The research group investigates the complex relationship between 'old' and 'new,' seeking to conceptualise this relationship not in terms of strictly linear diachronicity, but rather as the result of intricate temporal entanglements. 'Discursivisations of the New' as suggested in the project's title are understood as processual categories that are meant to transcend static old-vs.-new dichotomies and to overcome simplistic teleologies of progress. In the title, the term 'discursivisation' gestures towards the processualities and modalities involved when matters considered new are presented in textual form, whereas 'new' refers both to the results of intraliterary change and to the literary treatment of 'new' concepts from other orders of discourse, i.e. to extraliterary innovation.

The central object of the collaborative research is constituted by European texts from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The spectrum of genres to be analysed encompasses, amongst others, prose, poetry and drama, with treatises on literary theory and expository texts to be included as well. Comprised of works dating from the 12th to the 18th century, the corpus examined covers a rich variety of European literatures (German, English, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as Medieval and New Latin), and includes both canonical and non-canonical texts. The project's survey of the forms through which literature establishes relational conceptualisations of the 'old' vs. the 'new' is to be complemented by an exemplary analysis of the Early Modern discourse on innovation in art theory, an issue frequently negotiated with recourse to literary patterns.

All subprojects share the common goal of developing analytical categories for the conceptualisation and discursivisation of the new. The research group aims 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, in complex processes, with existing textual and generic structures. Invention, innovation and negotiations of cultural phenomena that have a capacity for irritating contemporaries are thus always connected to processes of re-novation, restoration and reconceptualisation.