Iulia Dondorici is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Her current research focuses on the transnational aspects of the artistic and literary avant-garde movements of the 20th century.

Iulia Dondorici holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, where she completed a dissertation entitled Den Körper schreiben. Poetiken des Körpers in der Prosa der rumänischen Moderne (Writing the Body. Poetics of the Body in the Romanian Modernist Novel). She translated works of Christa Wolf, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan and Louis Althusser into Romanian. She studied Romanian, English and Latin Philology in Bucharest and Berlin.

Teaching Slot within the Summer School 2017:

Alternative Histories of the Avant-gardes: (Re)Constructing Avant-garde Art (Literature and Performance)

This seminar will explore the intricate relations between literary history and women’s history. If we examine the written histories of different literary movements, we see that women are often written out of this histories. This is still the case for literary movements of the 20th century. Even historical avant-gardes like dada and surrealism offer numerous examples of such exclusions based on gender - in spite of the emancipatory discourses and artistic practices of these avant-garde groups. Thus, women artists had not only a particularly difficult stand in the avant-gardes of their time, but they also have highly ambivalent positions in the written histories of the avant-garde literatures and arts.
In this context, the questions we will address in this seminar are: how can we conceive today the avant-gardes and their histories in a way that would give women artists their places (back)? How can we (re)construct women’s traces, their roles, works and activities in literary histories? As far as the avant-gardes are concerned, these more general questions have some specific implications - for instance, the aspect of (re)constructing performances, dance, theatre, readings - which will be discussed from an interdisciplinary perspective.

“From all nations I myself choose the IMAGI-nation”: transnational aspects of the 20th century avant-garde movements

Iulia Dondorici's current research project deals with the transnational character of historical avant-garde movements. Within a comparative approach she will focus on the literary politics and poetics of Dadaist and surrealist groups in Romania, France and Germany. In the first half of the 20th century the avant-garde movements developed a unique dynamic in continuously oscillating between a transnational bias on the one hand, and the (re)integration in national artistic and literary fields on the other. In her work Iulia Dondorici wants to conceptualize this oscillation in the terms used by the French philosophers G. Deleuze and F. Guattari as consecutive acts of “deterritorialization” and “reterritorialization” and the avant-garde movements as “war machines” (Deleuze and Guattari: 1980) moving through various languages, cultures and territories.