The Beginnings of Writing in the Beginnings of the World: Creation and Authorship

该项目考察了前现代文学中创作和作者之间的关系。它最初的直觉是与“创造”作为一个世界的创造和文本的生产的模糊性联系在一起的，它打算通过关注创造叙事中的作者身份的构建来探索这种世界和世界的双重。它将探索和描述在早期现代和中世纪文本中这两种创造意义联系在一起的具体模式。以宾根、斯宾塞和弥尔顿的希尔德加德为中心和典范，将语境扩大到包括鲜为人知的六角文学和宇宙文学，以深入了解前现代病因学叙事的功能。在这方面，两个假设将受到检验：(1)要探索的创作叙事展示了创作和作者创造力是如何以诗意的形成方式联系在一起的。(2)将这些关于世界起源、产生和形成的叙述解读为病因，这些叙述有可能使历史秩序失去合法性，因为它们表明，尽管人类无法理解历史秩序的深刻起源，但世界的形成是由人类决定的，因此是偶然的和开放的。因此，他们看起来是生态批评的先锋。

The project examines the relationship between creation and authorship in premodern litera-ture. Its initial intuition is linked to the ambiguity of ‘creation’ as the creation of a world as well as the production of a text, and it intends to explore this doubleness of word and world by focussing on the construction of authorship in narratives of creation. It will explore and describe the specific modes in which both senses of creation are connected in early modern and medieval texts. With Hildegard of Bingen, Spenser and Milton as central and paradigmatic examples, the context is widened to include lesser-known hexameral and cosmogonic literature in order to gain insight into the functions of premodern etiological narration. In this, two hypotheses will be put to the test: (1) The narratives of creation to be explored show how creation and authorial creativity are connected in a poetically formative manner. (2) Read as etiologies, these narratives of the world’s origin, production and coming into being bear the potential to delegitimize historical order by making evident that, while its deep-time beginnings are beyond human grasp, the becoming of the world is anthropogenically determined, hence contingent and open to change. Thus, they appear as ecocritical avant la lettre.