Study Group Authorship (until 2012)
The study group investigates the staging of authorship within the competing interests of religion and politics and enquires about the particular authority of the author from Antiquity to the present. It takes as a starting point the critical analysis of different models of authorship such as poeta vates, poeta doctus, of the author as creator, as the haunted one/martyr, as the “conscience of the nation” and others. The question presenting itself here is to what extent these images succeed or continue religious patterns and in what way they are used politically. The metaphor of staging, borrowed from theatre, has become a cultural scientific key term and forms the theoretical focus of the study group, which approaches its topic both from a cultural scientific angle and from a text analytical one. On the one hand, the historically shifting political, religious, media-related and gender-specific conditions of authorship are to be analysed, and on the other hand, elements and structures that constitute a culturally productive topic of the author are to be determined in specific text analyses. It is not least a central research issue of the study group whether and to what extent the models analysed so far may be translated into other fields of discourse such as politics, religion, sciences, arts, music and others.