In Fall 2011 the MDRN-lab was awarded a so-called GOA (Orchestrated Research Action) by the Research Council of KU Leuven, making the lab one of the research centres of excellence of the university.

The project looked at how literature between 1900-1950 was defined and legitimized in each of the main Western European literary traditions (English, Spanish, Dutch, German, French and Italian) and studied the multiple “identities” literature took on in the period. While the project sought to expand the ways in which we read and understand canonized European modernist and avant-garde literature, it also looked at forms of popular, middlebrow and other types of writing so as to cover the full spectrum of literature in the period. The project was divided in three research "tracks", each focusing on a particular aspect of European literature between 1900 and 1950: one track focused on its multiple functions, one on its many histories and one on its multiple mediatizations.

In the first track we returned to the historical tension between autonomy and heteronomy, questioning the many historical narratives that (continue to) depict modern European literature’s evolution as one of increasing autonomization, thereby neglecting the many social, political and other functions taken up by modern writing, among others in so-called middlebrow as well as documentary writing.

In the second track on literature’s multiple histories we returned to the opposition between innovation and tradition so central in debates of the first half of the twentieth century. Here, we zoomed in on cases that complicate traditional models of progress and innovation in literary history by foregrounding, among others, the anti-modern, the aristocratic or the arrière-garde.

In the third and final track we looked at the relationship between literature and other media, scrutinizing the opposition between book and non-book. Here, we highlighted the complex medial make-up of “literature” as a category by no means restricted to the book, and investigate its intricate connections with new visual and aural technologies in the period.

Selected article output:

• Baetens, J., Sanchez-Mesa, D. (2017). La Literatura en expansión. Intermedialidad y Transmedialidad en el cruce entre la Lite-ratura Comparada, los Estudios Culturales y los New Media Studies. Tropelias, 27, 6-27.
• Dorleijn, G., De Geest, D., Verstraeten, P. (2014). Modellen in de Nederlandse literatuur. De Periode 1900-1920. Een inleiding. Nederlandse Letterkunde, 19 (3), 185-204.
• Baetens, J., De Geest, D. (2013). Relire La poésie pure (1926) d'Henri Bremond. Orbis Litterarum, 68 (6), 506-522.
• Baetens, J., Bru, S., De Geest, D., Martens, D., Van Den Bossche, B., De Bruyn, B., Bonciarelli, S., Reverseau, A., Verstraeten, P., Van den Bergh, C., Somers, M., Vandevelde, T. (2013). Pour une nouvelle approche de la dynamique littéraire. Pense-bête. Fabula LHT, 11.

PhD theses:

• Van Gansen, K., Baetens, J. (sup.) (2017). Arts et métiers graphiques: literature, typography and advertising in a tempered modernism.
• Lambrecht, B., De Geest, D. (sup.) (2017). Een pedagogisch project. Publieksliteratuur uit Vlaanderen tijdens het interbellum.
• Vanmol, A., Martens, D. (sup.) (2016). Un esprit de chevalerie au XXe siècle: Alphonse de Châteaubriant, Jean de La Varende et Henry de Montherlant.
• Vandevelde, T., Bru, S. (sup.) (2015). The Modernist Soundscape: Towards a Theory of the Representation and Perception of Sound in Narrative.
• Van den Bergh, C., Van Den Bossche, B. (sup.) (2015). Il rinnovamento del romanzo italiano intorno al 1930: fra dinamiche contestuali e tendenze generazionali.