Prof. Dr. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf
Photo: Hilla Südfeld
Curriculum
Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf studied German and History at the University of Tübingen. In 1987 she received her Ph.D. with a thesis on Mystik der Moderne. Zur visionären Ästhetik der deutschen Literatur im 20. Jahrhundert (Mysticism of Modernity. On the Visionary Aesthetics of German Literature in the 20th Century) at the University of Tübingen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989). After her dissertation, Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf was a research assistant at the University of Konstanz, where she worked on Die Melancholie der Literatur. Diskursgeschichte und Textfiguration (The Melancholy of Literature. Discourse History and Textual Configuration) in 1994 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997). From 1995-1998 she was Professor of Modern German Studies, with a special focus on Literary theory and Rhetoric at the University of Bochum. Since 1998 she has taught as Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Münster. Her research interests include German literature from the 18th century to the present, literary theory and rhetoric, autobiography and autofiction, and literature in relation to religion and politics. In 2019 she published the three-volume Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter) and in 2020 her monograph Sich entscheiden. Moments of Autobiography in Goethe (Göttingen: Wallstein). Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf has been Principal Investigator in the Münster Cluster of Excellence Religion and Politics since 2007. She has held visiting professorships in the United States, China, and Japan. She is a full member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Publications (selection)
- „,miteinander aus einem bette aufgestanden‘. Interdiskurse zwischen Recht und Literatur in rhetorischer Perspektive“, in: Cyril de Beun, Rolf Parr, Jörg Wesche (eds.), Rhetorik und Interdiskursanalyse. Theoretische und praktische Zugriffe auf ein wenig beachtetes Verhältnis, Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2023, pp. 51-74.
- „Of Strange Loops and Real Effects: Five Theses on Autofiction/the Autofictional“, in: Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (eds.), The Autofictional, Cham: Palgrave, 2022, pp. 21-39.
- Sich entscheiden. Momente der Autobiographie bei Goethe, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2020.
- Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, 3 vols, vol. 1: Theory and Concepts, vol. 2: History, vol. 3: Exemplary Texts, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.
- „Weltliteratur/-religion/-politik. Der Fall Rushdie“, in: Vergleichende Weltliteraturen/Comparative World Literatures. DFG-Symposion 2018, ed. by Dieter Lamping and Galin Tihanov, with the collaboration of Matthias Bormuth, Berlin: J. B. Metzler, 2019, pp. 467-484.
Research project: Literary Demonology. Powers and Latencies
The project is dedicated to the manifestations and functions of demons in modern discourse and literature. 'Demons' have haunted humans since immemorial times. In the thought of antiquity, they were mediators between the gods and humans and represented the bond between the sensual and the supersensual world. In the Middle Ages they belonged to the divine order of creation, but had no fixed place in it. As fallen angels, they symbolized evil, but gained their anthropological significance from the fact that their power had to be actively sought by man. Goethe's contradictory and tense explanations of the demonic refer to a conceptual unavailability, from whose latency the demons of modernity draw their moment of strength. The fundamental question is why modernity and even so-called late modernity need demons at all. Literary texts, for example by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Heimito von Doderer, Marcel Beyer, Peter Handke or Fatma Aydemir, give different answers. For example, when Spiegel 21 (1996) asks whether the Germans are a "nation of demons" with regard to their confrontation with the Holocaust, or when the reviewer of a Hamburg performance of Albert Camus's Die Besessenen (The Possessed, 1959) speaks of the "demons of our time" (Briegleb 2023), these are examples of a metaphorical force active in discourse, for which it is necessary to ask what exactly is metaphorized and for what purposes. The project focuses on the rhetorics of the demonic and the specific mediality and materiality of demon appearances.