Julia Klar, M.A.

Curriculum

Julia Klar studied German language and literature, English studies, and German-language literatures at the University of Hamburg. Since 2023, she has been working on a dissertation thesis on the forms of climate change in texts by Marion Poschmann, Esther Kinsky, Anja Kampmann, and Judith Schalansky [working title: Clouds, Plants, Fossils: Forms of Climate Change in Contemporary Literature].

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Research project: Forms of Climate Change in Contemporary Literature

The project takes as its starting point the frequently voiced objection to an ecocriticism that is too strongly focused on themes and content, in order to investigate the forms of climate change in texts by Marion Poschmann, Esther Kinsky, Anja Kampmann, and Judith Schalansky. Caroline Levine's broad concept of form comes into play, according to which forms not only have ordering and organizing powers within a text, but also fulfill this function equally well in socio-political contexts, i.e., extra-textually. This makes forms comparable with each other on all levels in the sense of a flat ontology and enables the premise of the project: to understand natural phenomena, ultimately climate change itself, as interacting and colliding forms as well.

In the context of the Fellowship, the fossil in particular, which in its manifestations - as fossil remains of extinct creatures from geological deep time or as fossil fuels - configures the intersection of multiple climate change discourses, will be considered as a form. It is to be asked how the form of the fossil exerts its ordering powers in the texts, but also, especially, how texts of different genres - poetry, novels, essays - resist these powers by confronting them with poetological reflections on form.