Romance literature and cultural studies

As a cultural science, Romance literary studies deals with aesthetically composed forms of expression that originate in or are closely associated with Romance languages. Written expressions such as literary texts or productions realized in other media such as photographs, films or oral recitations reveal a great deal about the past and present, about the development and history of Romance-speaking cultures worldwide. At the same time, they do not simply depict them, as the objects of literary studies are usually artfully composed artifacts.

In order to illuminate and contextualize the processes of such literary, to reconstruct the underlying creativity and to question possible patterns of tradition, literary analysis and interpretation comes into play. It has developed a comprehensive set of tools for this purpose, ranging from the hermeneutic art of interpretation to (post-)structuralist methodological and theoretical pluralism and more recent, politically very conscious approaches such as postcolonial or queer studies, ecocritical or (critically) posthumanist approaches. All theoretical models and literary studies methodologies can be classified insofar as they focus on either the text as such or the context, either the authors or the recipients of a work.

The spectrum of literary objects of study ranges from medieval or early modern epic poetry, lyric poetry and drama to the diverse repertoire of contemporary novels, films and series of the 20th and 21st centuries. Normative distinctions in H vs. P (i.e. in educationally relevant high literature and the more escapist popular literature)  and rigid canonizations hardly carry any weight here. For wherever worlds are created from & in texts, stories and images, literary studies perspectives have their place, tracing the genesis of these worlds and revealing symbolic or material practices relevant to cultural studies.