Prof. Dr. Benjamin Loy - Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prizewinner 2026
Romance Literature, LMU Munich
Globalisation has affected literature, too: novels circulate as commodities around the world within the asymmetrical structures of the global book market, while a global readership engages with literary innovation and unfamiliar narrative worlds. Since his doctoral thesis, Benjamin Loy has conducted pioneering research not only on the national literatures of France and Spain but also on texts of the “new” world literature from Latin America, thereby expanding the traditional boundaries of his field. Loy’s work consistently focuses on aesthetic features in the context of intellectual, social and cultural history. For example, to what extent do narrative strategies from the Global South follow the (Western) notion that globally received literature might contribute to the cultivation of a cosmopolitan outlook? This becomes apparent not only in the work of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño: the narrative worlds and transcultural systems of reference of authors from the Global South challenge Western conceptions of literature, the world and progress. They create aesthetics that highlight the consequences of colonialism and violence, for example, and offer alternative concepts to supposedly universal Western notions of time.