Müller, Samuel
Dissertation topic:
"Gottfried Benn's poetry of the 1920s."
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Professorship of Modern German Literature History
at the Chair of Modern German Literature II
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof. Dr Stephan Kraft
Second supervisor:
Prof. Dr Wolfgang Riedel (retired)
Prof. Dr Thorsten Ries (Univ. of Texas at Austin)
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2022/2023.
Abstract:
Gottfried Benn's lyrical oeuvre experienced considerable growth in the short period 1925-1927. Although individual poems are an integral part of the modern canon, this productive breakthrough leads a shadowy existence in the general perception alongside the earlier expressionist and later work phases and, unlike these, does not bear its own name. This is at least incongruent with the importance that Benn himself attached to his cycles and collections, which is also evident in a post-war edition of the poetry of the 1920s in particular. Previous research has usually summarised these using Benn's eight verse stanza, which is, however, a purely formal criterion without any further significance. Moreover, the poems are often reduced to makeshift stages in the transition from early to late work and realisations of poetological self-interpretations from the period. In contrast, more recent Benn research has tested an inventory of procedures on other phases of his work in order to prevent such misinterpretations and to gain a more independent picture. In the field of poetry, these include in particular text-genetic and contextualising approaches, which are to be transferred to the 1920s with some significant variations in the dissertation project. In addition, a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods will be used to test the common thesis of Benn's isolation during this period. The guiding assumption here is that Benn emancipated himself from his expressionist phase only late in the period in question and moved on to a more moderate style of writing that can be traced into his late work.
