Dr. Hannah von Sass

Alfried Krupp Junior Fellow
(October 2020 - September 2021) 

  • Born 1987
  • Studies of Scenic Arts at the Universität Hildesheim and the Université de Provence Aix-Marseille; PhD in German Literature, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
  • Free-lance Writer: theatre, opera and film
  • From 2021 onwards postdoc with the DFG scholarship ‘Eigene Stelle’ at the Peter Szondi Institute of Comparative Literature, Freie Universität Berlin

Fellow project: "Technology, frame, surfaces. On the metaphoricity of theatre texts“

The often-normative description of theatre texts is largely permeated by spatial and material metaphors. Due to an efficacious paragon the drama is coined as a painting in the middle of the 17th century, one hundred years later it becomes a wall, in the 19th century eventually a pyramid. In the late 20th century, theatre texts were declared machines, producing text carriers instead of figures. These normatively loaded terms already determine latently or even explicitly a specific theoretical approach. The conceptual ‘apparatus’ marginalizes the fact that texts are also temporally conditioned media. Therefore, this research project aims at identifying the epistemic practices of theatre text theories in order to reflect on the pertinent set of cognitive patterns, figures of speech and tropes as well as approaches in a critical way. Surprisingly, this endeavor has yet to ‘materialize’ and, at the same time, it can coalesce with recent research in literature science.