On 27 and 28 November, the second workshop in the series “Digital Genre Hermeneutics” will take place in Room 104 of the University Main Building. This time, the study of literary genres will focus not only on temporal context but also on a wide range of additional aspects.
Participation is free of charge. Please register by emailing phf.dh@uni-rostock.de.
Venue:
Room 104, University Main Building, Universitätsplatz 1, 18055 Rostock
Abstract:
From a hermeneutic perspective, genres can be understood as contexts of literary works that shape not only their production, reception, and interpretation, but also their structures, contents, and stylistic features. Comparatively little attention has been paid in literary studies and computational humanities to the fact that literary genres themselves are embedded in a variety of different contexts. The temporal dimension is the most thoroughly studied (Underwood 2016, 2019), but many others exist: social, linguistic, cultural, geographical, medial, and material contexts in which genres develop (for the medial conditioning of genre, see Meyer 1987; 1995). The workshop places particular emphasis on examining, modelling, and analysing such contexts as part of the study of literary genres using digital methods (Hesselbach et al. 2024). It will also address the development of new corpora (Henny-Krahmer 2023) and recent methodological advances in digital genre analysis, especially regarding the use of large language models and machine learning. In addition, the workshop engages with praxeological perspectives on genre (Martus/Spoerhase 2022; Gittel 2021), questions of conceptual structure and vagueness (Schröter 2025), and the relationship between genre and literary history (Gymnich et al. 2007).
References:
Hesselbach, R., Calvo Tello, J., Henny-Krahmer, U., Schöch, C. & Schlör, D. (2024). Digital Stylistics in Romance Studies and Beyond. University Publishing heiUP.
Gittel, Benjamin: Fiktion und Genre. Theorie und Geschichte referenzialisierender Lektürepraktiken. 1870–1910. De Gruyter.
Gymnich, M., Neumann, B., & Nünning, A. (Hrsg.). (2007). Gattungstheorie und Gattungsgeschichte. WVT, Wiss. Verl. Trier.
Henny-Krahmer, U. (2023). Genre Analysis and Corpus Design. Nineteenth-Century Spanish-American Novels. Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik, Band 17. Norderstedt: Books on Demand.
Martus, S., & Spoerhase, C. (2022). Geistesarbeit: Eine Praxeologie der Geisteswissenschaften (Erste Auflage). Suhrkamp.
Meyer, R. (1987). Novelle und Journal, I: Titel und Normen: Untersuchungen zur Terminologie der Journalprosa, zu ihren Tendenzen, Verhältnissen und Bedingungen. Steiner.
Meyer, R. (1998). Novelle und Journal. In G. Sautermeister & U. Schmid (Hrsg.), Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848 (S. 234–250). Hanser.
Schröter, J. (2019). Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen. Journal of Literary Theory, 13(2), 227–257.
Schröter, J. (2025). Zur Modellierung von Unsicherheit: Machine Learning und begriffliche Vagheit am Beispiel der Novellen im 19. Jahrhundert. Book of Abstracts – DHd 2025, 284–288.
Underwood, T. (2016). The Life Cycles of Genres. Journal of Cultural Analytics, 2(2).
Underwood, T. (2019). Distant Horizons. Digital Evidence and Literary Change. The University of Chicago Press.