Paula Höhn is pursuing her PhD within the DFG-funded Research Training Group “Aesthetics of Democracy” at Goethe University Frankfurt. Prior to starting her dissertation, she earned a Bachelor’s in Comparative Literature and a Master’s in American Studies, both from Goethe University. Her dissertation examines contemporary literary retellings of canonical novels as democratic practices. The project is supervised by Professor Heike Schäfer.

The project expands on the RTG’s central question about the aesthetics of democracy as a form of coexistence, integrating perspectives from democratic theory, affect theory, and narratology. The project examines how literary retellings, through aesthetic and content-based transformations, reconfigure canonical texts, thereby rendering forms of democratic practice sensorially perceptible.

Contemporary Literary Retellings as Democratic Practices

My dissertation examines contemporary literary retellings of canonical novels. Within my project, retellings are conceptualized not only as independent works of fiction but also as intrinsically linked to their historical source texts, from which they derive their meaning.

The project takes as its point of departure both an understanding of democracy as a form of coexistence and a temporal understanding of democracy, according to which democracy depends on a general openness of the future.

Bringing together democratic theory, affect theory, and narratology, the project aims to investigate how retellings aesthetically negotiate tensions between preservation and transformation. Another point of interest is how retellings might open up new perspectives on contemporary discourses surrounding the crisis of democracy, which are often linked to a perceived closure of the future. This raises the following questions: How do retellings negotiate social conflicts and diverse conceptions of democratic coexistence? What affective structures emerge in these texts? How do retellings continuously reconfigure the relationship among past, present, and future?

The project’s corpus consists of contemporary literary retellings of novels such as Quichotte (2019) by Salman Rushdie, Demon Copperhead (2022) by Barbara Kingsolver, James (2024) by Percival Everett, and Call Me Ishmaelle (2025) by Xiaolu Guo. I am particularly interested in retellings of canonical novels because, unlike fairy tales, myths, or medieval narratives, novels are generally treated as authored, stable texts, which alters the conditions under which they can be retold. Consequently, questions concerning the novel as a literary form are also relevant to my project. What implications does it have for the literary form of the novel when it is marked as reproducible through retelling? The overall aim of the dissertation is to examine retellings as a distinct literary practice and to simultaneously analyze their democratic potential.