Zones

Initiation of an international collaboration

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Ambiguity has been considered an essential quality of the visual arts and literature at least since the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the media-specific forms of ambiguity change considerably. Through international collaboration this project will, on the one hand, investigate the diverse spectrum of ambiguous forms in contemporary German literatures and arts including media and installation art, film, theater, and music. On the other hand, it will focus on areas of overlap between the communicative, aesthetic and political dimensions of ambiguity. The articulation of these areas will be achieved through the concept of the zone, which is drawn from phenomenology. In this context a zone indicates a space in which the use of ambiguity is favored with a corresponding expectation for or tolerance of it. In such spaces, ambiguity is not a contingent but rather a constitutive attribute that has less to do with semantic structures than with the dynamic processes of the production and reception of ambiguity in social contexts. With the concept of the zone, the narrow classifications of ambiguity in rhetoric and linguistics will be expanded without reverting to the vague concept of ambiguity employed recently in literary, visual, and media studies. 

Principal Investigators:Frauke Berndt (University of Tübingen / University of Zurich) &Lutz Koepnick (Vanderbilt University, Nashville)

The project was successfully completed between 2015 and 2016.