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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

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.

Research results: Literary Demonology. Powers and Latencies

The term ‘demon’ is frequently mentioned in contemporary political and cultural discourse, for example when the ‘demons of our time’, the ‘demons of the ‘demons of history’ are invoked. Obviously, these are ‘forces’ that haunt people today and which they cannot control. The project asked what these forces are and focused on the forms and functions of the concept of demons in the supposedly secular modern age. The project deliberately refrained from trying to clarify what demons are in modernity. Rather, the aim was to show, based on the use of the word, which contexts are invoked with the concept of the demon. It became clear that the discourse on demons cites diverse religious and cultural-historical traditions. Since antiquity, demons have been ascribed power in both a positive and negative sense. The fact that modern demons are often metaphorical does not diminish their discursive power. On the contrary, it could be observed that the analysed literary texts from the 20th and 21st centuries (including Georg Heym, Albert Camus, Marcel Beyer, Adriana Altaras, Fatma Aydemir, Maxim Biller, Peter Handke, Lynda Barry, various theatre projects) consciously place themselves in the metaphorical process and co-stage it. The concept of the ‘post-demonic’ was introduced as part of the project to describe this process, which develops its own dynamic on the theatre stage in particular. While research, with the end of demonologies, only discusses the demonic as a category, the project was able to show that modernity stages demons as actors of the demonic, giving it body and voice, revitalising the metaphor and bringing it out of latency. The power of metaphorically animated demons lies in the fact that they set something in motion between image and meaning. The demons of modernity are discursive because the traditionally airy, fluid, fiery nature of demons often manifests itself in conversation, in speech, and especially in talk, thereby allowing what is not discussed to resonate. Their power is formative; however, it operates at the boundaries of form and at transitions, for example between visibility and invisibility, between literal and figurative meaning or in medial transitions. What the metaphorical demons are acting out are usually complex constellations of problems, stretched between guilt and the desire for redemption, which can hardly be resolved. The demon metaphor makes biographical, but also political and social claims, i.e. it insists on and thus invalidates the judgement that modern demons are ‘merely’ metaphorical.