PRANA - Posthuman Research and Narration

• Applicant: Dr. Ronald Röttel, since 2/2025
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550626545

The network is dedicated to the development of new narratological concepts and terms against the background of the posthuman turn and the development from the humanities to the 'posthumanities'. The network wants to contribute a media historical background to these developments. Humanistic scientific conceptions, and also narratology, are shaped by the dominance of the book, but we live within the post-digital 21st century. The network develops the foundations of a narrative theory that can do justice to the diverse media formats of storytelling and expand the humanistic theorization of storytelling. Rather than relying on an exclusive concept of 'homo narrans', a new model of storytelling depicts the story as a network of narrative and meaning-forming environments and agencies. The guiding image of posthumanist narrative theory is not transcendence of the human but rather human's entanglement in the biological and technological actor-networks of the present. The ambiguity of the 'web' as an artificially created technological infrastructure and a naturally grown organism is our guidance. A posthumanist narrative theory needs new terms, concepts, theories, and models. However, it does not exhaust itself in that. Rather, it must be embedded in a fundamental reflection on the performance and conditions of knowledge generation and circulating practices in the humanities. On these grounds, narratology can be open to alternative practices and theories of narrative interaction with the environment. The organic environment and ist challenges (climate change, species extinction, and ecocide) and their cultural implications are examined by the environmental humanities, the technological and increasingly virtual environment are subject of digital humanities and media studies. It is necessary to join these two disciplinary discourses when inquiring into concrete narrative practices and their theorization, and to compare them with other perspectives on the theory and practice of storytelling. Narrative theory does not only take place in the scientific context but also implicitly and explicitly in artistic formats that reflect their own story-tellings. These forms of artistic narrative theory can be fruitfully integrated into the scientific theorization of storytelling and into the didactic mediation of narrative theory. The network is therefore interdisciplinary and promotes communication and knowledge transfer between narratological, artistic, and didactic research. This approach is made visible in the network's final presentation, an interactive and multimedia exhibition at the University Library of TU Berlin and UdK Berlin.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Charlotte Coch, until 1/2025