North African representations of Saint Augustine of Hippo as forms of late antique and postcolonial knowledge production

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The planned interdisciplinary research project will focus, from a classical philological as well as a cultural theory and modern literary criticism perspective, on the often underestimated late antique Vita Augustini by Possidius (431 A.D.) and on current literary production in the Maghreb dealing with Augustine. Starting from the question of their respective roles in the cultural discourse of each epoch, we will study the special function of these representations in late antique North Africa and in contemporary societies of the Maghreb. The project aims, in its first stage, to conduct a philological analysis of the corpus. A second stage will involve an in-depth study of the discursive strategies of the North African reception of Augustine in an attempt to understand its historical and cultural impact on the respective authors present environment. The project will serve as the starting point for an extensive and systematic investigation of the North African reception of classical culture encompassing three monographs (see sections 1-3). Both applicants have published preliminary studies on Roman literature and the reception of classical culture in North African literature and European cinema (Bettenworth 2009), on Maghrebian literature, as well as on postcolonial autobiography, historiography and gender criticism (Gronemann 2000-2013).