Adventure and Violence

Adventure simultaneously implies the danger of having to suffer violence and the promise of being able to inflict violence without threat of punishment. The aggressive driving forces at work here do not just manifest themselves on the level of the histoire, but also on the level of the discours. Both of these areas must be comprehended in their reciprocity. Therefore, the focus area "Adventure and Violence" aims to connect the question of the narration of violence to the violence exerted by certain narrative techniques (such as tension, interruption, fragmentation etc.). The story of Scheherazade teaches us that storytelling can be a form of counterviolence. It stands to reason that the aggressive driving forces which shape adventurous forms of narration must then also be analysed in their turn. This research area also serves to critically examine the particular resiliency of adventurous narratives which we have thus far conceptualized as the simultaneously serious and frivolous nature of adventure: On the one hand, adventure represents a cultural affinity for the deliberate pursuit of danger, but on the other hand, it is exempt from traumatic consequences and lacks both the cheerful detachment from the real world that distinguishes comedy and the solemnity that accompanies the certainty of catastrophe in tragedy.