Emily Graf receives Ruprecht-Karls prize for dissertation

Emily Mae Graf´s doctoral dissertation “Lu Xun on Display: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of World Literary Heritage or the Materiality of World Literary Heritage: Memory, Space and Media in the Making of Lu Xun” is located at the intersection of modern Sinology and Transcultural Studies. Her thesis analyzes author museums as microcosms of production and reproduction of culture, arguing that they are tangible spaces that reflect both the reception of an author within one cultural sphere and the transcultural nature of the production of a literary hero.

In particular, Graf examines social practices of commemorating writers as cultural heroes in memorial museums from a global perspective, placing the institutionalization of the Chinese writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) at the center of her investigation. She approaches the existence of literary heroes as a social reality, arguing that the author-as-hero as he is mediated and commemorated in museum space forms a Second Body of the writer beyond his mortal physical one. Because this Second Body has proven resilient to critical approaches, Graf goes beyond such a critical approach; her research does not aim at unmasking the differences between the writer’s representation and the writer as an historical figure, but rather at inquiring why these differences occur and how they affect a society’s memory of a particular writer. Along with Lu Xun, two other representatives of left-wing literature —Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and Lai He (1894-1943) —constitute the focus of her research. Taking into account the interdependencies and inequalities within world literature, Graf investigates how the display of one writer is connected to other writers in memorial museums around the globe.

Excerpt of the laudatio: