Dr. Jana Schuster
Photo: Jörg Heupel
Curriculum
Jana Schuster is a literary scholar at the Institute for German Studies, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn. Her habilitation (i.e. postdoctoral degree) project engages with the aesthetics and anthropology of the atmosphere in German literature, as well as philosophy and art theory, in the 18th and 19th century. She studied German philology and history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and King’s College London, received her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin for a thesis on Rainer Maria Rilke’s Poetics of Movement (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2011), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies Berlin. Her research interests include poetry; trans- and intermedial aesthetics of space, time and movement; literature and knowledge (meteorology, geology, cosmology); anthropology and aesthetics of the atmosphere.
Publications (selection)
- Josephe Maria Asteron. Kleists koloniale Heilsgeschichte. In: DVjs 96/4 (2022), pp. 361-409. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-022-00149-7.
- Meteorologie/Mediologie. Luft in der Lyrik des 18. Jahrhunderts. In: Urs Büttner/Michael Gamper (Eds.): Verfahren literarischer Wetterdarstellung. Meteopoetik – Literarische Meteorologie – Meteopoetologie. Berlin 2021, pp. 43-68. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110624489-003/html.
- Maß und Gesetz des Unmerklichen. Kraft, Zeit und Intensität bei Stifter. In: Davide Giuriato/Sabine Schneider (Eds.): Stifters Mikrologien. Stuttgart 2019, pp. 31-53. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-04884-4_3.
- (Ed.) Zeit und Zeiten in Stifters Nachsommer (= Jahrbuch des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich JASILO 28/2021). Linz 2021.
- (Eds. with Alexander Kling) Zeiten der Materie. Verflechtungen temporaler Existenzformen in Literatur und Wissenschaft (1770-1900). Hannover 2021.
Research project: Atmospheric Diffusion of Light as a Primal Phenomenon of Aesthetics
The atmosphere, first natural medium of light, is the figure of a double latency, inasmuch as the transparent air and the invisible light do not appear but interwoven with each other. Not only in clouds, dust and mist, but also in the sky blue and the red sky of dawn and sunset, the atmospheric reservoir of imperceptibly effective forces and ethereal bodies gains in an aisthetic markedness, which the subtle light effects of modern landscape painting suggest as the unavailable aura of aesthetic phenomena. The project investigates how the atmospheric plays of light and colour in painting wield crucial influence on the theory formation of philosophical aesthetics in the 18th century, and how the atmosphere, thereto dormant within the discourse, is concretised to an aistheton and even to a paradigm of the aesthetic realm around 1800 in Herder and Goethe.