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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.
"Finnegans Wake" has struck many of its exegetes as the epitome of the postmodern text. The oddity of James Joyce's last work has been and still is a provocation not only for literary criticism and theory but for every reader of the work. It provokes us to reflect on our preconceptions concerning such fundamental issues as reading, meaning and understanding. Due to this very quality, the work has been a fertile intellectual stimulus for an illustrious band of thinkers of the ―post-projects. Its singularity has provoked and facilitated the further development of theoretical frameworks beyond the confines of literary theory proper. This essay will trace the elaborate theoretical responses of Umberto Eco and Jacques Lacan to Joyce's grand literary arcanum. Eco's concept of the openness of modern works of art and Lacan's elaboration of his psychoanalytic concepts of the symptom and of the Borromean knot were inspired by their study of Joyce. As an extreme instance of literariness, Finnegans Wake thus constitutes an ideal opportunity to consider the scope and boundaries of the scholarly study of literary texts more generally.
Die Grenzen und Möglichkeiten der Philologie im Holocaust-Diskurs : das Beispiel Theresienstadt
(2011)
Philology seems to have come to a crossroads. One path leads back to the save haven of established core strengths and competences, the other path promises new perspectives through further expansion into the vastness of cultural studies. If philology is to continue as a discipline relevant to society as a whole, retreat into pure philology — concentrating only on the text itself, adhering to national boundaries — is no viable option. Instead, by opening itself up for the questions and methods of truly interdisciplinary inquiry, philology can emerge in new shape, powerful enough to adequately address issues of interdisciplinary, intercultural and intergenerational importance. This essay will argue for such an extension of philology into cultural studies through an examination of texts, songs and plays written in and about the Terezín ghetto. The songs of Leo Strauß and Manfred Greiffenhagen, the ghetto opera "Der Kaiser von Atlantis" (The Emperor of Atlantis), as well as Roy Kift's play "Camp Comedy" and Frido Mann's parable "Terezín" will exemplify the potential of philology’s conjunction with history, sociology and cultural studies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.