Dr. Yashar Mohagheghi receives Publication Award of the Faculty for Arts and Humanities

A few days ago, Dr. Yashar Mohagheghi, research assistant in the department of Modern German Literature at our institute, received the publication award of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at RWTH Aachen University 2021 (for publications from 2017 to 2019) in the category “Monograph.” Congratulations!

The title of the award-winning work is: Fest und Zeitenwende. Französische Revolution und die Festkultur des 18. Jahrhunderts bei Hölderlin, Stuttgart: Metzler 2019.

Yashar Mohagheghi examines the transformation of festive culture in the late 18th century. In the course of decorporization and temporalization, the feast gains currency as an associative practice of the politicized bourgeoisie and as a staging medium for the hoped-for turn of the times. This connection is traced in a panorama of cultural history: from the Enlightenment theory of the feast to the bourgeois associative movement to the French Revolution. The connection between festival and the turn of time is particularly relevant in Friedrich Hölderlin's hymnody and theory of time. The frequently stated loss of meaning of the festival in modernity is thus subjected to a revision: Just after the feast loses the function of cyclical reproduction, it becomes a discursive object. It becomes acute in particular against the background of increasing politicization and the formation of a modern-specific future horizon in the 18th century.

The work has already been awarded the Dissertation Prize of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft in 2018.