Global Humanities Junior Fellow at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

April – July 2016

Religion in Contemporary German Literature – Two Case Studies

At Freie Universitaet Berlin, Johannes Kleine reconsiders the role religious motifs and theological thinking play in contemporary German literature. He claims that religiously informed literature by Muslims and Jews in particular reshape this field. Thus, the literary texts by Navid Kermani, a highly regarded scholar in Islamic studies and Arab literature, will be examined in order to work out the theological and cultural discussions inscribed in the poetics of his work. A study of Benjamin Stein’s texts will examine the literary possibilities to define Judaism as a religious rather than a merely cultural phenomenon in German literature and explore the importance of Judaistic discussions for his literary work.

Before Johannes Kleine became a fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies in 2012, he obtained a B.A. (2009) and an M.A. (2011) from Dresden University of Technology. He conducted research and studied at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (2005-2006), at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2011-2012) and at Gonville & Caius College of the University of Cambridge in 2014. In various assistant and graduate positions, Johannes Kleine organized a number of conferences and workshops. His latest publications include “Contemporary Literature as Poetic Epistemology”, in: Navid Kermani, ed. Helga Druxes and Karoline Machtans, Oxford: Peter Lang 2016 and “Teleologie und Paradoxon: Zur Betrachtung von Grenzen in der Gegenwartsliteratur”, in: Europäische Grenzregionen als dynamische Semiosphären, ed. Giusi Zanasi and Ulrich Fröschle, Dresden: Thelem 2016.