Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Alain Montandon, Dr.

Project

Anthropology of the Nocturnal

Im Zentrum meines Arbeitsvorhabens steht eine Analyse der Bilder und Darstellungen von Licht und Dunkel, die sich der Mensch in seinem Bezug zur Welt und in der Bestimmung seines Daseins macht. Denn Licht und Dunkelheit geben nicht nur seiner Existenz einen Rhythmus, sondern strukturieren auch sein Denken.
Diese Idee ist einerseits aus meiner Beschäftigung mit sozialen Darstellungen und Repräsentationen im Rahmen einer Soziopoetik entstanden, andererseits aus einem von mir veranstalteten Literaturseminar über die Metamorphosen der Zeit (die Jahreszeiten, Tag und Nacht etc.) und schließlich und vor allem aus einem bereits seit langem gehegten Interesse an der französischen und
deutschen Romantik.
Dieser Frageansatz verbindet sich schließlich mit meinen aktuellen Forschungsinteressen hinsichtlich der Verbindung zwischen Literatur und historischer Anthropologie.
Ich möchte zuerst über die Nacht in der deutschen Aufklärung und Romantik arbeiten. Mich interessiert, wie die Konzeption des Nächtlichen (und deren metaphysische Wurzeln) sich in literarischen Formen äußert, etwa auf der Gattungsebene, in narrativen Strukturen und auf der symbolischen Ebene. Die Betrachtung wird hier über literarische Phänomene hinausgehen und soll auch
die Malerei und die Musik einbeziehen.

Lektüreempfehlung

Montandon, Alain. Le roman aux XVIIIe siècle en Europe. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1999.
-. Sociopoétique de la promenade. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000.
-. Désirs d'hospitalité: de Homère à Kafka. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2002.

Colloquium, 13.03.2007

Metamorphoses of the Night at the Transition from the 18th to the 19th Century

"His [the great scholar Mosch Terpin's] reputation was first established when, after many physics experiments, he clearly established that darkness is primarily based on a dearth of light." (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Klein Zaches)

"...the endless eyes that the night opens in us" (Novalis, Hymnen an die Nacht)

"Where a period's god goes down, like the sun, soon thereafter, the world enters darkness." Jean-Paul, Vorschule der Aesthetik

"Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Der tolle Mensch, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft [The Gay Science], Book 3, 125, 1881)

At the center of my project of a literary anthropology of the nocturnal stands an analysis of the images and depictions of light and dark that form man's relationship to the world and shape his existence. For light and dark not only give his daily existence rhythm, they also structure his thinking.

In Europe, the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th mark a fundamental and decisive turning point in this respect. Where the prior centuries increasingly strove for better illumination (the Enlightenment provides an evident example of this), the years around 1780 will experience the beginning of substantial progress in lighting technologies. These changes have major consequences for the history of the feelings (histoire des sensibilités), whereby literature not only describes them, but also contributes to their formation.

If, since Antiquity, night was the time of fears and terrors that were generally eliminated in the 18th century, then in Europe and particularly in Germany, night was the zenith of a poetics whose theoretical and aesthetic aspects are characteristic of modernity. The reasons why darkness as such could not become the object of artistic depiction until the end of the 18th century and was no longer treated solely as the other, deficient side of the bright day, as the absence or deficit of earthly or divine light, lie to a great degree in the changes in the night brought by lighting technology and the accompanying shift in the view and perception of nocturnal events. The natural philosophy of a Schelling and the various night sides of the natural sciences create a new relationship to nature, philosophically and "scientifically". The discovery and the invention of the unconscious come at the same time as a crisis of subjectivity, whose literary manifestations are manifold and rich. Among other things, a new literary genre appears, the "nocturne". I will take a specific work as an example, the Nachtwachen von Bonaventura (the identity of whose anonymous author remains a great riddle of German literature), in order to analyze in greater detail this particular kind of writing: a cumulation of stylistic devices displays an existential confusion and gives a name to what cannot be depicted.

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Alain Montandon, Dr.

Project

Anthropology of the Nocturnal

Colloquium, 13.03.2007

Metamorphoses of the Night at the Transition from the 18th to the 19th Century

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Montandon, Alain (Clermont-Ferrand, 2010)

Montandon, Alain (Paris, 2010)

Montandon, Alain (2009)

Montandon, Alain (Paris, 2009)

Montandon, Alain (Baltimore, Md., 2007)

Montandon, Alain (Baltimore, Md., 2007)

Montandon, Alain (Paris, 2006)

Montandon, Alain (Berlin, 2006)

Montandon, Alain (Clermont-Ferrand, 2004)

Montandon, Alain (Paris, 2004)

Yearbook Article

2006/2007