TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums

What roles have author museums as creators of cultural identity? What kind of representations do they use to communicate knowledge about literature and its authors? How are real and literary spaces, texts and objects interlinked?

Author museums, in the public imagination often associated with an old-fashioned cult of the author, are being transformed into interactive spaces in line with changing understandings of literature, developments in exhibition practices and larger processes of democratization. This interdisciplinary project will provide analyses of museums as cultural texts and performative spaces of memory and production.

In the past years, the alleged crisis of the humanities has been a recurring topic of debate. While criticism has been levelled at humanities for lack of relevance, informal polls made in various countries across Europe asking for the most important personality in national history have consistently placed artists on the top, often writers, and in the case of Norway, Henrik Ibsen. There is a paradoxical relationship between the discourse of the uselessness of humanities and the actual interest in and identification with some of its actors. The project aims to investigate how and why (certain) writers and literature have been turned into cultural heritage, helped by the display of auratic places such as their homes in combination with the aestheticization of personal "relics" within specific cultural-political contexts.

Combining humanities, social sciences and artistic perspectives, it will critically reflect on existing and historical exhibition strategies and consider alternative and innovative ways of displaying literature, focusing on the potentials of author museums and other literary museums and centres as sites of cultural production and literary creativity. On a meta-level the project will contribute to a better understanding of how to communicate the relevance of humanities to the public.