Profile

Professional career

• since 10/2008
  
• since 12/2016
  
• 07/2019 - 08/2020
  
• 01/2014 - 02/2015
  
• 03/2008 - 10/2008
  

Education

• 07/2004 - 07/2007
  
• 10/1997 - 07/2003
  

Why do we still read ,literary' writings - texts that we do not expect to refer directly to the same reality that we accept as given by our experience? We read as a dissotion, as a longing for beauty or as a short-term escape from everyday life - but often, we conncect reading to an intellectual gain. But what sort of knowledge do we connect to novels, poems, or plays - and what kind of knowledge have these texts been connected to in the past? What is the objective of ,literary communication' - using a language often different from the one we use in daily life, and and talking about occurences that rarely have happend in the manner they are reported?

These questions I direct to literary writings of the 21st century as well as of late 18th and 19th century. On the one hand, I am interested in an historical epistemology of literary writing throughout the long history of modern literature in Germany. On the other hand, and more generally, I try to identify the systematic place that literary communication still keeps within the present concert of digital media. My hypothesis (and also my hope) is, that literary texts interact with other forms of social media, but do not abandon its proper specifics.

• Institutional Partnership: Transcultural German Studies Leipzig - Tucson - Nairobi

  Herrmann, Leonhard

  Duration: 12/2023 – 12/2026

  Funded by: DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

  Involved organisational units of Leipzig University: Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)
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• Virtual Master Class Leipzig Tucson Nairobi

  Herrmann, Leonhard

  Duration: 03/2023 – 12/2023

  Funded by: DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

  Involved organisational units of Leipzig University: Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)
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• Leipzig Tucson Virtual Master Class

  Herrmann, Leonhard

  Duration: 10/2021 – 09/2022

  Funded by: DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst

  Involved organisational units of Leipzig University: Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)
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• Aspects of diction in comparative perspective: German/Portuguese (BR)

  Reichmann, Tinka

  Duration: 01/2019 – 12/2023

  Funded by: DAAD Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; Andere ausländische öffentliche Forschungsförderer

  Involved organisational units of Leipzig University: Translationswissenschaft (Dolmetschen/Dolmetschwissenschaft); Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)
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more projects

• Herrmann, L.

  Framing the Presence: Judith Hermann's "Lettipark"

  In: Marven, L.; Plowman, A.; Roy, K. (Eds.)

  The Short Story in German in the Twenty-First Century. Rochester NY: Camden House. 2020. pp. 137–155.
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• Herrmann, L.

  Wann ist Erzählen eigentlich zuverlässig? Mimetisch unzuverlässiges Erzählen als graduelles Phänomen und seine Funktion in Romanen der Gegenwart

  Zeitschrift für Germanistik. 2020. NF 31 (1). pp. 19–35.
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• Herrmann, L.

  • Nach dem Populismus. Komplexität, Polyvalenz und der ,Social Turn‘ in Büchern von Deniz Ohde, Marlene Streeruwitz und Sibylle Berg

  Gegenwartsliteratur. A German Studies Yearbook. 2021. pp. 315–342.
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• Herrmann, L.

  Literarische Vernunftkritik im Roman der Gegenwart

  Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler. 2017.
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• Herrmann, L.; Horstkotte, S.

  Gegenwartsliteratur. Eine Einführung.

  Stuttgart; Weimar: Metzler. 2016.

  ISBN: 978-3-476-02578-4
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more publications

• Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)

  Skeptischer Realismus. Erkennen und Erzählen im 19. Jahrhundert (Keller, Stifter, Storm)

  Start Date of Collaboration: 01/02/2018

  External participating organisations: University of California Berkeley (Berkeley)

  Involved persons: Herrmann, Leonhard
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more cooperations

• Konferenz

  Strukturalismus, heute. Brüche, Spuren, Kontinuitäten

  Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)

  Event Organiser: Herrmann, Leonhard; Endres, Martin

  24/04/2016 – 27/04/2016
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• Panel auf der Konferenz Realismen der Avantgarde, Münster

  Überzeichnet. Kunst, Wirklichkeit und Avantgarde in der Literatur der Gegenwart

  Neuere deutsche Literatur (19. bis 21. Jahrhundert)

  Event Organiser: Herrmann, Leonhard

  05/09/2018 – 07/09/2018
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• Vortragsreihe

  LLC (Leipziger Literaturwissenschaftliches Colloquium) im Wintersemester 2019/2020

  Neuere deutsche Literatur-Literaturtheorie

  Event Organiser: Burdorf, Dieter; von Ammon, Frieder; Herrmann, Leonhard

  06/11/2019 – 29/01/2020
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more events

The main aim of my teaching is to enable students to engage with literary texts self-reliantly. To this end, the participants in my courses develop various research methods. These enable them to make the results of their own work comprehensible to others, even if their results differ. In this way, a discourse is set in motion that takes the fictional, poetic and polyvalent nature of literary texts seriously and understands them as objects that allow plurality to be experienced as productive.

Subjects of my classes are closely related to my research interests. I combine literary texts under genre-poetic, systematic and historical aspects with regard to research questions that demonstrate the diversity of literary writing in the German language.

• Virtual Master Class Leipzig Tucson Nairobi: Discourse and complexity in German contemporary writing

• Literary theory and/as communication theory

  Literary theories repeatedly refer to communication models in oder to describe processes of the constitution of literary meaning and sense. The seminar deals with these theories against the background of the practical handling of literary texts: To what extent can communication processes be initiated, moderated and made fruitful by reading literary texts?

• 19th century Nature Writings

• Introduction to German literary studies: Focus on poetry and fiction of Romanticism

• Theories of realism

• Nature poetry from the Enlightenment to the present day

• Theodor Fontanes social novels

• The Idyll. History of the genre

• Virtual Master Class Leipzig Tucson Nairobi: trancultural memory

• Engaged Literature

• Narrating (my) life - fictional-biographical, autobiographical and autofictional narration of the present day

• Narrative poetics of the 19th century: Stifter, Keller, Storm

• Leipzig Tucson Virtual Master Class: Nature Writing

• Leipzig Tucson Virtual Master Class: Belonging and identity

• Leipzig Tucson Virtual Master Class: Postcolonial Writing today

• Bourgeois tragedies

• The novella. History of a genre

• The aesthetics of autonomy

• Media of literature in the 19th century

• Nature Writing in the 19th century

• The epic poem since 1800

• Ingeborg Bachmann

• Introduction to the History of German Literature

• Historic narration in the 19th century

• Theories and methods of the study of contemporary literature

• Film adaptations of Thomas Mann

• Fictionality and poeticity

• Concepts of Realism

• Travel writing around 1800

• Art reflection in the literature of realism

• Theories of drama since 1800

• Volker Schlöndorff: Literature and Film

• Poetics of narration today