Prof. Dr. Michael Auer
Curriculum
Since 2023, Michael Auer is professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Before this, he was professor of German Studies at the University of Vienna. As a visiting professor he taught at Harvard and UC Santa Barbara. Research visits led him to Florence and Berkeley. His academic interests include lyrical soundscapes, teichoscopy and the messenger, and discourses of planetarity.
Publications (selection)
- Law in Suspension. The Political Pindaric in England, Berlin: Edition AVL Berlin 2026 [in print].
- Souveräne Stimmen. Politische Ode und lyrische Moderne, Göttingen: Wallstein 2024.
- Hrsg.: Klopstock-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, Stuttgart: Metzler 2023.
- Hrsg. mit Claude Haas: Kriegstheater. Darstellungen von Krieg, Kampf und Schlacht in Drama und Theater seit der Antike, Stuttgart: Metzler 2018.
- Wege zu einer planetarischen Linientreue? Meridiane zwischen Jünger, Schmitt, Heidegger und Celan, München: Fink 2013.
Research project: Weak Signals. Soundscapes in Virgil’s Eclogues
The eclogue is a weak form. According to ancient theory, it belongs to the genus tenue; tenuis can be translated as ‚low‘ or ‚simple‘ but also as ‚weak.‘ Since Virgil this weakness reflects on the subaltern shepherds and nymphs that figure in bucolic poetry. Largely bereft of agency, they let their flocks graze on infertile grounds and meagre meadows.
What is striking is that this weakness also communicates itself to the art of the bucolic. Affectively, this is present in the predominant tone of lamentation; thematically, in the plain instruments (e.g. the tenuis avena) played and circulating among the figures in the landscapes. These poems do not gain their artistic quality by rising above the situation of the countryside and its people. Instead, they seek to articulate weakness as eloquently and as skillfully as possible. This leads to specific soundscapes that are modulated (modulari) and amplified (amplificare) by means of sound rhetoric. The amplification of these modulations is achieved by letting the shepherds’ and nymphs’ vulnerable voices (voces) resonate (resonare) in the pervasive background noise of nature. Thus, bucolic poetry becomes an artform by evoking soundscapes of weak signals. The strong and enduring presence of noise disturbs the aestheticization of sound.
In Hamburg, I plan to show how Virgil’s seminal Eclogues articulate such soundscapes and will take my cue from his reading of Lucretius’ theories of phonation and auditory perception.