Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}

{"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":"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":null,"pages":null},"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":"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":null,"pages":null},"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}