Temporal Communities - Literature in a Global Perspective

The aim of the Temporal Communities - Doing Literature in a Global Perspective cluster is to fundamentally rethink the concept of literature from a global perspective. To achieve this, it is necessary to overcome traditional framework categories of literary history such as 'nation' and 'epoch'. From a global perspective, we recognise literature as a phenomenon that works in time and through time. Globally understood literature thus challenges traditional cultural and linguistic boundaries. As a global phenomenon, literature shows a more diverse face because it is always in dialogue with other arts and cultural practices. It is no longer about the traditional image of great poets and canonical works, but about the ability of literature to create communities over time that transcend the concept of the literary as developed by Western modern societies.

In the case of literature, 'being global' means above all 'being interwoven'.

The researchers in the cluster, which is based at Freie Universit?t Berlin, follow the insight that literature must be fundamentally understood as performative, as something that only exists because people tell, write, read (aloud), perform, illustrate and produce images and sounds. Literature touches and combines different media, it is not limited to (printed) text alone, but also includes performance, illustration, (pop) song and cinema. Therefore, the manifold interrelationships - especially the temporal interrelationships - through which literature becomes global are at the centre of the cluster's research programme. For in the case of literature, 'being global' means above all 'being interwoven' - across long periods of time, cultural contexts and media.

The concept of "temporal communities" can be used to describe how literature extends across spaces and times, forming complex networks - sometimes over millennia - and engaging in constant dialogue with other arts, media, institutions and social phenomena. "We understand 'temporal communities' as the complex interplay of the diverse relationships in space and time that literary objects enter into and through whose interweaving they become literature in the first place," says Andrew James Johnston, Professor of English Philology at Freie Universit?t Berlin and spokesperson for the cluster.

The cluster cooperates with international and local partners such as the University of California, Berkeley; the Jawaharlal-Nehru University, New Delhi; the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome; as well as the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof and the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. "We rely on a flexible organisational structure that enables us to develop and implement small and medium-sized projects by researchers at all career levels with the participation of international fellows," explains Anne Eusterschulte, Professor at the Institute of Philosophy at Freie Universit?t Berlin and spokesperson for the cluster. With its ambitious digital humanities component and creative, research-orientated teaching as well as collaborations with Berlin's cultural and literary scene, the cluster aims to make an active contribution to Berlin's literary life and also reach a broad, non-academic audience.