After an inaugural meeting earlier in the year, the DFG research network on "Narrative Liminality and/in the Formation of American Modernities" held its second workshop from October 25 to 27, 2018, in Leipzig. The network members came together to discuss the work that happened between the two meetings and to further explore how their individual research projects cohere in an investigation of narrative liminality: The workshop focused on each member's individual case study, the links between ostensibly very different projects, and the overall connection to questions surrounding narratively liminal symbolic forms. Two special guests, Sascha Pöhlmann (Munich/Konstanz) and Luis Özer (Mannheim), added their thoughts from an outside perspective in order to invigorate the discussions.
On the final day, the group arranged the keywords associated with everybody’s individual projects into thematic clusters, as seen in the image below. This mapping will not only help to pinpoint moments of correspondence between individual projects, it has also already started to form the basis of further studies into the peculiarities of narrative liminality, helping to identify key questions and concepts related to our overarching research interest.
Following the physical meeting, the collaboration in the network will continue on a hypertextual online platform, where, based on the above mapping, the network members will work out further links between keywords and their associated projects. Then, the next meeting of the network will take place on April 26 and 27, 2019. The first day of the workshop will also include two public lectures by distinguished guests--we will provide more information on these events in the following months.
