Transdisciplinarity in Austrian literature, art and culture of the Interwar Period

The project at hand focuses on aspects and research proposals which due to their precarious situation and absence in the programmatical debates and in actual epoche-profile discussions have not been acknowledged appropriately. Based on just presented and for 2012 envisioned research results/ publications significant repositionings between contemporary discourses, primary texts and current literary and cultural epoche dipictions will emerge. This affects especially those areas in which transdisciplinary constellations were of importance as for example in the intersections of text- and media-culture (keywords: radio novel, film scripts, bill board art and Festspielkultur/festival culture) or between scriptural and tonal art (word-opera, jazz-novel), avant-garde concepts (Viennese Cinetism), culture-political debates, including the barely known lively debates on zionism, additionally the America- and Russia-discourses with focus on not only their political-ideological dimensions but also concerning quotidian culture, habitual models and artistic and literary offers, which are commented in nearly all cultural political institutions (of the Red Vienna as well as in a more modest way in the catholic pendants), in literary feuilletons as well as in the areas of everyday and leisure culture. In addition the highly differentiated cultural journalistic spectrum of about 30 newspapers and magazines which has been analyzed and processed in its amplitude, intellectual density and polarizing potential till 1930 needs to be completed with the years 1933/34. These still to be covered years provide important and epoche reflecting textual documents with programmatic character/expectations which on the one hand should be incorporated in a representative documentation (commented source volumes) and on the other hand into an online platform. The design of this online platform has already been specified (see: : http://elearning- old.aau.at/germanistik/) and will essentially contribute to the dissemination of the researched materials and future additional research results, as well as entail new questions due to its interactive character. Finally, the aforementioned documentations will be enriched by specific resulting publications of the envisioned workshops concerning transdisciplinarity in avant-gard concepts, urban space experiences in literature or America- and Russia-discourses. 1

It was the set goal of the project Transdisciplinarity in Literature, Art, and Culture in Austrias Interwar Period 1918-1938 (project duration 2014-2018) to define leading discourses by critically remeasuring the era, to secure these discourses by means of sourcesexts, and thereby elaborate on inter- and transdisciplinary potentials. Meeting this goal required a systematic perusal and review of relevant sources, i.e. texts in newspapers/magazines (publicity and resonance status), in order to anchor them in relevant databases. It also required locating media (early radio texts or movie material) or if possible theatre projects and performances in which intermedial techniques (music, dance, film etc.), for instance, were employed deliberately and experimentally. To this end, we researched texts which met specific criteria (participation in debates, programmatic intention, status of authorship, resonance, etc.) on the basis of more than 30 digitalized newspapers and magazines digitalized by the ÖNB (Austrian National Library) in the anno-project, but also by means of non-digitalized magazines from representative years between 1918 and 1934 (and partly beyond); and more than 100,000 entries were created. Concurrently, the project has focused on selected areas to consolidate the research, such as workshops, international conferences, and publications. Specifically, these were: 1. Re- defining the relationship between the (Wiener) Moderne and the (Historical) Avantgarde in art, literature, and music (publication); 2. Measuring everyday culture and exhibition culture and their relevance for cultural and literary discourses (workshops); 3. Exploring urban areas in art, literature, architecture, and everyday culture (conference, publication); and 4. Russia- US-America discourses (with a focus on Russia; internat. conference, publications). A further aspect of the project was developing and designing an online-platform which also functions as a digital and interdisciplinary encyclopedia, text archive, and data archive, and will be updated and integrated for approx. one more year: https://litkult1920er.aau.at/. By the end of 2019, the volume on urban explorations will have been published, and in 2020 the volume on the most important as well as newly discovered documents and manifests (all in all about 500-600) on approx. 30 topics relevant to the era will be published. Some discoveries which are just as typical for the era shall be published separately: e.g. (serial) novels based on the model of the America novel Marylin by Arthur Rundt published in 2017.