GRK 2845:  Family Matters. Figures of Allegiance and Release

• Subject Area: Literary Studies
• Term: since 2023
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 469973963

From heroic sagas of antiquity up to the present-day revival of family romance and life writing, world literature offers a rich archive of family matters. Literary studies have not as yet explored this archive except in terms of social history, using literature as a socio-historical source or, alternatively, as a medium of socialisation and intergenerational engagement. The Research Training Group we propose takes quite a different approach. We understand ‘family’ as an imaginary institution (Castoriadis) and an imagined community (Anderson), decisively shaped and brought about by literature as a transcultural and interdiscursive medium of social reflection. We thus proceed on the assumption that whatever is conceived as ‘family’ is largely negotiated through cultural master narratives and iconic images. They (pre)figure kinship systems and gender roles, structures of feelings and relationships, fundamental family norms and conflicts just as the strategies to deal with them, in this way also offering occasions to construct and contest the symbolic order whose normative power and claims must continuously be reaffirmed, justified, revised, criticised, modified, deconstructed, appropriated or rejected. In this process, ‘family’ operates not just as an important module in all attempts at creating order but also as an elementary figure of allegiance and release – a figure uneasily encompassing ancestry as well as offspring, heteronomy as well as autonomy, identification as well as alienation, a figure therefore of literature itself which also always comes into itself by means of binding and releasing (desis and lysis). For this reason, Mikhail Bakhtin already identified ‘family’ as one of the basic formal devices (chronotopoi) of world literature. Our Research Training Group brings together experienced and early stage researchers from all of LMU’s literature departments, ranging from Classics to contemporary writing. The first project of its kind in literary studies, we propose to explore ‘family matters’ in comparative and theoretical approaches, and with a view to their historical and cultural specificities, including transcultural and postcolonial perspectives. We aim to work towards a systematic account of the literary paradigms and discourses that produce ‘the familial’ and so establish a comprehensive archaeology (Foucault) of the family imaginary. At the same time, we plan to address and question historical master narratives such as Hegel’s philosophy of history, Riehl’s notion of ‘the whole house’ (“das ganze Haus”), or Freud’s origin story of parricide, which – though scientifically falsified – continue to shape myths of the bourgeois nuclear family. Working on and through such myths is imperative today, all the more so because current developments in biotechnology and reproductive medicine are producing new and alternative forms of parenting (beyond biological sex) that radically challenge our understanding of family and kinship.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
• Spokesperson: Professorin Dr. Susanne Lüdemann
• Participating Researchers: Professor Dr. Tobias Döring; Professorin Dr. Therese Fuhrer; Professorin Dr. Annette Keck; Professor Dr. Martin von Koppenfels; Professor Dr. Riccardo Nicolosi; Professorin Dr. Juliane Prade-Weiss; Professorin Dr. Susanne Reichlin; Professor Dr. Joachim Schiedermair; Professorin Barbara Vinken, Ph.D.