Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
22 search hits
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Meanings of translation in cultural anthropology
(2006)
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Doris Bachmann-Medick
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Iconicity in the digital world : an opportunity to create a personal image?
(1999)
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Eva Lia Wyss
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Literary recollection : the end(s) of intertextuality
(1998)
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Peter Matussek
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The Book as a landscape
(2007)
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Monika Schmitz-Emans
- There is a long tradition of regarding landscapes as texts and texts as landscapes. Characterizing visually experienced nature as a text implies stressing its meaningfulness, its character as a message or an expression. According to an old metaphor that was highly esteemed in medieval Christian culture as well as in early modem science, nature itself is a divine message addressed to mankind, analogously to the holy scriptures, revealing the will of God as the superior "author" to those who are able to decipher the signs. As a consequence of the process of secularization, art gains authority over the signs of nature, and it is the artist who creates messages by composing the elements of the visual world. The idea of interpreting texts as landscapes seems less evident at the first moment; it implies the notion of texts and landscapes as artificial products which depend on an individual human subject's intentions.
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"Ein Wahnsinniger, der die Fakultäten vermischt" : interdisciplinarity and Ingeborg Bachmann's Das Buch Franza
(2011)
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Katya Krylova
- 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.
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Did Philologists write the Iliad? : Friedrich August Wolf's criteria of style and the demonstrative power of citation
(2011)
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Anthony Mahler
- 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.
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Finnegans Wake as proving ground for theory and agent provocateur in literary studies
(2011)
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Philipp Rößler
- "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.
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Twombly’s Anatomy of Melancholy
(2008)
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Alfred C. Goodson
- A wall-sized canvas by Twombly hanging in a purpose-built pavilion by Renzo Piano, commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston, bears the scrawled inscription »Anatomy of Melancholy.« Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is the culminating statement of the artist’s maturity: begun in 1972, it was first exhibited in 1994. In this monumental cenotaph, Twombly’s painting displays phrases from Archilochos, Catullus, Keats and Rilke, as well as the title of Burton’s famous tome, worked into the fabric of the composition, integral to the iconic content. It is the aching heart of the select permanent exhibition of his oeuvre at the pavilion, known as the Twombly Gallery (www.menil.org/twombly.html). The austerity of Piano’s architectural setting, as well as the cunningly filtered Texas sunlight, makes this a site of cult, like the chapel containing the dark, final canvases of Mark Rothko, situated around the corner in the same urban grove of old oak. The setting is a modern Dodona, remote seat of the oaken oracle of Zeus, and it makes an evocative home for Twombly’s enigmatic constructions. These disarm conventional vocabularies of aesthetic response, drawing attention to words and snatches of verse as points of association and recognition. Looking at them involves siting a phrase such as »Anatomy of Melancholy« in other dimensions – in lines, patches, figures, colors.
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Historical Poetics : Chronotopes in "Leucippe and Clitophon" and "Tom Jones"
(2010)
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Roderick Beaton
- This paper forms part of a larger, ongoing project, to investigate how certain narrative possibilities that seem to have crystallized for the first time in the ancient Greek novel have proved persistent and productive over time, undergoing subtle transformations during formative later periods in the history of the genre, notably the twelfth century (simultaneously in Old French and in Byzantine Greek) and the eighteenth (the time when, according to a narrower definition, the novel is said to originate). For the present, my more limited aim is to revisit the two main essays in which Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope (and of the “historical poetics” of the novel) are developed, and to extrapolate what seem to me to the most significant and productive lines of his approach, both in general, and with specific reference to the ancient Greek novel. I will then attempt simultaneously to apply and to modify Bakhtin’s model, in the light of a reading of Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and with reference to previous critiques. The final part of the paper examines how this approach can be productive for a reading of a much later text, often regarded as “foundational” for the modern development of the genre, especially in English, Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).
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Internal Chronotopic Genre Structures : The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in the Context of the Belgian Literary Polysystem
(2010)
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Nele Bemong
- One of the most fundamental problems of systemic approaches to literature is the question of how systemic principles might be translated into a manageable methodological framework. This contribution proposes that a combination of functionalistsystemic theories (in casu Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory – especially the textually oriented versions – and the prototypical genre approach proposed by Dirk De Geest and Hendrik Van Gorp 1999) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory shows great promise in this respect. Since I am primarily interested in literary genres, the prototypical genre approach assumes a central position in my theoretical framework. My main argument is that Bakhtin’s chronotope concept offers interesting perspectives as a heuristic tool within a functionalist-systemic approach to genre studies, enabling the study not only of the constitutive elements of genre systems, but also of their mutual relations. Bakhtin’s own vague definitions of the concept somewhat hamper the process of putting it into practice for this purpose, but with the aid of the distinction between generic and motivic chronotopes, that problem can be solved. A detailed, comprehensive account of the theoretical premises underlying my proposal can be found in Bemong (under review); here I restrict myself to the basics.
