Jörg Kreienbrock is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in 2005 from the Department of German at New York University with a dissertation thesis examining representations of the small and minute in the prose works of Robert Walser. From 2005 to 2006 he held a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at Emory University.
He spent the 2015/16 academic year as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-Fellow at the Department of Media Studies at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He also recently received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University (UK), the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, the University of Rome La Sapienza, and the Graduiertenkolleg “Das Dokumentarische” at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Forschungsschwerpunkte
Germanistik
Literaturtheorie
Komparatistik
Forschungsprojekt
Il Gran Rifiuto: The Rhetoric of Renunciation
In his classical study The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology Ernst Kantorowicz analyzes the famous deposition scene from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard II as an “undoing of kingship,” reducing the body politic to a mere body natural. While ecclesiastical law provides specific forma degradationis, this project focuses on moments where the abdication of power transcends any given legal framework. Indeed, the right not to have a right points towards a different political and aesthetic praxis. It imagines an ethical life of Entsagung beyond the realm of codified law and political institutions. It is this principle of Verzichtbarkeit, which Werner Hamacher discusses as a form of Sprachgerechtigkeit. In his view, linguistic acts of renunciation are closely tied to an idea of justice that is not based on an active appropriation of rights. Theatrical scenes of abdication are therefore more than tragic depictions of demise but open a different perspective on justice understood as the right to renounce rights. It is a right that ungrounds all positive law as well as systems of politics, justice, and ethics and only becomes legible in artistic representations and performances like those of Shakespeare, Goethe, Grillparzer, and von Hofmannsthal (to name only a few prominent examples), paradigmatically performing the dis-entanglement of body politic and body natural.
Publikationen (Auswahl)
Kleiner. Feiner. Leichter: Nuancierungen zum Werk Robert Walsers, Berlin, Zurich: Diaphanes 2010.
Malicious Objects, Anger Management, and the Question of Modern Literature, New York: Fordham University Press 2013.
Sich im Weltall orientieren: Philosophieren im Kosmos 1950 – 1970, Wien, Berlin: Turia + Kant 2020.
Das Medium der Prosa: Studien zur Theorie der Lyrik, Berlin: August Verlag 2020.
