German-language Jewish Literature from the Enlightenment to the Present Day - New Approaches to Research in Paradigms

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The project GJL is intended as a seminal and systematic presentation of German-language Jewish literature since the Enlightenment in its entire dissemination area, based on a cultural sciences appreciation of texts, and expanded by approaches from the areas of reception aesthetics, space and media theory, as well as the history of science. It aims to produce six handbooks supported by an online platform including additional documents and controversial debates as typically in such a broad and complex field as GJL throughout the last 250 years. Such an ambitious project necessitates international cooperation, which can integrate a broad range of individual expert contributions and count on a highly engaged advisory board. This will be achieved through the cooperation of three (in reality: four) renowned centres of academic research regarding German-language Jewish literature in Central Europe: The RWTH Aachen is home to the only chair for European Jewish Literary and Cultural History in Germany; the University of Basel is the only place in Switzerland where German-language Jewish literature is taught; between 1998 and 2003 the University of Klagenfurt (Lead institution) hosted a research centre for Austrian and Middle European Jewish literature and established a network of cooperations with other Austrian Centres of Jewish Studies like Salzburg, and in the past few years with Graz, where the Centre for Jewish Studies in the meantime has become one of the most important and productive in Austria. Furthermore the named institutions have established additional national and international cooperations which can provide valuable impulses for the project at hand. The starting point lies in the assumption that Jewish thinking and German-language Jewish literature has always given important contributions to artistic-literary and scientific developments in the German-speaking area, by providing dialogues and impulses. Traditional criteria such as nation, identity, culture, and religion are thus deferred, as are attempts at unity, canonization, and binary distinctiveness of Jewish and non-Jewish culture and literature, all in favour of more open approaches in paradigms. These paradigms also correspond to the research expertise at the participating universities and their respective project leaders: Tradition and Faith as well as Thinking History (main focus University of Basel), Cultures of Language as well as Knowledge and Learning (main focus University of Aachen), Spaces and Landscapes, and Interrelationships (main focus University of Klagenfurt / Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Graz). The design of this project promotes the networking with other disciplines and enables an innovative dialogue with the interested research community.