RG 5323: Aetiologies: Founding Narratives in Literary, Scholarly, and Scientific Discourses

The research group ‘Aetiologies’ examines the fascination of beginnings and the search for origins by approaching them as retrospective narratives constructed for the needs of the present. Stories of beginnings, when viewed through the heuristic lens of aetiology (the narration of origins, foundations, and causes), contain the imprint of the very present which they seek to establish and explain, and blueprints for its politics, aesthetics, religion, and life sciences. This project studies the rhetorics of temporality employed by cosmologies, creation myths, political foundation stories, and literary and scientific origin narratives. The fundamentally argumentative nature of aetiologies draws attention to their position on the interface between literature and science, i.e. to both discourses of knowledge in literature and to the fictivity of scientific hypotheses. A central question of the project is whether (and how) literature imbues origins with ideological and metaphysical power, or undermines this power by questioning linearity and causality. Finally, the project’s focus on beginnings connects our research programme to the current interest in the ends of geological periods and their aetiologies in both aesthetic and political contexts.