Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"title":"Plotting Memory. What Are We Made to Remember When We Read Narrative Texts?","authors":"M. Mühlbacher","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While the general link between storytelling and remembering has often been underlined with regard to such topics as traumatic experience or the construction of identity, there are hardly any studies that analyse the mnestic performance that underpins the reading of narrative plots in literary texts. In order for a story to create meaning, the reader has to remember earlier events, thus becoming able to understand how conflicts arise and are resolved. If this fact seems much too obvious to require any questioning, the process of plot-related remembering takes on considerable complexity when it comes to long novelistic texts. In these cases, reading amounts to an exercise in remembering and writing becomes a way of addressing and guiding the reader’s memory. This article proposes a theory of emplotted memory, i. e. of how narrative texts create a sequence of events in the memory of the reader. It argues, furthermore, that emplotted remembering is a dimension of implied readership and that it can be analysed on a textual level. Gathering elements and cues for such a theory, the first section of the article begins with an examination of the rule laid down in Aristotle’s Poetics that the mythos of tragedy has to be easily rememberable (eumnēmoneuton). As the famous analogy of the animal body suggests, both the limited extension and the holistic structure of the ideal tragic plot prevent the audience from forgetting how events tie in with each other. The very intelligibility and the cathartic effect of tragedy hence depend on a mnestic activity. But whereas tragedy has to become rememberable by means of the plot’s inner structure and limited size alone, epic can use narrative techniques such as flashbacks and summaries in order to comprehend a much longer time span. In his theory of narrative desire, Peter Brooks builds on these insights and conceives plot as a dynamic process of anticipation and retrospection that heavily involves the reader’s memory. For Brooks, emplotted remembering amounts to a passionate quest for meaning: Narrative tension implies that a psychic need prevents the reader from forgetting as long as the end of the plot has not been reached. The more coherent the narrative structure of the text, the more intense the activity of emplotted remembering will be. The theoretical section of the article concludes with a review of some studies from the field of empirical psychology that have addressed the recall of stories. It turns out that the basic assumptions derived from Aristotle and Brooks – such as the importance of remembering for the comprehension of narrative, the correlation between structural coherence and memorability or the strife for meaning – are in tune with empirical findings. The goal of the article, however, is not to develop a theory that is able to predict the mnestic processes triggered by a given text. On the contrary, it uses theory as a heuristic tool that is meant to be transformed by each reading. Wherea","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"239 - 263"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48926803","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":"Defining Migration Writing","authors":"Joanna Kosmalska","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract With a view to extending and enriching the vibrant, ongoing debate about migration and literature, this article makes an attempt to define »migration writing«. Using three perspectives – the theme-oriented, ethnic-oriented and text-oriented approaches – the paper examines the concept of »migration writing« in relation to other literary terms. Therefore, the starting point for the discussion is a brief comparison of migration writing with autobiography, travel writing and postcolonial literature. Then some useful comparisons are made to other related literary concepts, such as exile literature, refugee literature, foreigners’ literature, guest worker literature, Kanake literature, »allochthonous« literature, ethnic literature, minority literature, diasporic literature, hyphenated literature, multicultural literature, intercultural literature, émigré literature/emigrant literature, immigrant literature, migrant literature, the literature of migration. From these concepts, there emanates what I call »migration writing«. The label is used by me as a term for a whole variety of different types of literary and non-literary texts that have been published since the 1990s. These texts either tackle the topic of migration or emerge from the experience of migration (but not necessarily address the subject of migration). It is also not necessary for the author to be a migrant: it is enough that his or her work is inspired or influenced by the experience of migration and is imbued with a vision of cosmopolitan, transnational, hybrid society and the globalised world. Given the large scope of this definition, it seems best to define the genre as a constellation of many different types of text which are connected to one another by a set of characteristic features. Some of these features include: the real-life nature of the writing, creolization and multilingualism in the text, references to multiple cultures and/or geographic locations, impact of the Internet and online communication on the structure of the work, common themes and motifs. The article ends by illuminating the research potential of migration writing. Among other things, it gives highly informative accounts of migration experience, exposes the stereotypical representations of migrants, gives piercing insights into migrants’ host and home cultures, explores the issues of identity, nationality, borders and belonging, provides alternative knowledge about current social and cultural transformations. Acting as a counterweight to the dominant narratives, migration texts often make visible the phenomena that are unintentionally ignored or wilfully excluded from the mainstream public discourse. Consequently, they provide alternative knowledge that can be a useful research material in all kinds of areas, such as sociological, political, economic or culture studies.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"331 - 350"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43735831","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":"Konzepte singulärer und pluraler Autorschaft in Filmkritik und Filmproduktion","authors":"W. Kamp","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Debates about authorship in cinema have held a privileged position in film studies since the 1950s, when the young generation of critics of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema formulated the politique des auteurs. This critical strategy proposed that the director of a film was the major creative source of the finished work. Since this assumption contradicts the industrial and collaborative character of the film medium, the politique has been questioned, attacked and reformulated ever since its beginnings. The auteur theory was appropriated and deconstructed under the influence of structuralist and poststructuralist theories that questioned the very concepts of individual creativity and self-expression. Nevertheless, questions about authorship in cinema did not vanish but were developed in many ways. If film is regarded not only as an art form but as a commodity, the director’s name cannot only be regarded as a sign of a discernible style (a ›world view‹), but as a brand name. ›Scorsese‹, ›Tarantino‹, ›Lynch‹, ›Nolan‹ – these names imply certain images, dramatic approaches, and themes. They also serve as a label for marketing a product. Directors and producers like Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott lend their names to a certain kind of media production (film or television series) that raises expectations associated with their work. They do not necessarily work as a director. As producers – or even only as the owners of a production company – they may function as a kind of team leader, leaving the creative work to hired teams. In television, the showrunner is the major creative and managing force in the production of a series that is scripted, shot, and directed by several production crews simultaneously. Film and media studies have sought to discern the structures of collective working from historical and contemporary perspectives. Bordwell and others have described the (Hollywood) system and its mode of production, that defined the auteurs’ work. When looking closer at ›the system‹, it becomes obvious that there are different kinds of authorship in existence. Recent production studies on the working conditions in todays’ television have sought to analyse the structures of working together and ask questions about individual agency. The growing awareness of collective authorship promotes new ways of close film analysis. The German television series Babylon Berlin here serves as an example of a major contemporary media production with multiple creative influences and explicit collective authorship. A closer look at the successful series reveals the impact of this plurality on its storytelling and form.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"127 - 149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46260770","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":"Nichtstun, Aufschreiben, Ausschneiden. Grenzwerte der Zusammenarbeit in der Literatur (Günther, Goethe, Schiller, Brecht)","authors":"Daniel Ehrmann","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article explores creative collaboration as an old, yet rarely discussed problem. It is mainly focused on literature, but the questions raised as well as the results are broadly applicable to most modern artforms that are based on a strong concept of authorship. Collaborations are familiar to all artistic genres at all times, in some periods and contexts they are even prevalent. Therefore, they currently gain notable attention in many academic disciplines, especially in the humanities but also in social sciences. In recent years the notion has become popular that in a certain way all works of art are collaborative (cf. Inge 2001, 623). One of the central points the article is trying to make is that the loose application of the concept of collaboration is clouding the view onto specific practices. At the same time, it is the main reason for the present uncertainty of what an artistic collaboration actually is or how it manifests itself in the resulting work of art. Therefore, the article explores the threshold of the concept of collaboration and presents readings of a few examples that challenge the stereotype of cooperative action as a setting of shared intentionality and stable roles of action. To make the huge field of collaborations more manageable, the article proposes to divide it into two different sets of practices: The first consists of all acts that bring texts into existence. On that level of material practices there is no need to make typological distinctions between the actors involved. It is more about the way a text is produced than who claims to be the author. Hence the question is how a person writes, on which surface and under which circumstances, if alone or interacting with others. The distinction between the author and all other actors involved in the production – the secretaries, the editors, the partners, to name only a few – is made on a second tier. It is the level of representation and representational practices. To separate the level of writing (Verfasserschaft) from the level of authorship (Autorschaft) allows a more neutral perspective on collaboration, that prevents confusion of writing with its representation. Based on Pierre Bourdieu’s Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972) the article proposes a praxeological approach which calls for a close look at the specific constellation of textual production. To acknowledge the symbolic value of different writing-scenes (Schreibszenen) this approach needs to be complemented by a history of reading and writing (i.a. Roger Chartier). To specify and exemplify this notion the article analyses three different settings of textual production that can all be located at the margins of collaboration. All of them show a certain way of making common practices seem extraordinary. It is not the general type of practice but the specific way it is acted out in a certain constellation that gains symbolic value. Some of the specific examples addressed are: 1) What makes Joha","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"29 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45312937","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":"Das umgeschriebene Genie. Zum Verhältnis von literarischem Autorschaftsdiskurs und Schriftpraktiken im Theater","authors":"Alexander Weinstock","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article proposes, as its successively developed tool of analysis, a combination of literary, theatre historical and manuscriptological approaches, which then reveal the extent to which the study of written artefacts may further our understanding of collaborative models of (literary) creation, analysed along with their corresponding practices. Authorship is often understood, on the one hand, as a discursively produced phenomenon – as an ensemble of attributes that are not only ascribed to any producer of literary texts, but are also demanded of them, and which, at the same time, are supposed to guarantee the quality of their literary ›products‹. By contrast, the present article focuses on a level of concrete practices at which, instead of a lone individual, a plurality of actors contributing to a literary text may be identified. This text, in turn, should be considered not as an inviolable work of art produced by a single entity but as an object of utility used by many, at least in those instances where it is functionally incorporated into a dynamic ensemble of technical, aesthetic and social requirements, norms and expectations, where, in other words, it becomes the basis for a theatre performance. As this article argues, the inclusive approach just described, as well as its consequences regarding questions of authorship and textual work, can be fully identified only in specific textual artefacts found at the centre of the eighteenth-century manuscript culture shaping the literary theatre of that time. Accordingly, the contrast between, on the one hand, discourses and practices (sketched more fully below) and the various understandings of authorship, on the other, can be located in historical terms: In the present article, it is sought out and analysed based on those stretches of history during which the various notions began to emerge with great formative power. In the case of the discourse of single authorship, this decisive phase is the Sturm und Drang period with its concurrent aesthetics of genius; the corresponding practice is that of a wholly literary theatre, already mentioned, which is founded on a dramatic text now considered binding; and the corresponding textual artefact is the prompt book, which adapts that textual foundation to the needs of a theatrical production (and which, at that time, is often the only book containing all of the dramatic text). Ultimately, this article is focused on the hypothesis that, upon closer consideration of the materiality of the textual artefact, the dramatic text, which usually is considered the work of a single auctorial consciousness, may reasonably prove a work of many hands. And indeed, various actors contribute, by different theatrical and manuscript practices, to the adaptation of the dramatic text to the conditions and requirements of the stage, without being placed, however, in a position of authorship comparable to that of the ›classic‹ author. More often than not, they r","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"51 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47790798","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":"Mediale Inszenierung geteilter Autor*innenschaften: Pauline Viardot-Garcìas Rollenporträts als Orphée (Paris, Disdéri, 1859)","authors":"C. Fischer","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The methodology and subject matter of this essay venture into the disciplinary borderlands of musicology. Taking Disdéri’s carte-de-visite portraits of the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcìa as a starting point, it attempts to broaden the notion of of the author for a historical period that quintessentially stood for the establishment of the concept of genius and thus for a definition and limitation of authorship as individual and singular. The article combines an interdisciplinary approach by considering image and media theory, theories of art and its practices, alongside historical musicological methods. Its theoretical perspective is situated at the intersection of performativity and media theory via the concepts of the ›messenger figure‹ (Botenfigur) and the ›reading of traces‹ (Spurenlesen) both according to Krämer, thus opening up a historical resonance space for contemporary music practices. As a consequence, the re-perspectivization goes beyond the basic understanding that multiple authorships are at work in every form of sounding music. Instead, it fixes diverse facets of the term authorship on a concrete example and reframes them methodologically. Thus, as a basis for a systematic generalization in music research, a model is proposed that makes medial transitions in performatively negotiated authorships describable, categorizable, and at the same time historicizable. With these interdisciplinary concerns in mind, Viardot-Garcìa’s photographic portraits in her role as Orphée in Gluck’s opera of the same name from 1859 appear to have been instrumentalized in a multilayered representational way: as images standing for a performance, as a photographic image reminiscent of a painting, as a depiction of classical Greek costume that takes on meaning for the present, as the visual standing in for the acoustic, as a depiction of a female singer embodying a man, and finally also of a title role standing in for an opera as a whole. How exactly these relations of representation are to be grasped – both in the French Gluck opera revival and in the photographic images discussed – has not yet been explored in depth. To attempt to entangle all these meanings is not motivated by trying to identify the ›actual‹ portions of the musical adaptations made by different persons to Gluck’s opera in the course of its 1859 revivals. Rather, this new perspective on the carte-de-visite photographs is intended to outline Viardot-Garcìa’s figure with the help of the numerous functions the singer assumed in the production. The essay thus looks at a blind spot that is still dominant in music research, namely the question of the methodological framing of performative authorship in historical perspective. It questions the critical concepts of ›messenger figure‹ and of the ›reading of traces‹ not only for their suitability to grasp the basic questions of the example dealt with in the text, but also for their potential for generalization.","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"341 11","pages":"96 - 126"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41286650","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":"Kooperation, Kollaboration, Kollektivität: Geteilte Autorschaften und pluralisierte Werke aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive","authors":"Ines Barner, A. Schürmann, Kathrin Yacavone","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"3 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45838023","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":"Das Kollektive in der Kunst zwischen Autor*innenschaft, Arbeitsorganisation, Systemkritik und Gesellschaftsentwurf","authors":"R. Mader","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract At the latest with the designation of Indonesian group of artists, ruangrupa, as collective co-directors of documenta fifteen in 2022, the collective has arrived at the centre of the art world. This notion includes not only the organizational form of a group, but also designates a specific mode of cooperating with outsiders, of reflecting and of cultivating appearances. In their curatorial approach, ruangrupa present an extremely comprehensive conceptualisation of the collective, in which the various collective aspirations observable in the art field, which have been spreading for some time now, are condensed. As early as the 1990s, there has been, in the art world, an increase in individual facets of the collective. This is evidenced not only by the growing differentiation between different forms of collective associations, which can hardly be represented in a typology anymore; the turn towards the collective is also reflected in its being addressed in exhibitions, which in turn often refer to theoretical considerations derived from the fields of philosophy, cultural studies, or sociology, interpreting the ›collective turn‹ as a ›sign of the times‹. Art-historically speaking, the examination of the collective is a relatively young phenomenon which exhibits a range of subject-specific peculiarities. While art-historical classification, in particular, retains fundamental reservations about this ›unconventional‹ artistic working mode (Thurn 1991, Stahlhut 2019), rather more recent, cultural studies approaches tend to put forward typologies based on such notions as complicity (Ziemer 2013) or collaboration (Schneider 2006). In all these contributions, authorship is the central ›axis‹ of analysis. However, the breaking up of individual authorship, which in the visual arts remained virtually unchallenged for a very long time, to make room for collective associations, has been neither the only nor the most important reason, in recent decades, for artists to associate collectively. The rejection of a ›singular‹ notion of creation is nevertheless often introduced as the most important theoretical-analytical reference; social factors, by contrast, which have accompanied or even promoted the spread of the phenomenon, are often pointed out only selectively, if at all. Well-founded discussions of select examples, or instances of reasonably systematic contextualisation, may only be found from the mid-2000s onwards (e. g. Lind 2007). And it was only in the 2010s that art historians and scholars from other disciplines became interested in collective working modes. In their attempts to clarify and classify this trend, whose reality can no longer be gainsaid owing to its omnipresence, most publications and events initially started from a rather broad, and thus vague, understanding of the collective. Nevertheless, the tension between the creative individual and the collective remained central to the narrative put forward in numerous contributions. Those t","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"174 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47825175","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":"Titelseiten","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-frontmatter1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-frontmatter1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49542970","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":"Ich und mein Dämon. Unfreiwillige Kollaborationen und die Konstitution weiblicher Autorschaft in Bettina von Arnims Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde","authors":"E. Thomalla","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2017","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper argues that the ways in which editors shape cultural perceptions of authors, or their works, are only partially evident from theoretical writings and testimonies. Programmes and practices of editing often do not coincide, they can even contradict each other. This is not necessarily due to a lack of consistency, but to the fact that there is an inherent logic to editorial practice that is sometimes not even fully reflected upon by the professionals and experts within the community. What is needed, it is argued, is a praxeological approach that looks at the practices of selecting and editing, framing and medially placing texts, as well as the social, economical and political aspects of editions in concrete historical constellations. Thus, fundamental tensions that characterize the practice of modern editing since the beginning become visible. In the nineteenth century, a notion of editorship as a purely reproductive activity emerged. Editors were not allowed anymore to make any interventions in the texts. However, this concept of editorship contrasted with the idea that the editor should become a second maker, by not only replicating the original creative activity, but claiming to be able to understand the author better than the author understands him- or herself. The collaborative practice of editorship therefore equally works in favour of the author and against the author. Bettina von Arnim’s literary debut Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835) is used as an example to illustrate this basic problem of modern editorship. In Arnim’s work, different functions and programmatics of editorship come together. Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde is situated between a poetic form of appropriation and a poeto-philological practice of editing. It is both an act of memorialization and an attempt by the editor to secure a place for herself in the literary field. Through her editing of the letters and their arrangement, Arnim initially places herself in the role of one of Goethe’s imaginary sister: At the end of the first part of the correspondence, Arnim is asked by Goethe’s mother to write down the story of Karoline von Günderrode. Thus, she composes a female Wertheriade. In the second part, Arnim stages herself as the poet’s muse by putting words into her own mouth in the letters to Goethe that later reappear in his poems. Finally, Arnim repeatedly slips into the role of Goethe’s female characters and continues their stories on her own authority. While the second part of the correspondence ends with Goethe’s death, the third part, the Tagebuch (Diary), becomes the initiation of Arnim’s own authorship. Here the dialogue turns into a monologue. The logic of inspiration is reversed: Arnim becomes a poet kissed and blessed by the muse Goethe. Owing to its fictional elements, Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde has tended to be regarded in German-studies scholarship as an epistolary novel or artistic adaptation rather than as an ›ed","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":"16 1","pages":"77 - 95"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46061189","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}