Open Research Europe presents an interview with Juliane Prade-Weiss, Professor of Comparative Literature, and the author of two articles in our Transnational Literature Collection. Juliane discusses her work on language and violence and her publishing experience with Open Research Europe.
Can you provide a summary of your area of research?
I work on the link between language and violence and the role of emotions in societal communication and politics in Western and Eastern European literatures.
I had the pleasure of publishing two articles with the Open Research Europe Transnational Literature Collection, one on the cultural memory of mass violence in National Socialism and Communism and the other on populism and shame.
In both articles, I examine what literary texts can contribute to understanding these societal phenomena.
What were some key findings of your papers published on Open Research Europe?
In Complicity at a distance: commemorating problematic involvement in perpetration in contemporary Central and Eastern European literatures, I analyze contemporary texts written in German, Czech, and Russian which combine fact and fiction; they portray historical events but use fictional characters or dialogues.
These texts are part of a “memory boom” in contemporary literatures from Central and Eastern Europe, where many texts portray the complicity of characters with political violence such as National Socialist crimes and Soviet terror. The article seeks to answer several questions: why is historical complicity currently being portrayed in contemporary literature? Why should it matter to current readers?
I outline that what makes such texts popular is that reading about what might have driven people to be involved in political violence and terror in the past can serve to understand how and why people are currently involved in wrongdoing, for instance, in economic injustice or ecological damage.
Taking part in structures we know are wrong seems difficult to avoid in a globalized world, and this sentiment is also found as a dilemma of people who lived during past oppressive regimes.
In Staging enmity: reading populist productions of shame with Jelinek’s “On the Royal Road”, I outline that although populist politicians often appear as a shamelessly loud part of the political debate, populism leads to societal silencing.
To show this, I analyze Austrian Nobel-Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek’s play On the Royal Road, which she wrote when Donald Trump was elected US president in 2016. Jelinek’s play shows that when the public sphere of a society, notably traditional and social media, is shaped by antagonism and hate between “we”-groups, the possibility of speaking to one another disappears.
Speaking to one another to resolve disputes, giving counterparts space to express their views openly, and listening to one another becomes impossible when politicians, media, and other public voices shame and shut down their opponents. Therefore, populism leads to the silencing of democratic dialogue and leaves communities polarized.
How did you find the publishing experience with Open Research Europe, and how did it differ from the process you’ve been through at other journals?
Publishing with Open Research Europe has been an exceedingly pleasant experience, both in procedure and result.
The procedure is very different from traditional journals in my field, which is mainly due to two things:
- The article being published before peer review. This makes my work visible much more quickly, as it is accessible while peer review is still pending, but the article still benefits from robust peer review down the line.
- The open peer review process. Publishing peer review comments and my responses allows for much more discussion than with traditional blind peer review, which is vital to academic work.
Similarly, publishing with Open Research Europe means that articles are more widely visible due to being published open access and with no charge to authors.
Open access is becoming increasingly relevant in my field, and it is exceedingly important for me because I work on contemporary literature and pressing societal issues. I’m thankful that there is no delay of several months, or even years, before my work on these texts and issues is published. At the same time—unlike in other online formats—a high-standard peer review process is still in place.
Are there any key challenges when it comes to participating in open research that are specific to your research area?
A beneficial, yet initially challenging, part of publishing with Open Research Europe was the required plain-language summary. I had not encountered the format before, yet explaining my research to non-experts is a very valuable exercise in clear and precise style, and, moreover, logical when working on societal issues.
What would you say to others thinking to submit to this kind of platform?
I can wholeheartedly recommend publishing with Open Research Europe, even to scholars from fields that might be more sceptical about online publications. The platform’s association with European Research funding ensures, in my experience, that the publication is perceived as prestigious in the same way as traditional journals.
Discover more in the Transnational Literature Collection today on Open Research Europe and dive deeper into each study and its findings.
