essential to consider and trace, how the magazines refer and work with accomplished or even canonical artists and writers and how young and still unknown authors participate in the field of modern magazines.
Research results: Youth – Literature – Magazine. Force and Forcelessness of the Youth in Magazines at the Turn of the 19th Century
A starting point of my research at the DFG-Center for Advanced Studies was the observation of an interconnectedness of historical concepts of youth and publication practices in magazines at the end of the 19th century. In this context I analyzed programs and strategies of publicists and editors that contributed to the emergence and development of a myth called “youth”, and their specific interpretation of this vague concept through a rhetoric of force.
Examining source materials and historical, sociological and literary scholarship on the topic have made it clear that the rise of newly founded magazines at the turn of the century is connected to the rising popularity of a contemporary youth discourse. The first volumes of magazine projects such as Jugend (1896–1940), Ver Sacrum (1898–1903), Pan (1895–1900) and Simplicissimus (1896–1944) helped aestheticize and idealize the concept of the “youth” in the years before the First World War. Their programs, design, and wildly heterogeneous assemblage of forms and topics as well as how their contributors were being described and described themselves refine the already wide spread notion that youth at the turn of the century had grown into a myth and carrier of different ideologies.
Comparing magazine announcements, the relation between text and illustration, the represented text genres as well as authors emphasized once more the prominent role of the magazine Jugend. Its founders Georg Hirth and Fritz von Ostini achieved a radical opening of the concept “youth” by including and modifying rhetorics and practices of the culture periodicals around 1890. They persisted against the tendencies of biology and jurisdiction to strictly define youth and reformulated the promise of invigoration, revitalization and rearrangement of the literary and cultural scene that was already present in the programs of Die Gesellschaft (1885–1902), Der Kunstwart (1887–1937), Blätter für die Kunst (1892–1919) and Ver Sacrum (1898–1903) as an exclusive right of an inclusive youth, that redefined and reinvented itself weekly on the pages of the magazine.