Ulrike Draesner: Sich ein Herz fassen

In the organizer's words:

Draesner takes heart and travels with us into the interior of bodies, invention processes, gifted people and caves in her first lecture entitled "Expanding failure". What does it mean to explore the boundaries of our habits of thought and language(s) through writing? How are historical novels created? Does it help to understand their spaces as a character? How many spaces do I have to deal with as a writer (language space, character space, bacterial space, particle space, past space, reading space ...)?

Draesner takes heart (which one?) and in her second lecture, with the help of various masks (as we, as he/she, as a horse), sneaks after the most insidious of all narrative instances: the ego. Ah, it's so beautiful. And so replaceable? Collectively capable too? Test, test, test. Can we actually expand it, now that the planet seems to be going through a new stage of transformation? Where co-creativity and broadening perspectives are in demand? Will multilingualism and machine-generated text change the literary field more than we realize? Draesner's second lecture ("Aus dem Ich") develops figurations of literary contemporaneity. For what does it mean to put the world into words for our own kind as warm, ephemeral beings? While the AI standing in the grass, famously heartless, beckons to us cheerfully.

The laudatory speech for Ulrike Draesner will be held by literary critic Insa Wilke.