Aetiologies: Founding Narratives in Literary, Scholarly, and Scientific Discourses

The research group ‘Aetiologies’ considers the fascination of beginnings and the search for origins from the point of view of their present and retrospective construction and functionalization.

Stories of beginnings – when studied using the heuristic instrument of aitiology (a narrative of beginning, reason and cause) – contain political, aesthetic, religious, and life-scientific programs for the present they seek to establish, explain, and justify. The group examines such stories, cosmologies, creation narratives, literary and scientific founding scenes, as well as political narratives of foundation with a view to their respective rhetorics. The argumentative tone of aetiological narratives draws attention to the interface between literature and science and brings into focus both knowledge discourses in literature and the fictionalization of scientific hypotheses. In studying such stories, we ask whether beginnings are being imbued with an ideological or metaphysical aura, or whether (and how) literary processes tend to work towards disenchanting them in ways that call linearity and causality into question. Finally, this focus on beginnings links the research programme with topical interests in the geological history of Earth, in the ending of its eras, and in their own specific aetiologies – both in aesthetic and political discourses.