Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"title":"Daten, Atmosphären, Texte – Künstlerische Erfahrungsräume und Virtualisierungen des Literarischen","authors":"Annette Urban","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2023-2006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2023-2006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article deals with contemporary interweavings of literature and visual art. It asks to what extent they include their own form of mediation of the literary and can be relevant in terms of literary theory. This is prompted by the currently diagnosed migration towards ›Literature’s Elsewheres‹ (Annette Gilbert), which, within the omnipresent digital culture, leads away from its traditional media and places. As one of these refuges, the art museum has already come into focus. In addition to being a shelter, it also promises to be a site of reinvention for literature because it offers different modes of presentation, display structures, and modes of experience. Nevertheless, while the literariness of media art has already been explored (Claudia Benthien et al.), less consideration has been given to the spatializing means of exhibition display and, in particular, art installation. Particularly revealing are those examples that attempt to connect the museum and the digital elsewhere of literary writing. For this second site of transformation is usually considered as part of the mass-practiced digital reading-writing culture, so that bridges to the visual arts emerge primarily through related conceptual approaches of appropriation rather than through the specific experiential framework of the art context. As a starting point, therefore, serve theses on the writing of contemporary artists understood as a practice of appropriation that increasingly involves publication gestures and mediation performances (Stefan Römer). Thus, artistic appropriations of literature and poeticized theory can be brought into view, which are performed in physical as well as virtual spaces and, for this purpose, are subjected to a process of datafication as two selected works of contemporary art show. In addition, the concept of atmospheres anchored in recent aesthetics, literary and media theory proves helpful in approaching such examples. For as »spheres of sensed bodily presence« (Gernot Böhme), they imply a mediation-relevant concept of aesthetic experience that privileges body-bound presence over hermeneutics and also open up a different reality of literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). At the same time, as a concept linked back to space it enables an expanded understanding of space/body/object ensembles and can be intertwined with theories of atmospheric media including their immersive environments (Tim Othold). On this basis, the first main part of the article explores the tendencies towards conceptualization, spatialization, and the performative, which are particularly at work in the intermediation of literature and the visual arts. A common point of reference here is the conceptual as uncreative writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, which shows distinctive publication performances and uses of the physical space of art exhibitions. In order to further ground forms of the spatial-installative exhibition of literature in literary theory, recourse is made to Roman Jakob","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"111 - 142"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45423058","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Literatur in Vermittlung. Zur Einleitung","authors":"N. Binczek, Hanna Engelmeier, A. Schäfer","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2023-2001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2023-2001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"1 - 10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44828381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Textuelle Infrastrukturen des Theaters. Dramaturgie als Vermittlung","authors":"Jörn Etzold","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2023-2005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2023-2005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the institution of dramaturgy in theatre as an agency of mediation. The term »dramaturgy« still has a double meaning in most European languages. In many situations, it continues to designate the art of writing plays, and a dramaturge in French or Spanish is also a playwright. However, a few years ago, the originally German notion of the dramaturge also started spreading into other European languages and into theatre in Europe and around the world. This article traces the evolution of dramaturgy from its first appearance in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to its use in contemporary independent theatre – especially in the sector that is referred to as the Freie Szene in German. Dramaturgy came into existence during the transition from the episteme of »representation« to the episteme of »man« diagnosed by Michel Foucault (2003). Once the sovereign had exited the stages of theatre and politics, Lessing, the first dramaturge in history, searched for another affective bond between the isolated »subjects of interest« (Foucault 2004b) in civil society. Lessing translated Denis Diderot’s treatise on a theatre of intimate scenes into German; these scenes, hidden behind an invisible fourth wall, were to be watched by a public consisting of mere »witnesses one does not know about« (Diderot 1996, 336). It is especially remarkable how Lessing’s interpretation of Diderot as well as his own work as a dramaturge was shaped by Protestantism. His theatre was supposed to mediate a clear message that concerned each of the individuals assembling in the theatre directly. A comparison between Lessing’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and Luther’s brief notes on Protestant liturgy shows that both understood the proceedings – the performance of a play or service – not as a ritual that is temporally structured by poetics or liturgy but as an event that conveys a certain message. For Luther, the clear reading of the translated bible and the sermon were central to the service; Lessing, who fiercely fought Johann Christoph Gottsched’s attempts to write a new poetics of the theatre, translated and reinterpreted Aristotle’s concept of kátharsis into a concept centered on feeling pity for human beings »of the same stamp and grain« (Lessing 1988, 422). Theatre, like the service, became an event that concerns each visitor directly. Dramaturges exercise what Foucault calls »pastoral power« (cf. Foucault 2004a, 173–200, and passim) and become the herdsmen of the spectators assembled to cry for their own kind. Their regulative position is thus related to that of the police (Schiller 1982; Vogl 2006; 2008; Müller-Schöll 2020). But the post-sovereign and – not just in Lessing’s case – eminently Protestant governance of affects is again and again confronted by the persistence of the representation of sovereignty despite the epistemic transformation to »man« analyzed by Foucault, not only in the colonies of European states (Spivak 2008) but also in a p","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"88 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45821720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Neues Lesen. Unikalität und Multisensorik als Strategien der Literaturvermittlung","authors":"S. Rieger","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2023-2007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2023-2007","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This text intends to contribute to the transformation of the classical printed book to its alternative forms and shapes, praxeologies and customs. Besides digital variants, this also applies to those that specifically emphasize other forms of reception, those that shift the reading experience into the virtual sphere. At the same time, the book has an enormous capacity to persist in the economy of mediation. This applies both to the customs of its use and to its cultural status in general. It is self-evident that this transfer of the book’s appearance does not take place without interruption. Of course, there are significant differences both in reading habits and in reading scenes. Reading modalities have also changed, diversified and differentiated. However, the appearance of the classical book and the traditional ways of dealing with it persist. It is necessary to situate this appearance of the book and thereby put its persistence in relation to the phenomenal formations, to the changed arrangements, infrastructures, and materialities. The book remains valid as a semantically as well as phenomenally equally resilient center of organization, not least because it succeeds in regaining terrain by the use of technical possibilities and thus also by reaffirming its historically vouchsafed phantasmatics, for instance by using new sensualities. Procedures of virtualization and augmentation turn reading into an advanced reception possibility, adapted to the state of the art of the technical world of living and reading. In the course of this shift, not only did the possibilities of reception change, but also the object of reading. Both aspects can be condensed into two core concepts, which also characterize the title: Multisensory and Uniqueness. Multisensory integrates other senses such as tactility and haptics in addition to seeing and hearing. Whereas the concept of uniqueness encompasses moments that promote a regionalization of literature. The corresponding narrative appears increasingly data-driven (data epics): It is based on a sensorial recording of life circumstances, and on the individual and personal set pieces which can be found in the respective environments. Not the major themes of world literature, but the respective life conditions with their everyday objects and behaviors become the driving force of narratives and reading moments. This finding is particularly striking in view of the possibility of typographic duplication and contradicts common expectations. The object of reading and thus of literary mediation is thus less a canon of literary works that is considered authoritative. Rather highly personalized narrative forms and narrative moments are tapped in the course of changed receptions. These emerge in different places and with different target groups as effects of these new possibilities. In this way, an almost poetological momentum is unleashed that not only works its way through predefined narrative patterns and a canon ","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"17 1","pages":"143 - 166"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47207099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: Relations between Literary Theory and Memory Studies","authors":"Urania Milevski, Lena Wetenkamp","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"197 - 212"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45145356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shared Histories in Multiethnic Societies: Literature as a Critical Corrective of Cultural Memory Studies","authors":"Monika Albrecht","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The staging of history in literature is engaged in dynamic exchange with society’s memory discourses and in this context, literature is generally seen as playing a creative role as a formative medium in memory cultures. For some time, however, many feel that established concepts of Cultural Memory Studies need to be reconsidered for multiethnic societies. The assumption is that official memory cultures tend to exclude people with a migrant background from identity-forming discourses about the past. Using Germany as an example, this paper argues, first, that the question of memory in multiethnic societies needs to be reconsidered indeed, but in a different direction than has been assumed so far, and, second, that much-discussed concepts such as the post-migrant paradigm or multidirectional memory tend to circumvent the problems at hand rather than contribute to their solution. The paper therefore discusses the preconditions for a literary-theoretical engagement with this socio-political issue and the direction in which an alternative conceptualization would have to go – that is, not a new theory or method, but a novel perspective that should be the basis for future theory building. Rather than confining the notion of a »shared history« to, either the common history of a country’s native population, or to the history since migration shared by minorities and receiving society, this paper proposes to focus on actual links between the histories of Germany as the receiving society and the histories of the new Germans’ countries of origin. Using literary texts and discussing a concrete example, it brings such shared histories to the fore and explores how they open up national memory discourses transnationally. The underlying vision is that these important components of multiethnic societies have the potential to show a way in which national and transnational memory landscapes as a whole could be transformed. In this sense, the metaphor of »Migration into Other Pasts« may be rephrased as migration not »into the past of others« but a territorial move within one common shared history. The paper therefore shows that the prerequisites for a literary-theoretical examination of the question of memory culture in multiethnic societies and its literary representations must be sought in the offerings of literature itself. The literary example, Orkun Ertener’s novel Lebt (Alive/Live! 2014), with its numerous entangled and interweaving shared histories shows particularly clearly how literature can function as a drive or even theory generator for concepts to be developed – instead of, conversely, imposing readymade concepts on both German multiethnic societies and its literary production. The novel perspective of this paper can be summarized in the inversion of the conventional point of departure: Instead of looking for a way to include people with a migrant background into the German memory culture, the first question to be asked should be how, in the age o","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"309 - 330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43297317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Inherited Revolution. Narratives in Transgenerational Memory Transfer","authors":"Ana Nunes de Almeida, Christian Wimplinger","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Our essay deals with narratives of social upheaval that act as vehicles for transgenerational memory transfer. We look at narratives of collectively experienced processes of emancipation and the subsequent possibility of remembering things not experienced firsthand under the prism of the political event of revolution understood as an inherently violent process (Arendt 1990). In this context, we inquire about postmemory along similar lines to those staked out by Marianne Hirsch, while also considering whether the term can be separated from trauma and linked to other emotional responses of comparable affective intensity. Memories of violence are frequently disjointed and impressionistic. The connection of fragments to a narrative context is often severed while the action of linking the threads into a coherent narrative faces vehement resistance. In principle, this is not different from the experience of violence in revolutions and their remembrance. However, narratives on revolution tend to exert a strong force of attraction upon their recipients. Considering the figures of cycle, linear progression, iteration, disruption and irreversibility as the time modes of revolution, we look at how these have enabled entirely new understandings of time since the nineteenth century. New forms of temporality, in turn, are entangled with the role displacement plays in the relationship between a transgenerational transfer of narratives and the construction of narrative time. In order to explore how a generation deals with the dominance (Hirsch 2012) of the narratives transmitted to them by the preceding one, we deal with two models in which affective states charged with both suffering and pleasure are developed into terms of cultural and literary theory: Bini Adamczak’s reading of desire as fetish in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, and Svetlana Boym’s work on nostalgia as an emotional disposition characteristic for modernity. Taking into account that both models are more or less constructed by cultural practices, historical events, and transformations in the history of ideas, and thus cannot always be precisely distinguished from one another, we present two main narrative strategies: The reception of the stories of one generation by another involves either contracting the affective intensity of their narratives at the expense of linear time or expanding narrative time far beyond individual life spans. For our analysis we mainly refer to Rodolfo Usigli’s Ensayo de un crimen and Heinrich Heine’s Ludwig Börne: A Memorial as post memory narratives on revolution. We understand them as examples of each narrative strategy and as part of the dialectic of this way of remembering.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"289 - 308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41891897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mimesis of Remembering","authors":"Michael Basseler, Dorothee Birke","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Literary narratives not only often thematize memory as a topic; they also directly represent or stage concrete processes of remembering by way of various narrative techniques. This article offers a systematic approach to these techniques which is informed both by narratology and interdisciplinary memory studies. Specifically, the contribution offers a toolbox for the analysis of what we refer to as the ›mimesis of remembering‹: through a variety of textual strategies, literary texts can create ›memory-like‹ effects. How such ›mnestic narration‹ is achieved and what functions it might fulfil is the main concern of this article. Most generally, we argue, two basic structural principles are the basis for a narrative mimesis of remembering: first, such narratives feature a centre of subjective perception, a consciousness who performs the process of remembering (either on the level of the narrative mediation or the level of the characters), and second, they need to feature at least two distinct time levels. However, not all narratives that contain these very common aspects are equally invested in representing processes of remembering. We propose to think of the mnestic quality of texts as a scalar phenomenon, where passages set in the narrative past can be more or less emphatically (and continuously) marked as rendering products or processes of remembering. Besides introducing various basic aspects of a mimesis of remembering – representation of time and space, narrative mediation and focalization, and questions of narrative unreliability –, the article not only offers a toolbox for analysis, but also discusses, on the basis of selected texts, how these aspects can be designed and combined in ways that serve to highlight a text’s mnestic qualities. We come to the conclusion that in order to fully understand these effects, one must set them into broader cultural and historical contexts. For one thing, it needs to be considered how the representations in the texts relate to evolving conceptualizations of the process of remembering itself. Moreover, one must be aware of changing narrative conventions for the representations of ›normal‹ or unmarked acts of remembering, which may also serve as a foil to foreground unusual instances.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"213 - 238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48321680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lyric Poetry and the Disorientation of Empathy","authors":"Wit Píetrzak","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the present essay, I argue that empathy constitutes the mode in which lyric poetry registers in the readers. However, unlike in prose, where the reader is allowed to empathize with the characters via the mediation of the narrator, in poetry, as Jonathan Culler and a number of other theoreticians of the lyric have indicated, the reader assumes the position of the speaker, thus becoming a reperformer of the text. This positioning, in turn, creates a situation in which the text, rather than representing a mental state, embodies it and in the process of being enacted impels the reader to internalize this state. I then move on to complement this distinction between poetry and prose by noting the fact that critics who explore how empathy is employed in reading fiction appear to depart from assumptions of comprehensibility and stability of the representations of characters’ mental states. This is shown in the analysis of the work of such critics as Suzanne Keen and Liza Zunshine. By contrast, in lyric poetry, empathy is both necessitated and simultaneously disoriented through the discontinuous, open-ended nature of the poetic text. As a result, the reader is perpetually made to feel into the speaker’s evocations of mental states but his or her empathic efforts are thwarted by the operations of the text in which a given affect is being evoked and disarticulated at the same time. This dialectic of empathy and disorientation is a dynamic process that can take various forms. In the last section of the present essay, I analyze three poems, »Punishment« by Seamus Heaney, »The Loaf« by Paul Muldoon and »Geis« by Caitríona O’Reilly, in order to show how the empathic impulse is both triggered and disoriented by the tensions between the poems’ denotative meanings and their formal features, mainly prosody and rhyme scheme. Thus, a tentative conclusion is that lyric poetry’s formal complexity and its non-mimetic nature enter into a dynamic relationship with the propositional content – a dynamic which contributes to the continual disorientation of our empathic capacity that is the essential form of our performance of the poetic text. This tension may manifest itself in how form and content challenge each other or how they cooperate, which in either case leaves us with a rather uncomfortable feeling of having witnessed not a representation of but an embodied, real-time moment of intimate and essentially aporetic experiential performance.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"351 - 369"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42626201","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Concept of Liminality as a Theoretical Tool in Literary Memory Studies: Liminal Aspects of Memory in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children","authors":"Claudia Mueller-Greene","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There is something peculiar about memory insofar as it tends to be formed across boundaries. We can think of it as located in an in-between zone, on the threshold »where the outside world meets the world inside you« (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children). Somehow, memory oscillates between the inside and the outside, connecting the subjective and the objective, the imaginary and the real, the self and the other, the individual and the collective. Memory involves all aspects of human life, be they biological, psychological, social, or cultural. Due to its omnipresence, memory is the object of a diverse range of disciplines. Correspondingly, the field of memory studies is situated at the intersection of a bewildering variety of disciplines, which creates exciting interdisciplinary opportunities, but also epistemological and methodological challenges. According to Mieke Bal, interdisciplinarity »must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods«. Liminality is a concept that seems particularly well-suited to address problems that arise from the distinctive in-between position of memory. So far, however, it has been largely ignored in memory studies. The concept of liminality deals with ›threshold‹ characteristics. Liminal phenomena and states are »betwixt and between«; they are »necessarily ambiguous« and »slip through the network of classifications« (Victor Turner). The concept of liminality helps to avoid »delusions of certainty« (Siri Hustvedt) by drawing attention to interstitial entities and processes that resist clear-cut categorizations and are inherently blurry and impalpable. »Every brain is the product of other brains« (Hustvedt) and so is memory: »we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons« (Maurice Halbwachs). Instead of being able to distinguish clearly between individual, social, and cultural memory, we are confronted with their dynamic interactions and complex entanglements: »to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world« (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children). There is »the constant ›travel‹ of mnemonic contents between media and minds« (Astrid Erll), as well as their ›migration‹ from one culture to another (Aby Warburg). Memory is deeply relational and always in motion in regions of the ›between‹. This contribution focuses on these qualities through the lens of liminality. Its purpose is to introduce the concept of liminality as an analytical tool in literary memory studies and to put it to the test by applying it to a paradigmatic literary text about memory. Section one provides an introduction to the concept of liminality as it was developed by the anthropologist Victor Turner. The second section brings liminality and memory together and reflects on liminal, relational, and complex aspects of memory, with the main emphasis on complexity. In section three, the focus shifts to literature and the applicability of liminality as a concept in literary memory studies. Theories implici","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"264 - 288"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46698904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}