135045 VO Thematology (2024S)

Thematic studies („thematology“) is a common generic term for the study of the diverse content of literature. It therefore includes what is also known in German as the history of myths and motifs, as well as the analysis of texts according to symbols, metaphors and topoi. Literary texts are fundamentally worldly; they reflect everything that exists in the real world and also present products of the human imagination or projections of the future, i.e. things, techniques, places, circumstances, living beings that do not (yet) exist. Each sub-area of thematic studies is in turn an extensive field of research: mythology, historical figures or events, fairy-tale motifs, realistic representations of the real world with its discourses and problems, and much more.
The lecture will begin by outlining the origins of the academic study of literary content, which can be found on the one hand in the theological-allegorical conception of stories and on the other in the interest in folkloristic "sorting". It will deal with the different classes of literary content (places, characters, narratemes, etc.), with academic practice (retelling, producing reference works, classifying, etc.), with past and present methods (from enumeration and ordering to digital techniques and the question of the overlap with general cultural studies as a discipline). It will examine the fiction-theoretical status of invented worlds, as well as the relationship between genres and content (whether political poetry or crime fiction). But it will also examine problems such as the linguisation of content under catchphrases, which are problematic today for various reasons. And, of course, some of the lectures will be dedicated to a specific topic that can be used as an example to analyse past and present research into a field such as economics in literature, military history or libraries.