American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy

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The research project “American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy” constitutes research area 2 of the Heisenberg-Professorship of American Studies, Democracy, and Aesthetics. Privacy has long been regarded a pillar of liberal democracy. At present, however, the future of privacy—and hence of democracy—seems uncertain. This research project investigates American literature of the nineteenthcentury and the recent past in order to gain insights into the changing conceptualization and functions of privacy in light of the current transformations of American democracy. “American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy” consists of two intersecting subprojects. Over the course of the last two years, both of these subprojects have been altered in their orientation or scope in order to do justice to their preliminary findings. The present proposal aims to fund the project for an additional two years. This extension will enable research area 2 to fully contribute to the Heisenberg-Professorship’s objective of exploring the aesthetic dimensions of the transformative processes characterizing contemporary democracy. Draft versions of the two book manuscripts-in-progress are enclosed in this proposal. Dr. des. Stephan Kuhl, the postdoctoral researcher, is at work on a book which supplies the field of literary privacy studies with a theoretical framework. This approach is pioneering insofar as it puts literary theory at the center of privacy studies. His project promises two yields: First, it will fill a lacuna in the field of literary privacy studies, which so far has borrowed its conceptualizations of the private from non-literary disciplines such as political theory or sociology. Second, by bringing a literary-theoretical approach into the broader debate on privacy, it will help come to terms with the aesthetic dimensions of privacy even in non-literary contexts. The study takes Emily Dickinson and the history of her reception from the antebellum period to the present as the paradigmatic example for its theoretical conceptualization. In the second subproject, Prof. Johannes Voelz is writing a monograph that approaches privacy in the “network society” through an analysis of contemporary literature. His study investigates three areas of contemporary literary writing: surveillance novels, the “New Sincerity” movement, and literary memoirs. The analysis of these diverse genres contributes to an understanding of the aesthetics of “networked privacy.” The private here is invoked to single out interpersonal affects that generate intense experiences of selfhood. No longer residing in a spatial or psychic sphere protected from public scrutiny, the private is currently being relocated inside network structures. Drawing on media sociology and affect theory, the monograph brings to light how contemporary literary aesthetics consolidates a new concept of the private, and by extension of the self.