Prof. Dr. Susanne Goumegou
French and Italian Literature, Tübingen

Contact Details

Prof. Dr. Susanne Goumegou
Department of Romance Languages
University of Tübingen

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Homepage: www.romanistik.uni-tuebingen.de/intern/goumegou.html
Profile cultural dream studies: www.culturaldreamstudies.eu/susanne-goumegou

Biographical Note

Susanne Goumegou is a graduate of the Humboldt University, Berlin (MA 1998, PhD 2004). Before her appointment at Tübingen, she was teaching and researching at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and the University Marc Bloch, Strasbourg (2002-2004) and from 2004-2015 at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Her research interests include literature and anthropological knowledge as well as fiction and fictionality with a major focus on Italian Renaissance literature and French literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Dream poetics in the prose poem

During the second half of the 19th century, philosophers and psychologists become more and more interested in the mental processes of dreaming. They conceive dreaming as an association of ideas which is independent of deliberate thinking, and, therefore, consider the dream as a series of images produced by a mental automatism. At the same time, revolutions of the poetic language as well as new developments in visual media take place. My project starts from the assumption that all these processes intermingle and leave traces in the prose poem. While Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire took their references mainly form paintings, it is the projections of the laterna magica that serve as references in Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations in order to reproduce a dream atmosphere. Another important question in this context is that of authorship. The dream proposes a model of creation that involves the subject’s loss of control over its production. The project will analyse the different modes of dream representations and the inherent conception of the dream and of the dreamer from these early prose poems up to the surrealist prose poems by Antonin Artaud, Paul Eluard, Michel Leiris.