Organised by Anne Eusterschulte and Beatrice Gründler, project Premodern Anthologies and the Selective Fiction of Tradition Building, Research Area 3: "Future Perfect"

The aim of our second workshop in 2024 is to bring together experts from various classical, pre-modern and contemporary fields of research to examine anthological text or text-image formats based on case studies from different cultures and time periods. From a comparative perspective, we ask about philological, literary, and artistic principles of selection and collection, about implicit epistemic orders as well as aesthetic strategies, and thus about anthologizing procedures as aesthetic practices. The very conception of anthologies in the premodern context reveals a transcultural entanglement of textual witnesses from different, even distant linguistic and temporal spheres, from diachronic as well as synchronic traditions and socio-historical contexts. Anthologies can be seen as transcultural and at the same time transtemporal media of negotiation. By collecting textual as well as artistic witnesses, networks of scholars (synchronic and diachronic) become indirectly manifest. Through the selection of fragmented texts, images and materials polyphonic, cross-cultural discourses emerge and create ever shifting traditions and audiences. In this sense, anthologizing as practice always shapes and generates "temporal communities".

Further information will follow soon.