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Researcher
Thomas Ernst
- Research Expertise:My expertise grows out of the fields of Modern German Literature (PhD 2008, Trier) and Germanic Media Studies and Cultural Studies (habilitation 2019, Duisburg-Essen). I am particularly interested in German-language culture and literature from the 18th century to the present, with a focus on the 20th century and the present. I concentrate on three fields: First, I work on the systematization and sustainable establishment of web literary studies, which is especially interested in the follows of digitization and communication in social media for literature, for literary communication and for the work and publication practices of literary studies itself. As a subdiscipline of digital humanities and of digital literary studies, web literary studies analyzes, among other things, digital literature and web literature, new forms of digital publishing (in literature and in the open humanities), digital literacy, digital memory culture, and new models of author’s rights. Second, I develop studies of subversion, based on the broad model of political writing that I built in my book „Literatur und Subversion“. I apply this model to contemporary (German-language) literature, to avant-garde and experimental literature of the 20th and 21st centuries, and meanwhile also to subversive films, music, and web artists. Third, I work on comparative studies of multilingual literature in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands and on the reflection of (urban) spaces in literature, especially of Brussels and the Ruhr Area.
- Keywords:WEB LITERATURE, GERMANY, DIGITAL SOCIETY, SUBVERSION, DIGITAL LITERACY, LITERARY CRITICISM, NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, GERMAN POLITICS AND CULTURE, LITERARY THEORY, GERMAN PHILOLOGY, GERMAN LANGUAGE + LITERATURE, Language and literature (incl. information, documentation, library and archive sciences)
- Disciplines:History and philosophy of media and communication, Cultural media, Digital media, Gender and media, Comparative literature studies, Contemporary literature, Literatures in German, Literary criticism, Literary theory, Comparative study of regions
- Research techniques:On the one hand, I work qualitatively with established literary, cultural and media theories, analyzing literary and popular texts, films and drama. Here hermeneutical and narratological as well as discourse analytical methods count as well as cultural theories of Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, imagology and theories of (urban) spaces. These different approaches merge into the complex model of "Studies of Subversion" that I use to analyze political literature and art. On the other hand, I am interested in the (quantitative) methods of the Digital Humanities and in the analytical approaches of Digital Literary Studies and of Web Literary Studies to analyze digital literature and literary communication in digital and social media.
- Users of research expertise:In the academic field, my expertise is of relevance to humanities scholars, and here in particular to scholars from literary, cultural, media, library, and book studies, and to digital humanists. But interdisciplinary collaborations with disciplines from other faculties can also grow out of my research. This is especially interesting for colleagues who deal with questions of creativity, cultural developments, the arts and digitalization, such as e.g. pedagogy, law or sociology. Socially, different groups can gain knowledge thanks to my expertise on German-language and digital culture and literature. This certainly applies to the media, to politics, to cultural institutions such as theaters, libraries or author associations, as well as schools.