The Literary in Life: Exploring the Boundaries between Literature and the Everyday

This consortium reconsiders how literature reflects, explores and modifies social life. The project analyzes fiction, poetry and cases of
new media texts in order to map the traffic between the poetic and the everyday, between the artistically designed and the incidentally
occurring. It focuses on the poetics of literary practices in their traditional, creative and experimental manifestations in literature and
other textual forms. Methods from transdisciplinary narrative studies, cognitive poetics of emotion, rhetorics of literary affectivity, and
poetics of experimentality are utilized and developed. This approach provides detailed analyses on how literary conventions and
novelties work in and through the latest forms of cultural and social meaning-making, how stories and metaphors work as tools for
literature and social life.
The project will take literary scholarship into a new direction: we want to regain the focus on literary works and literariness and open up
the boundaries that have traditionally isolated artworks from the world of everyday life and routine textual practices. In order to study
the forms and functions of literature and life intertwined, the project asks 1) how the literary interacts with the communicative in
everyday social interaction, 2) how literary experimentation revolts against and remodels dominant cultural values and discourses, and
3) how literature creates structures and discursive possibilities for individuals to express and to share emotion and affect. The
consortium, with its threefold emphasis on the social, the experimental and the affective, covers vital aspects on the traffic between life
and literature. Together, the three universities contribute to the multidisciplinary effort of understanding the human mind in action.