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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Dr. Elisa Ronzheimer

 

Photo: Philipp Ottendörfer

Curriculum

Elisa Ronzheimer is a literary scholar at Bielefeld University. She works on historical poetics since the 18th century (with a focus on meter and rhythm), literary theory (especially 20th-century theories of style and lyric theory) and the theory and practice of comparative literature.

After studying German and Romance languages and literature at the University of Bonn and the Université Paris-Sorbonne IV, she completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in 2018 with a doctoral thesis on poetologies of rhythm around 1800. Since 2018, she has been working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Literary Studies at Bielefeld University. Her habilitation project focuses on the transformations of literary stylistics between 1945 and 1980. Between 2021 and 2024, she led the sub-project Comparative Reading: Constitution and Critique of Stylistics as a Scientific Method at the Bielefeld CRC 1288 Practices of Comparing. In 2023/24, she conducted research at the Università degli studi di Bergamo with a Feodor Lynen Fellowship. In 2024, she taught as a Max Kade Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt University and in 2025 as an interim professor at the University of Siegen.

Publications (selection)

  • Radikale Zärtlichkeit – Skeptische Zärtlichkeit. Zur Wiederentdeckung eines Gefühls in Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart, in: Sociologia Internationalis, Sonderheft: Fingerspitzengefühl, ed. by Niklas Barth, Regina Karl, Sophie Schweiger (to be published in 2026).
  • The Return of „Empfindsamkeit“? Mapping „New Sensibility“ Literature, in: Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 100 (2025), H. 3, pp. 405–421.
  • Together with Kristina Petzold: Vergleichendes Lesen. Praktiken des Vergleichens in Literatur, Wissenschaft und Kritik, Bielefeld 2024.
  • Der Ton der Schreibart. Zum Tonbegriff in der Gattungstheorie des 18. Jahrhunderts, in: Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 23 (2024): Schreibarten im Umbruch, ed. by Eva Axer, Annika Hildebrandt, Kathrin Wittler, pp. 215–232.
  • Poetologien des Rhythmus um 1800. Metrum und Versform bei Klopstock, Hölderlin, Novalis, Tieck und Goethe, Berlin/Boston 2020.

Research project: The Power of Mindfulness: Late Modern Spirituality and Contemporary Literature

“Mindfulness” or “awareness” (German: “Achtsamkeit”) has flourished in recent decades. A central concept of Buddhist meditation practice that was secularized and psychologized in the 1970s, the term has made its way into areas as diverse as medicine, education and business, justice and politics. Critics see mindfulness as nothing more than a neoliberal disciplinary measure with the aim of self-optimization. For its advocates, it rather offers a counter-model to neoliberalism, turbo-capitalism and social polarization. Affirmative visions emphasize the power or force inherent in mindfulness: allegedly, it has mind-expanding or therapeutic effects, controls the subjective affect balance, allows for an experience of humanity as part of a larger ecological whole and contributes to the transformation of social division. The project investigates the power/forces attributed to mindfulness and its representation in contemporary literature.

In a first step, it analyzes relevant mindfulness literature by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Joseph Goldstein and Eckart Tolle with regard to leading concepts of power/force. In a second step, it investigates literary representations of the “power of mindfulness.” What role does mindfulness play in the constitution of literary subjects? (How) Is mindfulness mobilized as an aesthetic or formal strategy? What attitude – emphatic or ironic – does literature adopt with regard to mindfulness? These questions will be pursued in readings of texts by Yevgeniy Breyger, Emmanuel Carrère, Joshua Groß, Timon Karl Kaleyta, Carla Kaspari and Anna Maria Stadler.