Kofler aural makes the sense of hearing the focus of analysing the literary creative process. Against the background of a boom in Sound Studies and research areas such as Literary Acoustics, the project investigates how the ‘trace of sound’ makes its way into literature. This will close a gap in the research, because until now only marginal attention has been paid to tones, noises, and sounds as central spaces of imagination in literary production.

The ouevre of the Austrian writer Werner Kofler (1947-2011) is in the process of being canonised - not least by the previous work of the project team. It has become apparent that his writing cannot be fathomed without the auditive dimension. The project pursues the question of how Kofler stages and figures hearing in his writing; additionally, it analyses the rhythmic and tonal qualities of language in the writing process as well as the conditions of aural (non-acoustic) production of perception. Expanding writing-process research to include the analysis of auditive and aural phenomena is an innovation. The knowledge gained will be applied illustratively to the analysis of the writing process in other corpuses (with Friederike Mayröcker, Ernst Jandl, Gert Jonke or Thomas Kling in mind). Furthermore, the work from this project promises to make a contribution to expanding research in literary studies on the avant-garde, which in Austria has so far been fixated on the so-called Vienna Group (Wiener Gruppe).