Fredrik RenardPhD, Postdoc

Modern German literature

German, preparatory class

My research interests include genre theory, narratology, the relationship between literature and philosophy, and the history of the modern novel, in particular the German, French and English novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. I’m also interested in how perception, emotions, and experience have been represented in literature and how this relates to literary form. In my first monograph, Arbeit am Zufall: die Formierung des modernen deutschen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert (2021), I investigated the emergence of the modern German novel in relation to changes in the narrative and poetological role of chance and contingency taking place in the eighteenth century.

My current research project, "The narration of experience and the modern novel," aims to develop a new theory of narration of experience in the modern European novel of the long nineteenth century. Specifically, the project examines how two different aspects of experience originally conceptualized by Wilhelm Dilthey and Walter Benjamin as Erlebnis and Erfahrung relate to form in the modern novel. My guiding hypothesis is that the difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung offers two different ways to structure narration that partly can explain the modern novel’s rich formal variation throughout the period.