Artistic research initially developed in the context of artist training in both Anglophone countries and Scandinavia and, in the last nearly decade and a half, has likewise made a name for itself in the German-speaking world. In the beginning this research revolved largely around the visual arts, but now nearly all artistic disciplines – from theatre and film design to music and dance – participate in the profiling of artistic research. Literature, however, has yet to join the endeavor. This is largely the result of institutional concerns. Indeed, the discipline of creative writing provides for a literary education but – at least in the United States and Great Britain – is traditionally housed within English departments rather than art academies. Corina Caduff examines the question of how fiction should be conceived in relation to artistic research, how it is integrated into the existing sphere of debate, and also investigates the function of the non-artistic language in the field of contemporary discourse regarding artistic research.

Corina Caduff is a cultural and literary scholar and a professor at the Zurich University of the Arts / Institute for Theory since 2004. She studied German language and literature and wrote her 1991 dissertation on Elfriede Jelinek. In 2001, she received her postdoctoral lecture qualification at TU Berlin. She has held residencies as a guest researcher at, among others, the University of Chicago, Humboldt University Berlin, University of Amsterdam, Centre for Literary Research Berlin. She is also a literary critic, and her key areas of expertise include: Contemporary literature, artistic research, the relationship between the arts, and death and dying.