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Innovation oder Wiederkehr? : Das Methodenspektrum im Kurzzeitgedächtnis der Literaturwissenschaft
(2011)
In recent years, a pronounced methodological self-reflexiveness has been established as a standard in studying language and literature. Methodological pluralism and a specific methodological adaptation to the objects of study are a characteristic feature of present-day literary and cultural studies. In keeping with this tendency, introductory textbooks on literary studies often provide an overview of the broad discussion and spectrum of methods and their seemingly boundless possible applications and the options for combining them. But this is not the first time that the boundaries of our discipline have undergone dissolution. Beginning with early examples of accounts of methodological variety and methodological reflection (Oscar Benda, Harry Maync, Emil Ermatinger, Julius Petersen), the present article discusses the ways in which an awareness of a surprisingly long tradition of discussions concerning methodological competence affects the present self-conception and identity of philology.
Based on the metaphor of “liminality” in literary studies, this paper examines two different approaches to the literary genre of travelogues, using the example of Adelbert von Chamisso‟s Voyage Around the World (1836). One approach, with the help of autobiographical research, sheds light on the author-specific key motifs of “omnipotent time” and the process of aging. In the second approach, the focus shifts to the relationship between literature and natural science, i.e. to Chamisso‟s transitional position in the context of the historicization and dynamization of the sciences and humanities in the 19th century. Rather than thinking of “philology” and “cultural studies” as opposing methods, this article thus suggests a more in-tercessory position for the purpose of a fruitful study of travel literature.
This paper examines the well-known practice of developing a conceptual frame-work for reading works of literature in such a way as to illuminate previously ignored aspects of those works. It investigates the nature or genre of such discoveries: Are they philological? Hermeneutic? Do they correspond to the discipline of the framework selected? This problem is considered in the case of an example of the deployment of a very specific philosophical framework, namely the problem of skepticism as glossed by the American philosopher Stanley Cavell. This framework brings to light a structural affinity between two seemingly disparate moments in the history of German lyric poetry: the Biedermeier period and the works of Konkrete Dichtung from the mid-twentieth century. The paper postulates this affinity as an exam-ple of the kind of “discovery” whose type, usefulness, or even existence as discovery might be called into question and perhaps not, ultimately, agreed on.
In works of Maghrebi authors like Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), the body is the central medium that generates and constitutes the narration. The authors stand in the tradition of oral folk literature, which increasingly has been displaced by French written literature. Hence there is a tendency in postcolonial Maghrebi texts to reintegrate the performative act of narrating via the body into the literary structures of the novels. This becomes manifest in poly-phonic and poly-perspectival narrative experiments in which, with recourse to the halqa (the typical oral narrative situation), a re-territorialization (Deleuze/Guattari) of the body is performed.
In this context the body in literature plays a central role on the level of the metadiegesis: it is presented as the medium of narration. Using as an example Tahar Ben Jellouns novel L’enfant de sable (1985), the aim of this essay is to show how halqa elements and narrative influences from The Arabian Nights structure the text, which becomes a hybrid between medium and embodiment (Fischer-Lichte) by simulating eventfulness.
On the level of the diegesis, the body plays likewise a decisive role as subject of the storyline, becoming the most important medium for the expression of emotions, thoughts or attitudes. Body language is deliberately utilized by the authors to discuss ways of dealing with traditions, the negotiation of social relations and the (de-)construction of identity. Social order, power structures, hierarchies, existing values and norms are communicated and constituted via body language.
Is there something like a 'scientific' approach to the reading or interpretation of literary texts as is suggested by the German term 'Literaturwissenschaft'? This essay argues that genuinely scientific criteria such as the intersubjective verifiability of a given reading do not apply to the reading of literary texts. The reason is that such texts enable a quasi infinite range of different readings the preconceptions of which are contingent upon the individual readers, their previous experiences, literary as well as non-literary, and their expectations. — What, then, are the tasks of a scholarly reading of literary texts? Firstly, the theoretical reflection upon the status of such texts in comparison to pragmatic texts; secondly, the attempt at reconstructing their historical context (in terms of discursive history), and thirdly, a reading with regard to present-day problems. The 'quality' of a scholarly reading of a literary text would thus be dependent not on its 'objectivity', but rather on its capacity to produce resonances amongst other present-day readers, scholarly and non-scholarly.
This paper seeks to demonstrate the ways in which Bachmann's work constitutes a prime case for examining the scope and the boundaries of philological research. It does so by focusing on Bachmann‘s fragmentary and unfinished novel, "Das Buch Franza" [1965-1966], exploring the text and its author in an interdisciplinary light. Forming part of Bachmann's uncompleted "Todesarten"-Projekt, "Das Buch Franza" deals with the continuing legacy of fascism and its displaced forms in the post-war era. In its thematisation of the traumatic and necessarily belated after-effects of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Bachmann‘s text draws on various disciplines and discourses, namely geology, archaeology and psychoanalysis. I consider the ways in which the interdisciplinary ambitions of the text reflect Bachmann‘s struggle for a new form of representation, one that adequately mirrors the concerns of her society. Finally, drawing on Bachmann‘s own theoretical reflections on the field of literary study in her Frankfurt Lectures on poetics, I trace the ways in which the author's work repeatedly encourages us to adopt multiple disciplinary perspectives, as well as privileging literature with a utopian function that exceeds any generic or disciplinary boundaries.
The article engages in a close reading of Goethe's sonnet "Mächtiges Überraschen", published in the sonnet cycle of 1807. In it the poetic voice evokes a mountain river whose course is suddenly interrupted by the limiting force of a dam. Paradoxically, however, the effect of this is not stagnation, but the emergence and celebration of a "new life". This paradox will be illuminated by a discussion of Goethe's "Morphologie" as a universal scientific method. Morphology studies the infinite variety of (natural) forms while also insisting on their individual limitation. Goethe's understanding of life lingers on the co-presence of "coined form" and "living development" as he formulates it in "Urworte. Orphisch". "Mächtiges Überraschen" is read as a poem that embodies this fundamental polarity. The sonnet refers time and again to the borders and limitations of both the natural image it evokes and its own poetic properties. Simultaneously, it suggests the transgression of these limitations on both a formal (or structural) and a metaphorical level. As a poetological sonnet, "Mächtiges Überraschen" unifies the representation (of a natural event) with a reflection on representation as such. The announcement of a "new life" in the last stanza of the poem is thus read as an announcement of its own coming-into-being.
The essay raises the question of what it actually means to work with concepts of intermediality in literary studies. It uses as an example a Ph.D project which compares story-telling in literary texts and videographed testimonies by Shoah survivors. It soon becomes clear that that a strictly "intermedial" approach does not fully serve the purpose. Instead, one should try to maintain a literary studies perspective even on other forms of media. To illustrate this, the essay presents an analysis of videographed testimonies using categories taken from literary narratology. It thereby shows the problems as well as the merits of such an approach, at the limits of the discipline.
Friedrich August Wolf posits in his "Prolegomena ad Homerum" that, from the time of the first transcription of Homer's epics around 700 BC to the time of the Alexandrian editions, the Iliad and Odyssey underwent repeated revisions by a multitude of poets and critics. According to Wolf, the "unified" works that we know are the products of emendations by Alexandrian critics who attempted to homogenize the style of the epics and to return them to their "original" form. This paper argues that Wolf's narration of the history of these texts relies on and produces aesthetic claims, not historical ones. Wolf determines the dates and origins of passages based on intuitive judgments of style for which he cannot provide linguistic or historical evidence. And his conclusions that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were not written by Homer, but rather by a history of emendations and revisions, enthrones his work — the work of philologists — in place of the literary genius Homer. Thus philology becomes for Wolf an aesthetic discipline that produces canonical and beautiful works of literature. This aesthetic task is essential for philology to fulfill its educational and political responsibilities.
In response to the question "What is the nature of a philological practice that seeks to establish a spatial relationship between text and reader?" this essay compares the philologist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's contemporary account of aesthetic experience with the school of Empathy Aesthetics in the late nineteenth century with respect to the manner each emphasizes the spatial qualities of that relationship. Although employing different conceptual repertoires, both assert that the desire of an aesthetic recipient to be in the spatial vicinity of the object and experience the presence of the object with and upon his own body motivates an aesthetic experience, including the work of the philologist. Gumbrecht and the empathy aesthetician Robert Vischer characterize the desire to stand in a spatial relationship to the aesthetic object as the desire to be subsumed thereby, a characterization which entails the negation of the original philological standpoint.