EXC212 B10 - Authorship as Scandal: Strategies of Staging, Political and Religious Subtexts

Basic data for this project

Description

The project is devoted to the relationship between present-day politics, religion, and literature based on the example of literary scandals in whose centre there is always the person of the author. The death threat of Islamistic fundamentalists against Salman Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 shows – in the globalised and apparently secularised world – how closely interwoven the political, the religious, and the literary spheres remain. The project shall be guided by the question of what role “the author” – who traditionally represented a charismatic, religious and/or political agent (poeta vates, “Gewissen der Nation” [conscience of a nation]) – plays in modern and post-modern societies and to what degree the patterns of perception that have come down to us continue to work implicitly.