Nora Berning, Ansgar Nünning, Christine Schwanecke

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Volume 65 (2015), Issue 1, Page 115 - 135

In view of the demand for greater transparency and accountability regarding the expenditure of taxpayers’ money, techniques and practices such as benchmarking and the establishment of seemingly objective criteria used in evaluation have been imported from the United States into European higher education where they are used in all sorts of contexts: for the evaluation of manuscripts, theses, applications, and funding proposals. Focusing on an analysis of criteria, the present study examines evaluation forms distributed among reviewers to assess funding proposals in the humanities. By using a comparative framework, the authors seek to make a meta-theoretical and empirical contribution to the lively debate about quality assessment and assurance in the humanities in general and literary studies more particularly. Drawing on data from ten funding organizations in eight European countries, this is the first empirical study of its kind to address the construction and dissemination of (trans-)national criteria, norms and standards and, in doing so, to make a modest attempt to get to grips with the complex meta-category called ‘quality’.

Christine Schwanecke

Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Volume 63 (2013), Issue 3, Page 383 - 391

This article explores the ‘cultural life of catastrophes’ from a literary point of view. Jonathan Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) and Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American (2008) deal with September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. Going beyond the mere reflection of this particular incident, these two American novels explore the general nature of catastrophes and their possibly universal effects. By drawing on established cultural concepts and images (e.g. the ‘turning point’ and the ‘fall’), they try to meet the challenge of representing events that in principle defy representation. Yet, Foer and Hustvedt do by no means only adopt common representational strategies; they also enrich the catalogue of imagery related to catastrophes by putting traditional concepts in new contexts and representing them in new ways. What is more, they meta-memnonically assess conventional commemoration practices and critically reflect upon them. Thereby, they strongly influence the ways in which 9/11 and other catastrophic incidents are remembered.