DFG-Forschungsprojekt

On 1 July 2020, the research group led by Prof. Anne Kraume began working on the project "Travelling libraries: transatlantic knowledge systems on the eve of the 19th century", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Through two interrelated subprojects, this three-year project is investigating the extent to which the Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw, with his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768), is responsible for the emergence of an autonomous Hispanic American knowledge discourse in the period of independence and Hispanic American literature based on this discourse.

The first subproject (Dr Andrea Renker) is dedicated to the literary analysis of de Pauw's works and its discourse-analytical placement within the context of the European Enlightenment. The second subproject (Professor Anne Kraume) focuses on the transatlantic cross-linking of knowledge discourses in which Cornelius de Pauw inscribes himself and which are taken up and updated prior to the Spanish American independence by authors such as Juan Ignacio Molina, Francisco Javier Clavijero and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier. Both subprojects share a philological interest in the literary forms through which these knowledge discourses are conveyed. The critical literary goal of the project is to use the example of the transatlantic knowledge discourse on the eve of the 19th century to explore the wider possibilities within the relationship between literary form and knowledge.