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On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
Karin Kukkonen nimmt nicht den Text als Medium ins Visier, sondern die Form des Romans, dem sie ein hohes Bewusstsein für die eigene "Unabgeschlossenheit" attestiert. Der von Georg Lukács auf die Moderne gemünzten Formel der "transzendentalen Obdachlosigkeit" trage der Roman dadurch Rechnung, dass seine Teile "nie den Eindruck eines geschlossenen Ganzen" zu erwecken versuchen. Kukkonen legt dies am Beispiel der narrativen Darstellung moderner "Protokolle" offen, die sie als Mechanismen zur Ordnung jeweiliger Lebenswelten begreift. Moderne Romane kündigten in der Regel eine "organische Logik der Lebensgeschichte" auf und verschrieben sich buchstäblich einer "sozialen, prozessualen Logik des Protokolls". Solche Protokolle könnten von Zügen und Fahr- oder Bau plänen über das Schlangestehen bis hin zur Organtransplantation reichen. Die literarische Umformung der Prozesslogik moderner Protokolle analysiert Kukkonen vornehmlich bei Zola, Sorokin und Maylis de Kerangal.
Repetition
(2019)
Serial texts must repeat, so that they can be recognized, but they must also change, so that they can remain interesting. Unusual temporal manipulations can emerge in such texts in order to balance these contradictory demands. This essay studies two serial texts whose need for self-extension produces a suspension of historical time: the contemporary animated sitcom "The Simpsons", and medieval romance as theorized by the twelfth-century poet Wace. I suggest that we might name this temporal constraint fiction.
Resolution
(2019)
Many parodies operate through temporal strategies that distort the narrative proportions of their targets. This essay discusses two texts that manipulate time for parodic purposes: the contemporary animated sitcom "Bojack Horseman" and the twelfth-century romance "Ipomedon". Their shared method involves the absurd prolongation of narrative structures of resolution and satisfaction in order to reveal these structures' arbitrary nature. But this method, in turn, shows that resolution - a retrospective determination of shape and meaning - can never be avoided entirely, even if it can be deferred.