Geist oder Gesellschaft. Über die Konstruktion sozialer Akteure in der Literaturwissenschaft in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts

In the first decades of the 20th century, literary studies in the history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte) experimented with sociological and socio-historical perspectives and concepts in search of a stable basis. In doing so, it reacts to the problems of historical-philological research that focuses on social aspects of literary change. In the competition for the sovereignty of interpretation, holistic(national, ethnic) concepts also prevail against empirical findings.

Creative Writing Crosses the Atlantic: An Attempt at Creating a Minor French Literature

This chapter analyzes literary advice culture from a transnational-comparative perspective. It sheds light on the reception of the American poetics of creative writing in contemporary France by examining the specific case of Outils du roman: Avec Malt Olbren sur les pistes et exercices du creative writing à l’américaine (2016, Tools of the Novel. Exploring American Creative Writing with Malt Olbren) by the experimental prose-writer François Bon. This text represents a broader dynamic in which French authors of literary advice resort to a repertoire of American writing techniques in an attempt to revive French literature. To conceptualize this process of transfer, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “minor literature.” This notion conveys how literary advice in France must constantly position itself vis-à-vis its American counterpart, but also how it appropriates and transforms this same body of ideas and techniques. More generally, this chapter makes a case for an increased consideration of supranational transfers in the domain of literary advice when studying processes of local literary change.

Starry Sky

The aim of this chapter is to ‘showcase’ two stellar (in more than one sense) modernist texts which met with relish the challenge presented by the pace of technological and literary change, and which remain to this day essentially uncategorizable: Wyndham Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ (1914) and Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’ (1915). These texts put a cosmological understanding of the universe as medium in dialectical tension with the generation of exclusive closed circuits and loops (an exclusiveness that might be thought to amount to madness). Lewis and Loy aimed not simply to represent, but to reproduce, the idea of communication as an adjustment of signal-to-noise ratio. The chapter concludes with a discussion of cryptographic modernism, and of the poems of Harriet Monroe.

Reseña de Underwood, Ted: “Distant Horizons. Digital evidence and literary change”

Esta reseña evalúa el trabajo más reciente de Ted Underwood: “Distant Horizons. Digital evidence and literary change”, publicado en 2019 por la Universidad de Chicago. El autor aborda en él diferentes cuestiones de la historia de la literatura a partir de la aplicación de métodos cuantitativos.

Interferenz statt Verspätung – Die Polysystemtheorie als Beschreibungsmodell für ‚kleine‘ Literaturen

Interference instead of Belatedness – Polysystem Theory as a Descriptive Model for ‘Small’ Literatures. Luxembourg literature can be considered a ‘small’ literature from various angles. Its small size, young age and the existence of a sparsely diffused language within a multilingual setting are features that also apply to other small European literary systems and that affect their self-perception fundamentally. In that context, Jeanne E. Glesener has identified a “discourse on smallness” which is developed by the literary centres and unconsciously internalized by the actors of small literary systems themselves: this discourse is essentially shaped by the ideas of creative sterility, poor visibility and, particularly, literary belatedness. However, as Glesener points out with respect to Pascale Casanova’s concept of literary time, the notion of belatedness wrongly implies that all literary systems sooner or later generate the same literary phenomena; it is therefore highly problematic. This paper introduces Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory – which has been designed in view of the Israeli literary system – as an alternative descriptive model for ‘small’ and multilingual literatures. Proceeding from the example of Luxembourg ‘Heimatliteratur’ in the second half of the 20th century, I would like to argue that by openly acknowledging every system’s historical and sociological characteristics and by excluding the notion of comparison from the analysis, the concept of ‘polysystemic interference’ allows for a more neutral study of literary contacts and literary change.