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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Dr. Johanna-Charlotte Horst

 

Photo: Kat Eryn Rubik

Curriculum

Johanna-Charlotte Horst is a literary scholar and art historian. Most recently, she was a research associate at the Department of Comparative Literature at MLU Halle-Wittenberg. Prior to that, she was an Associate Professor at the Institute of Comparative Literature at LMU Munich, where she received her doctorate in 2017 with a dissertation on Georges Perec. Her research has taken her, among other places, to Sorbonne-Université in Paris, UC Berkeley, New York Public Library, and the Association Georges Perec in Paris. She recently held a fellowship at the Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies in Cologne with a project on digital commonplaces. She is a member of the ERC project The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe at ZfL in Berlin. Her research interests include everyday life and literature, theories of materialism, feminist theory, and literature and photography. She also regularly contributes reviews to SZ and FAZ.

Publications (selection)

  • Ed.: Skandal machen. Mittelweg 36 4 (2026).
  • „Schreiben, Text, Verwandlung. Alltag und Essay in Wolfram Lotz’ Heilige Schrift I“, in: Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (2025), pp. 45–58.
  • „‚The Bear’, die Familie, das Essen“, in: Pop. Kultur & Kritik, 24 (2024), pp. 116–123.
  • „‚infra-ordinaire‘. On the literary infrastructure of the everyday in Georges Perec“, in: GAM. Architecture Magazine, 12 (= Infra-Ordinary) (2024), pp. 2–14.
  • Schreibformen. Georges Perecs literarischer Materialismus, Paderborn: Brill Fink, 2023.

Research project:  The Force of Scandal: Circulations of Affect in Gayot de Pitaval’s Causes célèbres et intéressantes

Scandals are dramas with an escalating sequence of events: the scandalous event is followed by media coverage, which provokes public outrage. In the process, the actors involved struggle for interpretive authority and seek to influence the affective economy of society. In this way, scandal produces a “Selbstirritation der Gesellschaft” (Luhmann), through which social coexistence enters a minor state of exception. Collective energies of outrage are released, existing orders are called into question, and social change thereby becomes imaginable. The project focuses on a collection of juridical scandal cases, the Causes célèbres et intéressantes, published by the Parisian lawyer Gayot de Pitaval at the beginning of the eighteenth century. They mark a “diskurshistorische[] Transformationsphase” (Meierhofer), in which legal proceedings are condensed into affectively charged sensations. Pitaval’s collection of cases addresses two distinct audiences. In the sense of prodesse et delectare, the case narratives are intended not only to instruct legal scholars but also to move and educate a broader public. Ernst Cassirer’s observation that eighteenth-century psychology was by no means purely intellectualist, but also produced knowledge through “die Kraft und die Eigenart des Trieblebens” is pivotal to this poetics. The project examines how Pitaval’s aesthetics stages the case narratives as public spectacle and thereby operationalizes them as a dispositif within a force field of affective energies.