Annette Gilbert

 

Annette Gilbert studied General and Comparative Literature, Eastern European Studies and Journalism in Berlin, Paris and Kazan’ (Russia) and, after university stations in Siberia, Moscow, Göttingen, Berlin, Boulder/Colorado and Mainz, is now Academic Director at the Department of German and Comparative Literature in Erlangen.

As a literary scholar, she is particularly interested in the mediality and materiality of literature and phenomena on the border between art and literature. The focus is on the avant-garde and experimental literature and art of Europe and America. Even if these artistic experimental arrangements tend to move in the marginal areas of literary practice – some even outside of it – they can be read as a substantial contribution to basic literary research, since they bring to light the subliminal preconditions, but also the neuralgic points and contradictory aspects of how we deal with literature. In this way, they contribute to the discussion of fundamental questions of literary theory, such as authorship, the concept of the work, the understanding of literature, original and copy.

In addition, she has been working for years on the historical changes in cultural techniques as well as publication and distribution practices. Questions of the public sphere, publishing, circulation, censorship, subversion, underground, samizdat and copyright play a role here, which are also of central interest to the Research Training Group. She is currently preparing an exhibition on artistic print-on-demand projects for the German Type and Book Museum of the DNB Leipzig, as well as research projects on the knowledge of digital literature and the indexing of a pirated print collection unique in its holdings, which has lost none of its relevance against the background of contemporary digital shadow libraries – which also enjoy great popularity in academic circles.

 

Publications on the topic of literature and the public sphere from recent years:

• Library of Artistic Print on Demand. Post-Digital Publishing in Times of Platform Capitalism, zs. mit Andreas Bülhoff, Leipzig: Spector Books 2023.
• Literature’s Elsewheres. The Necessity of Radical Literary Practices, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 2022.
• Digitale Literatur II, zs. mit Hannes Bajohr, München: Text + Kritik. Sonderband, München: edition text+kritik im Richard Boorberg Verlag 2021.
• Die Zukünfte des Werks. Kleiner Abriss der Gegenwartsliteratur mit Blick auf die Werkdebatte von Morgen. In: Gilbert, Annette/Spoerhase, Carlos/Danneberg, Lutz (Hgg.): Das Werk: Verschwinden und Fortwirken eines Grundbegriffs, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2019, 495–555.
• Unter dem Underground- und Selbstpublikationen 1965–75, zs. mit Jan-Frederik Bandel und Tania Prill, Leipzig: Spector Books 2017.
• Publishing as Artistic Practice, Berlin: Sternberg Press 2016.