With an emphasis on transregional biographies, the IRTG stresses the dimensions of experience, individual knowledge, and the relevance of day-to-day perspectives on peripeties. Particular importance will be attached to forms of (micro-)storytelling that subvert literary, political, or historical narratives, e.g. on social media, in personal accounts, or in the biographies of contemporary witnesses.
Re-examining shifting expectations and narrative escalations through the lens of biography and life story testimonies is especially fruitful in the field of social history, e.g. by reconstructing the emergence of new “social figures” as responses to social problems in times of change. Likewise, migration movements in the Baltic Sea Region need to be analysed together with individually or collectively shared narratives that anticipate better living conditions, future prospects, and dangers. Discourses of past (and present) repressions in the Baltic Sea Region largely concern individual biographies. We assume, with Bruner (2004: 692), that while “[n]arrative imitates life, life imitates narrative.” The IRTG invites research into life stories and their turning points as shared in personal testimonies. In this context, the biographical ‘flip-side’ of theory formation in the Baltic Sea Region can be addressed, e.g. with regard to narrative theory: Viktor Shklovsky’s key texts of Russian Formalism were written under the dire conditions of World War I, the Russian Civil War, and the Russian Revolution. This research frame invites analyses of literary lifelines that significantly resonate with the Baltic Sea Region. Contemporary “autosociobiographical” novels merge transregional dynamics with a “peripety” moment by fusing class-related life stories into a plot structure that consists of an either physical or commemorative “retour” narrative involving a border-crossing movement and a major transformation. From a linguistic perspective, finally, the study of “word biographies” to be mapped qua discourse-linguistic analysis of large corpora, which must also be evaluated qualitatively, can be assigned to this research frame. Word biography supplements the traditional approaches of conceptual history and etymology with the everyday perspective of language use.