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Nicola Gess ist Professorin für Neuere deutsche und Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Basel.

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Selected Publications

Gess, Nicola. (2024). Bewunderung, Verwunderung, Erstaunen? – Praktiken des Staunens in der Tragödientheorie der Frühaufklärung und in Lessings Philotas. In Berndt, Frauke; Hees-Pelikan, Johannes; Reisender, Marius; Rocks, Carolin (Ed.), Ethische Praktiken in ästhetischen Theorien des 18. Jahrhunderts (pp. 349–366). Felix Meiner.

Gess, Nicola. (2023). Die Literatur der Gesellschaft. Von Soziologen, Detektiven und einer Spurensuche bei Leo Perutz und Norbert Jacques. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97, 73–86. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41245-023-00163-3

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Gess, Nicola. (2022). Emerging from stupor: A chapter in the cultural history of thunder. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 77-78, 120–132. https://doi.org/10.1086/721447

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Selected Projects & Collaborations

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Halb-Wahrheiten. Wahrheit, Fiktion und Konspiration im 'postfaktischen' Zeitalter

Research Project | 6 Project Members

Das Projekt, das am 1.9.2019 startet und vier Jahre laufen wird, beschäftigt sich mit der Funktion, Verbreitung und Evolution von Halbwahrheiten im sogenannten 'postfaktischen' Diskurs und allgemeiner mit der Frage, wie dort das Fiktive im Faktualen heimisch wird. Zwei Teilprojekte untersuchen Beispiele aus dem Kontext des gegenwärtigen deutschen Rechtspopulismus: Das Projekt Konspirative Halbwahrheiten. Pegida-Diskurse in den sozialen Netzwerken untersucht die Kommunikation von Pegida-Anhängern auf Facebook und Twitter und legt das Augenmerk insbesondere auf Konspirations- und Katastrophennarrative. Das Projekt Analoge Verschwörungen. Paranoia, Fiktion und Populismus in der Postdemokratie untersucht konspirative Erzählungen in Sachtexten, Belletristik und Veranstaltungen rechtspopulistischer Publikationsorgane.

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Sinergia: The Power of Wonder. The Instrumentalization of Admiration, Astonishment and Surprise in Discourses of Knowledge, Power and Art

Research Project | 2 Project Members

This sinergia-project, directed by Mireille Schnyder (Zürich, Leading House) and Nicola Gess, aims to provide groundbreaking insights into the social relevance of aesthetic emotions, by showing that the analysis of the deliberate instrumentalization of wonder (Staunen) in political, scientific, social and artistic contexts casts an innovative light onto the structuring of cultural values, the ordering of knowledge and our practices of governance and domination. Further members of the project are Hugues Marchal (Basel) and Ulrich Bröckling (Freiburg i.Br.). The sinergia-project builds upon the results of a previous Sinergia project, Poetics and Aesthetics of Amazement. As indicated in its title, that first phase of research focused on the fabrication, reflection and function of wonder within literature and the arts, with a significant attention to philosophical thought. However, the new project endeavors to research how these practices and the kinds of wonder they induce are used in the fields of power and knowledge. If aesthetics, rhetoric and poetics investigate and conceptualize the artificial production of wonder in the threefold sense of admiration, astonishment and surprise, these closely related emotions are also put in operation in a much broader range of human activities. They are commonly sought, managed and questioned in, for example, politics, pedagogy and education, polemology, ecological and security issues, (popular) science, advertising and media, when issues of hierarchy, legitimacy and risk assessment, but also persuasion, manipulation and entertainment are at stake. The project aims to study these instrumentalizations of wonder and to assess their massive cultural importance in a strongly interdisciplinary perspective that primarily joins cultural sociology and literary studies, as well as the history of science, but that will also rely on the collaboration of scholars of educational science, history, art and architecture, musicology, and security studies, who are involved in supervising the doctoral candidates. That said, our methodology is based on the hypothesis that literature, literary studies and the sociological approach of cultural analysis are key tools to understand processes in which wonder is instrumentalized. Literature has not only reflected on its own fabrication and use of this affect; it has also constantly depicted, analyzed and/or criticized the broader social and anthropological utilization of wonder that we want to study, and it therefore forms a rich diachronic archive of relevant observations and assumptions. Non-literary strategies of inducing and appropriating wonder heavily rely on linguistic, discursive and aesthetic tools: their analysis therefore calls for instruments of literary studies, such as rhetoric, poetics, aesthetics, that are to be applied to a meta-analysis of public discourses of knowledge and power, their practices and arrangement in the public sphere. Finally, the sociological approach of cultural analysis allows us to research wonder as a specific form of elicited and orchestrated interpersonal behavior. Historically, the project focuses on early modern and modern history and contemporary times. This time frame, ranging from 1600 to the present, allows for examining important discursive and historical shifts, which we consider to be crucial for the topic at hand.