Vulnerability and Resilience

Theorizing vulnerability and resilience leads to a key contradiction in the cultural construction of leading a successful life in the face of adversity. Mental health and well-being are as endangered by modern life in consumerist society and culture as they are the goals of the pursuit of happiness. Resilience becomes the catchphrase of a well-being industry which conceptualizes the individual as vulnerable. Vulnerability is the conditio sine qua non of resilience while the resilient individual will not succumb to its weakness but become stronger through adversity. – In this talk, on the one hand, popular (mis-)conceptions of resilience will be introduced and analysed. Their critique will be performed on psychological, biological, social and cultural levels. On the other hand, a research program into resilience which de-ontologizes resilience as a trait will be presented This alternative concept of resilience as a process will be introduced as a construction which acknowledges its internal contradictions. On the basis of this theorizing, there will be an overview of how the reading of literary texts can be researched as an double-edged activity – increasing vulnerability and resilience at the same time.

Bio

Pascal Nicklas is a research group leader in the University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz. He holds degrees in English and Comparative Literature and has published widely on literary historical topics from the 18th century to the present day, on Adaptation and Comparative Arts. His recent work is concerned with Empirical Aesthetics, Cognitive Humanities and Reading and Resilience.

Selected publications

• (Neuro)-Aesthetics of Adaptation and the History of Rhetoric (co-authored with Arthur M. Jacobs) Special Issue Poetics Today “Situated Cognition and the Study of Culture” edited by Ellen Spolsky, Sowon Park and Ben Morgan. Poetics Today 38.2, 2017, 393-412.

• Adaptation (Oxford University Press): Volume 11, Issue 2, August 2018. Special Issue: Adaptation and Perception, Edited by Pascal Nicklas and Sibylle Baumbach.

• Resilienz und literarische Lektüre unter den Bedingungen der Medienkonvergenz. In: Ästhetische Rezeptionsprozesse aus didaktischer Perspektive. Hrsg. von Daniel Scherf und Andrea Bertschi-Kaufmann. Weinheim: Beltz Verlag, 2018. 189-200.

• Literatur und Musik im Vergleich der Künste. Herausgegeben von Pascal Nicklas. De Gruyter 2019.