MJAMarvin Jonathan Asmussen
Role in the Project
Marvin Jonathan Asmussen – Doctoral Project on Poetry
In his doctoral project, Marvin Jonathan Asmussen investigates the extent to which depictions of weather in 17th- and 18th-century poetry can be read as realistic renderings of the climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age. He works closely with the project database and is involved in the textual analysis of the LitLIA corpus.
Second supervisor: Prof. Dr. Dirk Werle, Heidelberg University
The aim of the thesis is to examine whether elements of weather depiction in early modern poetry can be explained as reactions to historical weather and climate conditions, and thus read as an example of how ‚the world' enters poetry. The so-called ‚Little Ice Age' – a climate-historical period between roughly 1350 and 1850 marked by a globally cooler climate and an accumulation of weather anomalies – provides the framework for the study. From a history-of-problems perspective, the thesis asks whether weather and climate were among the problems to which early modern poetry responded, and whether corresponding ‚traces' of the climatic conditions faced by early modern people can accordingly be found in the texts of the period.
Three case studies, conceived as historical cross-sections, draw on poems by Paul Fleming, Gertrud Möller and Barthold Heinrich Brockes as well as poetological and natural-philosophical texts, in order to explore the scope for a ‚realistic' perception and depiction of nature. The thesis thus ultimately pursues a meta-perspective that seeks to render visible the conditions of possibility for ‚traces of climate and weather' in early modern poetry.
