Döring, Adrian
Dissertation topic:
"Bleak Metal. Cultures of Discontent in Virtualised Spaces."
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Chair of English Literature and Cultural Studies
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Zeno Ackermann
Second supervisors:
Prof. Dr MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2021/2022.
Abstract:
The dissertation is embedded in the larger discourse of the advancing digitalisation of our cultural spaces and the associated consequences for literary and cultural studies. It aims to analyse the transformation of practices of meaning generation using selected pre-digital subcultures (black metal, darkwave, punk) and the associated transformations of ideological and textual work. The aim is also to create a framework with which cultural studies can grasp the digital space in a meaningful way and with which literary studies can deal with new, digital text forms.
The dissertation draws on research that I have conducted in the past on the basis of modern text forms such as interactive digital texts, as well as within cultural studies, for example by analysing field recordings, industrial and noise culture, and digital-discursive electronic music cultures. This includes an understanding of articulation in the field of tension of multimedia sign and memory structures, as well as a spatial conception of digital space (web space) as a liminal place between the materially entangled and the unbound ideal.
Black metal in particular, but also parts of punk and darkwave, also refer strongly in their structure of meaning to an anti-modern discourse that is critical of or even hostile to civilisation, which was originally taken from Romanticism and is expressed both in visual signs and in the lyrics, as well as partly in its musical structures. Nonetheless, for economic reasons, they network beyond the surface social media structures and migrate their pre-modern discourses into a post-modern space full of tension. In this tension, black metal in particular is also building up politically extremist and anti-Semitic structures. The findings of the thesis could therefore also benefit extremism research and the analysis of political structures on the internet, in addition to cultural studies.
