We examine the aesthetic judgments and practices that define the popular sphere, moving beyond traditional concep­tions of “folk culture,” “mass culture,” and “pop­ular culture.”
During the first funding period, we focused on two inter­related dimen­sions: first, the syste­matic analysis of auto­nomous aesthetic frame­works and evalua­tions applied to highly popular works, and second, the prac­tices of pub­lishing houses, cultural jour­nalism, and German literary studies that contri­buted to the estab­lishment of the genre known as “pop literature.”
In the second phase, the focus will shift to another crucial pheno­menon of pop aesthetics: the resis­tance to the popular within the domain of pop culture itself. This involves tracing strategies – from the 1950s to the present – that invoke con­cepts such as “sub­culture,” “indepen­dence,” “sub­version,” and “queer­ness” to reconnect pop music, pop life­styles, and pop litera­ture with modernist avant-garde principles.
By interrogating this tension, we seek to uncover how counter­cultural prac­tices nego­tiate their rela­tion­ship to popu­larity. In doing so, we aim to illum­inate the dynamic inter­play bet­ween institu­tionali­zation and resis­tance, conti­nuity and rupture, that defines the evo­lution of popular aesthe­tics.