Organised by Michael Bies (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin), Michael Gamper and Alix Ricau, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies".

In the current debates about how to move towards a sustainable society, do-it-yourself (DIY) is a topic that is as omnipresent as it is controversial: while it is often promoted as a model for alternative economies and community-based ways of life, it is also criticised as an embodiment of capitalist notions of individuality. These different assessments already indicate that DIY is not only talked about from very different political perspectives, but that it is also very difficult to define. In this sense, DIY is often understood as an amateur practice that has its origins in craft or counterculture and can serve as a model for new forms of political, social, economic, and aesthetic intervention today. At the same time, however, it is often analysed as an individualistic activity that became popular with the rise of the consumer society and is accompanied by promises of self-efficacy, creativity, and therapy, but in fact limits people’s abilities to deviate from what industry allows them to do, as Adorno already criticised in 1938.

At our conference, we want to look at DIY from a literary and cultural studies perspective. Our aim is not to differentiate and critique different forms of DIY, such as handicrafts, needlework, tinkering, and repair, or different understandings and perspectives of DIY. Instead, we want to understand DIY as a phenomenon that, precisely because of its diversity and contradictions, plays a key role in negotiating the status of work and other forms of human agency in modern consumer societies. Starting from the idea that DIY in its various forms has been decisively shaped in and by media from the modern novel to Instagram and TikTok, we want to focus on the imaginaries that have influenced ideas and representations of DIY in European media culture. At the same time, we want to take into account that, conversely, literature and other aesthetic artifacts have repeatedly been conceived as the result of DIY practices such as bricolage (Lévi-Strauss).

The conference will focus on three main aspects: First, we will look at genealogies of DIY, examining key literary figures and narratives of DIY that have shaped modern Western literature and culture. These figures range from Robinson Crusoe and other skilled craftsmen to more recent examples of self-made individuals across all social strata. Second, we will consider the transmedia construction of these figures and narratives, whose great cultural significance is due to the practices of dissemination and adaptation throughout the Western world. Third, we will discuss the social, political, and, above all, aesthetic values ascribed to DIY characters and narratives, with a particular focus on the notions of work and labor and the relationships to the natural world that they suggest.

Programme

15:00-15:30 | Michael Bies (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin), Alix Ricau (EXC 2020): Introduction

Chair: Michael Bies

15:30-16:30 | Jana Vijayakumaran (Universität Duisburg-Essen): Necessity – Universality – Fatality. Imaginations of the "Zero State" in Modern German (Anti-)Robinsonades

16:30-17:00 | Coffee Break

Chair: Michael Gamper (Freie Universität Berlin/EXC 2020)

17:00-18:00 | Michael Bies: Robinson and the Radio

18:00-19:00 | Patricia Ribault (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis): To Make, or Not to Make, That Is the Question

Chair: Alix Ricau (EXC 2020)

09:30-10:30 | Christiane Arndt (Queen’s University Kingston): Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Narrating Material Practices

10:30-11:30 | Karin Krauthausen (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): The Hut as Improvised Structure and Border Experience

11:30-12:00 | Coffee Break

Chair: Michael Bies 

12:00-13:00 | Alix Ricau (EXC 2020): The Story Labels Tell: Narratives of the Self-Made in Industrial Food Production

13:00-13:30 | Final Discussion