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Wer sich über das Bedeutungsspektrum eines literaturwissenschaftlichen Terminus technicus informieren möchte, wendet sich in der Regel als erstes an die einschlägigen Nachschlagewerke zur fachwissenschaftlichen Nomenklatur. Wer sich aber in deutschsprachigen Lexika und Handbüchern über die literaturwissenschaftlichen Verwendungsweisen des Begriffs der „Konvention“ einen Überblick verschaffen will, muß sich auf eine herbe Enttäuschung gefasst machen. Im Gegensatz nämlich zu den gängigsten angloamerikanischen Vergleichswerken führen weder das von Paul Merker und Wolfgang Stammler herausgegebene "Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte" noch Gero von Wilperts "Sachwörterbuch der Literatur" (fünfte und sechste Auflagen), weder Otto F. Bests in erweiterter Neuausgabe 1982 veröffentlichtes "Handbuch literarischer Fachbegriffe" noch Wolfgang Kaysers "Kleines literarisches Lexikon" und weder das 1984 in erster Auflage erschienene "Literatur-Lexikon" des Metzler-Verlags noch das von Claus Träger 1986 herausgegebene "Wörterbuch der Literaturwissenschaft" irgendeinen Eintrag zum Stichwort Konvention.
The reading of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" that I propose on the following pages is based on two assumptions that are derived from widely divergent approaches to Kafka's writings. The first is the offspring of psychological interpretation and recognizes that homologous unconscious strategies are operative in the "Letter to his father" and Kafka's tale. Josef Rattner, writing about the "Ur-Situationen", the "primal situations" that Kafka experienced as a child and which produced in him his most basic psychological attitudes (Rattner calls them Grundhaltungen), concludes: "Kafka's life is an incessant attempt to cope with his father-experience. His father is at the base of his anxiety of life and his crippling hypochondria. … Sadism and masochism are distinctive features of Kafka's works."
The essay provides a contrapuntal "parallactic" reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's "Bildungsroman" Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre - with its extensions Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre - and James Joyce's high modernist A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922). Derived from astronomy, the term parallax designates, transferred to literary history, a narrative stratagem, a metapoetical rationale, and an interpretive method. Joyce employs it as a key concept and narrative tool in Ulysses to denote a stereoscopic perspective applied to the protagonists’ actions and the world they live in. Leopold Bloom thus refl ects on it and the technique of Ulysses is determined by it. On a higher plane, literary critics, too, engage in literary historical parallax whenever they read texts intertextually — as exemplified in this essay. A parallactic reading of the novels’ protagonists Wilhelm Meister and Stephen Dedalus, as regards not just their identification with Shakespeare’s Hamlet but also the symbolic connotations embedded in their names and mythological pretexts, allows us to shed new light on the roles and significance of narrative irony, chance, and paternity in these novels.