FOR 5323:  Aetiologies: Founding Narratives in Literary, Scholarly, and Scientific Discourses

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458735579

The research group ‘Aetiologies’ examines the fascination of beginnings and the search for origins by approaching them as retrospective narratives constructed for the needs of the present. Stories of beginnings, when viewed through the heuristic lens of aetiology (the narration of origins, foundations, and causes), contain the imprint of the very present which they seek to establish and explain, and blueprints for its politics, aesthetics, religion, and life sciences. This project studies the rhetorics of temporality employed by cosmologies, creation myths, political foundation stories, and literary and scientific origin narratives. The fundamentally argumentative nature of aetiologies draws attention to their position on the interface between literature and science, i.e. to both discourses of knowledge in literature and to the fictivity of scientific hypotheses. A central question of the project is whether (and how) literature imbues origins with ideological and metaphysical power, or undermines this power by questioning linearity and causality. Finally, the project’s focus on beginnings connects our research programme to the current interest in the ends of geological periods and their aetiologies in both aesthetic and political contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Units

Projects

• Aitiologies in the reality narratives of the natural sciences: On the epistemic function of origin (re)constructions (Applicant Toepfer, Georg )
• Chronos and Chthoniê: Beginnings and Foundations in Ancient Mythology and Modern Theories of Myth (Applicant Gödde, Susanne )
• Coordination Funds (Applicant Gödde, Susanne )
• Cosmogony meets extinction in literary texts and graphic narratives. The aesthetics and politics of nostalgic aetiologies (Applicant Krüger-Fürhoff, Irmela Marei )
• Imagining Dark Age Britain. The Birth of Literature from the Darkness of History (Applicant Johnston, Andrew James )
• Imperial aetiology – Russian Eurasianism between origin myth and apocalyptic conflict (Applicant Hausteiner, Eva Marlene )
• New Creation? - Aitiological reception of the Genesis narrative in discourses on cosmos, humanity and gender in early Christian Literature. (Applicant Gerber, Christine )
• The Beginnings of Writing in the Beginnings of the World: Creation and Authorship (Applicant Lobsien, Verena )
• Universal Key to All Mythologies and Primordial Culture: Antiquarianism and Atiology in the 19th Century (Applicant Roling, Bernd )

• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Susanne Gödde