The research group "Discursivizations of the New: Tradition and Innovation in Medieval and Early Modern Texts", funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), was established in 2016 and is based at the Freie Universität Berlin and at partner universities in Bochum and Zurich. For the past two and a half years we have been researching the complex and multifarious relations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ in medieval as well as early modern texts. It is the group’s aim to cast a fresh look at the allegedly linear sequence of 'old' and 'new' cultural phenomena, which have frequently been interpreted on the basis of paradigms of progress. In so doing, 'old' and 'new' are revealed to be complexly intertwined processual relations, emerging in a time-space that generates hybrid textual phenomena: the collaborative research project seeks to demonstrate that 'old' and 'new' in their familiar antithetical guise in fact constitute modern categories of 'purification' (Latour), a state of affairs which manifests itself in this particular case in the form of diachronic dichotomization. On the level of actual cultural phenomena, however, both qualities are typically conjoined in highly specific constellations. Our focus is on medieval and early modern texts (English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Venetian and New Latin) whose historically specific level of dependence on literary tradition and whose tendency towards an intensive deployment of intertextual approaches invites a critical examination of complex, non-dichotomic entanglements and relational configurations of supposedly 'old' and supposedly 'new' phenomena.

We share the common objective of developing categories for the conceptualization and discursivization of the 'new'. The goal is to achieve a redefinition of cultural dynamics that goes beyond the theoretical opposition of rupture and continuity. The project takes its departure from the observation that what is 'new' in epistemological, social or cultural terms is frequently coupled with existing textual and generic structures in complex processes. Invention, innovation and the negotiation of irritation are thus always connected to processes of re-novation, restoration and reconceptualization.

Featuring an international panel of guests and held in German and in English, the closing conference of the first funding period (2016-2019)

"Multitemporalities, Heterochronies, novantiquitates" is scheduled

from 04 to 05 April 2019

at the Freie Universität Berlin. As the title of the conference suggests we would like to use the opportunity to address concepts of temporality with which historically specific aspects concerning such relations of ‘old’ and ‘new’ can be understood and conceptualized. As a collaborative research group we wish to use the event to review the results we have achieved so far; at the same time we would also like to scrutinize them critically as well as discuss central theoretical issues underlying our approach with a number of external experts coming from various disciplines.

Location: Freie Universität Berlin, Habelschwerdter Allee 45, Room L 116 (Seminar Center)

Programme

Thursday, 4th April

09:30	Bernhard Huss (Berlin): Introduction
10:00	Judith Pollmann (Leiden): To give novelty to the old and authority to the new. Negotiating novelty in sixteenth-century Europe
10:45	Dialogue Subproject 06: Philosophia cantat. Negotiating Epistemic Ruptures in Early Modern Philosophical and Scientific Didactic Poetry Statement: Martin Korenjak (Innsbruck) Response: Bernd Roling, Ramunė Markevičiūtė (Berlin)
11:45	Dialogue Subproject 08: Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques. On the Relationship of Enlightenment and Classicism in 18th-century French Literature Statement: Gideon Stiening (München) Response: Klaus W. Hempfer, Roman Kuhn (Berlin)
12:45	Lunch break
14:00	Patricia Clare Ingham (Bloomington): Residual and Emergent: Temporal Patterns in Geoffrey Chaucer's A Treatise on the Astrolabe
14:45	Dialogue Subproject 02: Troynovant revisited. Strategic hybridization in the competing traditions of classical antiquity in English Literature c. 1380 - 1680 Statement: Ananya Jahanara Kabir (London) Response: Andrew James Johnston, Wolfram Keller, Margitta Rouse (Berlin)
15:45	Coffee break
16:15	Dialogue Subproject 04: Thinking Innovation/Novelty in Venetian Literature on Art of the Cinquecento and Seicento Statement: Eva Struhal (Québec) Response: Valeska von Rosen, Anja Brug (Düsseldorf)
18:00	Mordechai Feingold (Pasadena): No Longer Ancient? The Modernity of Early Modern Intellectual Life

Friday, 5th April

10:00	Dialogue Subproject 03: Mars and his Pistol. Contemporary Innovation/Novelty and Epic Tradition in Early Modern France Statement: Jan-Friedrich Missfelder (Basel) Response: Bernhard Huss, Daniel Melde (Berlin)
11:00	Dialogue Subproject 05: Canto l'arme pietose. Hybridizations of the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ in Epics and Epic Theory during the Secondo Cinquecento Statement: Federico di Santo (Berlin) Response: David Nelting, Maria Debora Capparelli (Bochum)
12:00	Lunch break
13:30	Verena Lobsien (Berlin): Pausing for means to mourn some newer way: Ekphrastische Novationen des Mitfühlens bei Spenser, Sidney und Shakespeare
14:30	Coffee break
15:00	Dialogue Subproject 01: ich bin niht niuwe -? Innovation/Novelty as Paradoxical Effect in the Medieval Discourse of Courtly Love Statement: Susanne Köbele, Tim Huber (Zürich) Response: Hartmut Bleumer (Göttingen)
16:00	Dialogue Subproject 07: El peregrino en su patria. Recoding ‘old’ and ‘new’ in the ‘novela bizentina’ of the Spanish Golden Age Statement: Karin Kukkonen (Berlin/Oslo) Response: Anita Traninger, Paolo Brusa (Berlin)

Conference in English and German with simultaneous translation