This project focuses on authors as cultural artefacts, and is located at the cusp of humanist literary studies, cultural studies and the social sciences. Since 2008, it has produced a series of peer-reviewed articles and 2 major co-edited volumes. These publications, together with the book version of my doctoral thesis (2008), examined how a number of post-war German-language authors have engaged with media processes, as well as considering the wider issues underlying the production and reception of cultural output in the Western world. All of these publications have been geared towards my second major monograph, which carries the project's title: Writing Life: The Making of the Author in Germany's Media Age. This study will enhance existing theories of authorship by reflecting on the impact of the media and media constructions on writer's views of themselves and on the aesthetic nature and social function of their writing. It will encourage scholars within German Studies to consider German cultural output within the globalized world of the media and literary celebrity. For several years to come, it will also offer opportunities for collaboration with colleagues within and beyond Lancaster on projects that seek to understand how cultural producers are valued in the contemporary Western world.

In a little more detail...
The project engages with the political, social and cultural circumstances of authorship in post-war Germany. Its key output, a monograph,will provide detailed analysis of the ways in which an evolving model of authorship conditions both authors' individual literary creations and the wider public consumption of culture. This analysis in turn will allow me to investigate broader questions about the nature and function of the German cultural sphere, as well as to formulate a systematic conception of the hitherto under-researched phenomenon of literary celebrity in a globalized environment - topics I have begun to address in related individual articles and edited volumes. Locating literary texts by key authors within broader shifts since the 1960s in German media, culture and publishing, I employ methodologies ranging from close textual analysis to historical reconstruction (evaluating archive materials) and specific instances of data analysis (TV and radio statistics). In doing so, I draw on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, John Frow, and a number of celebrity studies scholars. The major achievement of the project within the discipline of German Studies will be to effect a shift of emphasis from the narrow focus on direct political engagement on the part of writers (e.g. speeches on a particular issue or event) towards a more discursive understanding of the author's position within the cultural sphere and the aesthetic strategies entailed by such a position. More broadly, my project will result in a portfolio of outputs, headed up by my monograph, which collectively offer an innovative template for linking in-depth literary analysis with a sociological approach to culture. By re-framing authorship in relation to media processes of commodification and fetishization it will break new ground for our understanding of celebrity processes and the production and consumption of culture in the Western world.