Journal of Literary Theory最新文献

{"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":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":"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":"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":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":"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":"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":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":"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":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":"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":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":"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}

{"title":"Gemeinsam Räume schaffen. Facetten kollektiven Arbeitens in Architektur und Planung","authors":"S. Herold, Sophie Stackmann","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2022-2020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2022-2020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Even though it is well known that only very few buildings have been planned and built by individuals alone, dominant conceptions of art and architectural history still are shaped by the idea of a few, self-sufficient artistic personalities. However, the fact that the production of architecture is always integrated into societal and social contexts, i. e., that it always takes place in interaction with a variety of actors, has garnered scholarly attention in recent years. At the same time, there has been increasing interest, from the point of view of architectural practice, in considering different forms of collaborative work. One specific form of this collaborative approach to work is that of the collective. During the interwar period, in particular, this concept was influenced by the various protagonists of classical modernism; in most of its iterations, it is based on a socio-critical foundation questioning established hierarchies (including the construct of a formative author figure) as well as the conditions of living and working under capitalism. Instead, they conceive of building as a task to be taken on by society as a whole. This idea already was politicised in the early Soviet Union, where it went hand in hand with a centralised notion of the state. In the German Democratic Republic, also, government building policy was tied in with this notion, as is evident from GDR agencies organising the entire building process in collectives. This led, at least in part, to resentment (discussed more or less openly) among contemporary architects, whose self-image as creative workers had thus been called into question (a fact which found expression in various debates about the organisation of working methods and the role of the author or collective leader within the collective). Certain persistent difficulties in the practice of architectural and art history – those in assessing and valorising buildings from that era – also reflect this problem: Even today, dispensing with a clear attribution of authorship apparently still is difficult (though this phenomenon may also be attributed to a lack of knowledge and understanding as regards the organisational and working methods of collectives at that time. Starting from this problem, the present article focuses on the various processes that take place during the creation of a work of architecture. One of the questions to explored is whether there are – or have been, historically – specifically ›collective‹ ways of ›doing architecture‹. In order to focus on this question from another angle, the article also points out significant parallels (and differences) between the working methods and self-image of architecture and planning collectives, then and now. Initially, work in collectives appeared to have taken a backseat after German reunification – a circumstance due in part, possibly, to the association of collective working modes with the failed socialist utopia of the GDR. In more recent years, howe","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":"47191493","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":"Theorie und Methode der Gattungsgeschichtsschreibung. Mediävistische Perspektiven","authors":"Florian Remele","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2021-2010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2021-2010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article proposes a methodology for writing genre history that does not proceed from »always already« existing generic norms, but rather describes the processes through which genres and their conventions emerge in the first place. Scholars in the field have long been calling for a mediation between (systematic) genre theory and the (historical) exploration of genres – i. e., generic historiography (see Lamping 2007; Neumann/Nünning 2007). So far, however, the solutions proposed have been classificatory in nature, and have mainly been concerned with taking into account the historical diversity of genres more fully than had previously been done (Hempfer 1973; Fricke 1981). The theoretical and methodological questions raised by genre historiography regarding the emergence and transformation of genres, by contrast, have hardly ever been the focus of sustained enquiry, despite the fact that a historically adequate approach to the history of genres – meaning an approach not based on classificatory models – remains a desideratum to this day. Most contributions to the historiography of genre thus far make use of prototype theory or draw on scholarship analyzing schemata and patterns in order to identify genre norms in their historical setting and describe the correspondences with (and/or deviations from) those norms which may be observed in a given text. Yet the methodological problem here is that, ordinarily, prototype-theoretical and schema-oriented approaches raise systematic rather than historical claims. Thus, a »prototype« is understood to be an abstract, ideal model which might never have been realized historically but is still considered the most »typical« exemplar of a given genre whose individual, concrete manifestations may be described as placed along a scale of relative similarity with that exemplar (Tophinke 1997). By adopting such a perspective, the texts belonging to a certain genre may be categorized without having to draw »hard« (i. e., feature-based) boundaries. However, comparing a single text with an ideal model affords hardly any surplus value regarding the question of the origin and change of genres. Being an ideal model, after all, the prototype is constructed a posteriori, on the basis of all available texts assigned to a given genre; it has never served as an actual point of reference for the production or reception of individual texts in their historical context. A similar methodological difficulty arises with a view to scholarship on schemata and patterns, in that these are usually abstracted from all texts belonging to a given genre (like prototypes) or else are fashioned on the model of supposed »masterpieces«, which all but invalidates their explanatory power in a historical context (Schulz 2012). For the historiography of genres, however, one question of particular interest is a question treated only marginally in scholarship on prototypes and schemata. This is the question of how precisely literary spe","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49033420","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":"Zur Operationalisierung literaturwissenschaftlicher Begriffe in der algorithmischen Textanalyse. Eine Annäherung über Norbert Altenhofers hermeneutische Modellinterpretation von KleistsDas Erdbeben in Chili","authors":"A. Pichler, Nils Reiter","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2021-2008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2021-2008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The present article discusses and reflects on possible ways of operationalizing the terminology of traditional literary studies for use in computational literary studies. By »operationalization«, we mean the development of a method for tracing a (theoretical) term back to text-surface phenomena; this is done explicitly and in a rule-based manner, involving a series of substeps. This procedure is presented in detail using as a concrete example Norbert Altenhofer’s »model interpretation« (Modellinterpretation) of Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile. In the process, we develop a multi-stage operation – reflected upon throughout in terms of its epistemological implications – that is based on a rational-hermeneutic reconstruction of Altenhofer’s interpretation, which focuses on »mysteriousness« (Rätselhaftigkeit), a concept from everyday language. As we go on to demonstrate, when trying to operationalize this term, one encounters numerous difficulties, which is owing to the fact that Altenhofer’s use of it is underspecified in a number of ways. Thus, for instance, and contrary to Altenhofer’s suggestion, Kleist’s sentences containing »relativizing or perspectivizing phrases such as ›it seemed‹ or ›it was as if‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45) do by no means, when analyzed linguistically, suggest a questioning or challenge of the events narrated, since the unreal quality of those German sentences only relates to the comparison in the subordinate clause, not to the respective main clause. Another indicator central to Altenhofer’s ascription of »mysteriousness« is his concept of a »complete facticity« (lückenlose Faktizität) which »does not seem to leave anything ›open‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45). Again, the precise designation of what exactly qualifies facticity as »complete« is left open, since Kleist’s novella does indeed select for portrayal certain phenomena and actions within the narrated world (and not others). The degree of factuality in Kleist’s text may be higher than it is in other texts, but it is by no means »complete«. In the context of Altenhofer’s interpretation, »complete facticity« may be taken to mean a narrative mode in which terrible events are reported using conspicuously sober and at times drastic language. Following the critical reconstruction of Altenhofer’s use of terminology, the central terms and their relationship to one another are first explicated (in natural language), which already necessitates intensive conceptual work. We do so implementing a hierarchical understanding of the terms discussed: the definition of one term uses other terms which also need to be defined and operationalized. In accordance with the requirements of computational text analysis, this hierarchy of terms should end in »directly measurable« terms – i. e., in terms that can be clearly identified on the surface of the text. This, however, leads to the question of whether (and, if so, on the basis of which theoretical assumptions) the terminology","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41940860","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":"From Keyness to Distinctiveness – Triangulation and Evaluation in Computational Literary Studies","authors":"Juliane Schröter, Keli Du, Julia Dudar, Cora Rok, Christof Schöch","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2021-2011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2021-2011","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract There is a set of statistical measures developed mostly in corpus and computational linguistics and information retrieval, known as keyness measures, which are generally expected to detect textual features that account for differences between two texts or groups of texts. These measures are based on the frequency, distribution, or dispersion of words (or other features). Searching for relevant differences or similarities between two text groups is also an activity that is characteristic of traditional literary studies, whenever two authors, two periods in the work of one author, two historical periods or two literary genres are to be compared. Therefore, applying quantitative procedures in order to search for differences seems to be promising in the field of computational literary studies as it allows to analyze large corpora and to base historical hypotheses on differences between authors, genres and periods on larger empirical evidence. However, applying quantitative procedures in order to answer questions relevant to literary studies in many cases raises methodological problems, which have been discussed on a more general level in the context of integrating or triangulating quantitative and qualitative methods in mixed methods research of the social sciences. This paper aims to solve these methodological issues concretely for the concept of distinctiveness and thus to lay the methodological foundation permitting to operationalize quantitative procedures in order to use them not only as rough exploratory tools, but in a hermeneutically meaningful way for research in literary studies. Based on a structural definition of potential candidate measures for analyzing distinctiveness in the first section, we offer a systematic description of the issue of integrating quantitative procedures into a hermeneutically meaningful understanding of distinctiveness by distinguishing its epistemological from the methodological perspective. The second section develops a systematic strategy to solve the methodological side of this issue based on a critical reconstruction of the widespread non-integrative strategy in research on keyness measures that can be traced back to Rudolf Carnap’s model of explication. We demonstrate that it is, in the first instance, mandatory to gain a comprehensive qualitative understanding of the actual task. We show that Carnap’s model of explication suffers from a shortcoming that consists in ignoring the need for a systematic comparison of what he calls the explicatum and the explicandum. Only if there is a method of systematic comparison, the next task, namely that of evaluation can be addressed, which verifies whether the output of a quantitative procedure corresponds to the qualitative expectation that must be clarified in advance. We claim that evaluation is necessary for integrating quantitative procedures to a qualitative understanding of distinctiveness. Our reconstruction shows that both steps are usually skipped in e","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46433823","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":"Entgrenzte Figuren – bewegte Erinnerungen. Migration im Spannungsfeld von Literatur und Begriff","authors":"Hamid Tafazoli","doi":"10.1515/jlt-2021-2012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2021-2012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract My paper discusses the controversial relationship between literature and literary studies by using the example of the term ›migration literature‹. It demonstrates in the first part that ›migration literature‹ as a term in literary studies does not expose explications of rational reconstructions of a conceptual content in Harald Fricke’s and Klaus Weimar’s understanding. In its history (Adelson 1991; 2004), ›migration literature‹ goes back to a chain of different terms and definitions as Gastarbeiter- or Ausländerliteratur and reflects strategies of homogenization and exclusion. From the 1980s forward, those terms produce in cultural contexts a semantic field that propagates culture based on a definition of ex negativo (Tafazoli 2019). The first part of my paper describes an outline of influences of homogenization and reductionism on the discourses of migration in literary studies and explains in the second part an asymmetrical relationship between motive on the one hand and terminology on the other. The term ›migration literature‹ seems to dominate this relationship by determination of a source of ›accepted truths‹ related to the life and background – specifically to the place of birth and the origin – of the author (Bay 2017). By prioritization of criteria beyond narrative reality, literary studies led in the 1980s and 1990s discourses on migration on the sidelines of canon of German speaking literature (Weigel 1991; Wilpert 2001). With regard to terminological determination in order to produce interpretative sovereignty (Foucault 1994), my paper exemplifies in the second part that the term ›migration literature‹ collects selected and limited fields of social, historical and political knowledge in perspective adjustment and in order to classify literature beyond aesthetic criteria. By this means, inductive standards (Müller 2010a; 2010b) classify the literary object ›migration‹ ontologically and regardless of factuality of the author’s life on the one hand and fictionality of narrative text on the other. The ontological classification has been used, for example, in contexts that replace the figure of stranger (Fremder) by the figure of migrant and determines the latter as figuration of external space of culture. The replacement suggests a perspective rigidity in the cultural production of knowledge that flows into a terminological classification and claims with the term ›migration literature‹ sovereignty over culture. From this point of view, the author and his work should be located in the external space of canonized literature. The second part of my paper comes to the conclusion that the term ›migration literature‹ has been developed in politicized frames of external-textual ›accepted truths‹ and bases its stability on cultural essentialism and exclusion regardless of heterogenetic appearance (Bhatti 2015). With regard to theories of »literature on the move« (Ette 2001), my paper understands that migration has always formed a consider","PeriodicalId":42872,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Literary Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2021-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45406141","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}