: 20th and 21st Century German Literature and the Environment

Attention towards the environment and its cultural construction has become an increasingly prominent focus of literary studies, with the development of ecocriticism reflecting broader cultural concerns over environmental destruction and the effects of human interaction with the surrounding world. These concerns are articulated in many works of German literature, and have become more acute over the course of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, in response to environmental disasters as well as to increased understanding of issues such as species extinction and climate change. While thinking about and relating to the environment has a long tradition in modern German culture, the ecocritical approach to twentieth and twenty-first century German literature is still a relatively new field, and more work can be done to understand the cultural constructions that inform contemporary relationships with the environment. The successful applicant might investigate work by authors such as: Günter Grass, Monika Maron, Christa Wolf, Yoko Tawada, Ilija Trojanow, or others according to personal interest and suitability. The project will also draw on studies of modern German culture, history and literature and works by major thinkers, theoretical writers and ecocritics. Through the analysis of literary texts from an ecocritical perspective, the project offers significant potential for a better understanding of the complex relationship between humans and the environment, and how this relationship is shaped culturally.