AG Spirituality – Culture – Narrativity
The connections between spirituality and the literary and non-literary narratives of a culture.
This AG takes on the concept of spirituality that has just recently commanded attention within cultural studies, and examines its links with cultural narratives, literary and otherwise. By posing these questions we endeavour to open a matrix of spirituality-culture-narrativity, one that has not yet undergone systematic analysis and that promises insight into how historically and culturally construed forms of spirituality can be pinned down, played out in literary texts, and made manifest.
The descriptor 'spirituality' serves the AG as an 'umbrella term' that encompasses formal religious practice as well as the social phenomena of religiosity, esoterica, and the occult. Our general interests include drafting the contours of the term 'spirituality,' the development of theory on the reciprocal effects of social and historical context, and the different cultural traits and social functions of spirituality. The projects represented by current participants highlight gender, power, and magic as well as Christian spirituality. The AG follows an integrative approach that draws its tools from literary studies, theology, philosophy, cultural history, and sociology in order to place the complex phenomenon of spirituality under multiperspectival observation.
Researchers from all faculties are welcome to collaborate on an inter- and transdisciplinary investigation of our thematic matrix. The AG regularly organizes workshops and study days that foreground the use of key concepts in the context of cultural studies and the discussion of methodological approaches and interdisciplinary perspectives, all accompanied by expert scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.
Information on upcoming events is published on the GGK's homepage, and can also be obtained from Hanna Bingel.
Speaker:
- Hanna Bingel
Contact:
Meeting times:
- 08.12.2008: AG meeting with Dr. Martha Blassnig
- 11.12.2008: AG meeting with Prof. Ulrike Brunotte
- 12.12.2008: Workshop with Bernhard Kleeberg