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Die Reihe Communicatio, nun in neuer Ausrichtung, versammelt methodisch ambitionierte Forschungsbeiträge in deutscher oder englischer Sprache, die die Trias aus Kultur, Text und Medium in ihrer wechselseitigen Bezogenheit zum Gegenstand der Untersuchung machen.
Die Prozesse des Mitteilens und der Vermittlung, auf die sich der Begriff der Communicatio bezieht, entfalten sich stets in spezifischen kulturellen Zusammenhängen, auf die sie gleichzeitig zurückwirken. In den Beiträgen der Reihe werden Kommunikationskulturen sowohl als Effekt von Formgebung (als Text/textum) wie mit Blick auf ihre medialen Bedingungen untersucht. Dies setzt notwendig einen erweiterten Textbegriff voraus, der symbolische Praktiken in Wort, Bild und Klang umfasst.
Die Studien widmen sich diesen Zusammenhängen sowohl in ihren systematischen wie fallbezogenen Ausprägungen. Sie gehen den historischen und gegenwärtigen Konstellationen nach, in denen sich das Zusammenspiel von Formgebung, Mediendifferenz und kultureller Rahmung sowohl entfaltet als auch transformiert – um dann zu neuen Formen der Verknüpfung, kommunikativer Praxis und medialer Entwicklung zu führen.
Die Reihe verbindet so medienwissenschaftliche Expertise mit literatur- und kulturgeschichtlichem Wissen und bietet auf diese Weise sowohl konzeptuelle wie historisch informierte Beiträge zur Formdimension gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen.
Jürgen Fohrmann, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn; Brigitte Weingart, Universität der Künste Berlin.
Scenes of reading are omnipresent throughout film history. This interdisciplinary study is the first to characterize the structures, functions, and interpretations of filmic stagings of sensuous and aesthetic acts of readings. In doing so, it does not simply close a gap in the research discourses of media studies and the sociology of reading, but also makes an original contribution to contemporary debates about aesthetic experience.
The Tunisian Revolution of 2010–11 was marked by a new culture of online protest. The extensive use of digital icons in social media was one prominent feature of this protest. In this investigation of cultural semiotics, the author traces the formation of collective structures of meaning, demonstrating their significance for revolutionary and post-revolutionary protest.
This book examines paranoia as a “media pathology.” It considers conspiracy narratives with regard to their handling of technical images and asks to what extent we can recognize an implicit knowledge of photographic media and technologies, of their paranoid constitution and paranoia-inducing effects. The overarching aim is to describe a specifically paranoid form of media knowledge.
Following Gilles Deleuze, this book envisions virtuality as opposed not to reality but to actuality, connecting this relationship with Niklas Luhmann’s conceptions of medium and form. Sand is treated as a metaphorical model of virtuality given its quality as a medium, i.e. its openness to shaping and dissolving different forms. The study examines the implications of these processes for literature, theory, and art.
This book examines Heinrich von Kleist’s relationships to the media as author, journalist, and correspondent. His literary works were a sensitive reflection of the media landscape of his times, and his publication projects, the best known of which was the Berliner Abendblätter, may be seen as an experiment to develop something akin to “social media,” in which the audience actively collaborated in the media production.
Marshal McLuhan’s writings established media studies. The eccentric way he developed and presented his ideas, however, has consistently led readers and critics to doubt the academic status of his work. Is he a scholar, an author playing with words, or perhaps a trickster? This book examines McLuhan’s writing style and questions its function in the production of knowledge.
Silence can be injurious – similar to words, yet different. This study uses the perspectives of literary and cultural studies to examine the violence of silence in the works of Thomas Bernhard, Kōbō Abe, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Kenzaburō Ōe. Close readings yield concrete illustrations of current theories regarding subtle forms of violence and interrogate silence in the context of gender, politics, economy, and cultural memory.
This work examines the validity of 19th century gender discourses. Using a selection of novels from the German, English, and French literature of the 18th and 19th centuries, it explores the thesis that there is a specifically feminine conflict between understanding and emotion. Using contemporary instructional manuals for comparison, it undertakes a historical exploration of the contextual place of the Western European novel in gender discourse.
When “anthropology” and aesthetics struck up a close alliance during the late Enlightenment, this threw literary utopias into a deep crisis. Tracts about societies composed of autonomously reasoning individuals clashed with an image of human nature that emphasized the power of the conditioned body. Especially on account of their dubious reputation, utopias give us the chance to reflect upon “anthropology” as an explosive new form of knowledge. This study examines how thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romanticism used the utopian genre to respond to the ethical and political problems resulting from the “rehabilitation of sensualism”.
As the new medium of the 17th century, the newspaper helped shape the core structural conditions for modernity: an accelerated pace of circulation, new information pathways, networking, and the reproduction of knowledge. These changes confronted the academic world with a major conceptual challenge: How should one describe the complexity associated with the newspaper as a new medium? The study traces the history of discourse about “Fama's Medium” (Fama was the Roman Goddess of rumor) between the 17th and the 19th centuries, and shows how that discourse might be linked to modern media theory, such as that of Marshall McLuhan.
For the first time, this study offers a detailed analysis of the translations of Paul Celan’s poetry published in French from 1971 to 2010. In addition, the author proposes a new model for translating poetry and analyzing poetic translation that extends beyond the work of Celan and engages critically with existing methods. As a result, it becomes possible to read Paul Celan’s poetry from an entirely new, foreign, and yet familiar perspective.
La présente étude offre, pour la première fois, une analyse détaillée des traductions françaises de la poésie de Paul Celan publiées entre 1971 et 2010. Elle élabore, par ailleurs, une pensée de la traduction poétique et de son analyse qui dépasse l’œuvre celanienne et qui prend position par rapport aux méthodes existantes. Elle ouvre ainsi la voie à une lecture tout à fait nouvelle, étrangère et pourtant intime de la poésie de Paul Celan.
Wilhelm Heinse’s novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (‘Ardinghell and the Blessed Islands’) (1787) is often rejected as an unsuitable object for literary criticism – it is seen as formally defective, overladen with theory and hardly comprehensible to the modern reader. Leonhard Herrmann demonstrates that it is these very qualities which make it worthy of consideration as the manifestation of a philosophical experiment – the sensual, empirical individual with free will. Although this experiment must ultimately fail, the novel continues to find enthusiastic readers in the 19th and 20th centuries.
This study analyses the general significance of translation in the literary life of an epoch, a country and a language, and engages in particular with the status of German lyric poetry in French literature in the first half of the 19th century. In the wider context of a study of the problem of translation, the author enquires into the poetical affinity and relative synchronicity of Germany and France, and points the way to areas which have not yet been sufficiently researched, such as the significance of translations and translators for the development of French poetry. She goes beyond traditional research approaches into “influence” and sees translation as the vehicle for the transfer of motifs or forms, or of changes in metre.
L’ouvrage illustre l’importance du rôle joué par la traduction de la poésie allemande dans l’espace littéraire français de la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Cette enquête favorise l’étude de problématiques encore peu exploitées (place des traductions et des traducteurs de la poésie allemande dans le développement de la création poétique française, traduction comme vecteur du transfert de motifs ou de formes poétiques, de modifications métriques, etc.), dans une perspective dynamique dépassant la traditionnelle approche des „influences” et ouvrant une nouvelle voie à l’étude et à la critique des traductions en général.
The studies offer a comprehensive literary interpretation of the novels Voyage au bout de la nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Die Schlafwandler by Hermann Broch. Against the background of related subject matter – the crisis in Europe after the First World War – and with special reference to the authors’ prophetic approach, the novels are examined in terms of the way they shape the relations between esthetic, ethical and cognitive elements. The main focus of the interpretation is on the different ways in which the two novels engage with the connection between art and social praxis in times of artistic autonomy.
What is politics? What is a novel? In the mid 18th century these questions were still unresolved. The study exploits this state of affairs for closer investigation of the convergence between genre theory and political theory. It takes its bearings from the "genre negotiations" to be found in the novels of Wieland and Jean Paul, disquisitions in which these authors attempt to arrive at conclusions about the political and poetological conditions under which they are writing. In terms of the history of the (German) novel, the background is formed by the transformations undergone by the 'Staatsroman' (political novel) genre on the threshold from the Baroque to the modern age.
The study examines the entire spectrum of forms taken by the prose poem in Germany between 1880 and 1920, presenting the first comprehensive history of this genre in the European literary context from a perspective angled toward cultural studies and media history. It also engages with the influence of French genre patterns and traces the corresponding intercultural exchange processes between the national literatures of Europe. In its consistent endeavour to regard genre history in conjunction with the history of communication it proposes a theory of the prose poem in the context of literary modernity.
Discourse-analytic, media-historical, and genre-theoretical approaches are combined here to cast new light on the pre-history of modern subjectivity and its literary representation. Of central concern is the connection between reading, writing, and the constitution of the Subject. The study reveals the ancient roots of this writing-based form of subjectivity, reveals its affinity to specific literary forms of representation, and traces its transformation in the transition to the Christian Middle Ages and the early modern age.
In the early modern age, religious knowledge was not limited to the prospective definition of metaphysical expectations. It served rather as the basis for reflection on, and normative description of, the human self in religious autobiographies and religious anthropology. This study demonstrates that for the 17th and 18th centuries the culture-historical dynamics of secularization consisted in the generation of tensions between edifying and literary writing, religious and medical anthropology, and religious and secular life. Social evolution occasioned the supplanting of religious concerns by autobiography and the Bildungsroman. This process took place in constant conjunction with the changing media landscape, replacing interactive patterns of observation with writing-based alternatives.
Homer, Milton, Ossian. The aesthetic history of blindness goes straight to heart of visual modernity. This book examines this history in France and Germany around 1800 with reference to the philosophical and literary functionalizations of negation. In this, the blind individual figures as a counter-pole to visual enlightenment, an instantiation of the hierarchy of the senses, an idealistic metaphor for the process of negation, an embodiment of the sacralization of poetry, and finally as an exponent of a transitory form of seeing and of the optical unconscious, as represented by photograph negativity around 1900.
The study sets out to examine how the concept of melancholy evolved from its usage in medical discourse to its usage in literature. How can we explain the fact that a term referring to a pathological condition close to madness and marked by extreme introversion and distraction should have become a key concept characterizing the expressive condition of the Romantic writer? Stripping away the modern usages of the term, the study adopts a rigorously historical perspective and analyzes a number of texts that cast a revealing light on the articulation of a philosophical and poetic purchase on the concept of melancholy and its pathological semantics.
Exceptionally, perhaps, the study does not concentrate on the role of the theatre in the (German) bildungsroman. Instead, a comparative perspective is chosen to elucidate how and why European novelists talk about the theatre. Poetological considerations, such as the function of the theatre for the organization of the narrative, are given just as much attention as issues connected with the history and theory of aesthetic experience in modernism. In short, the concern is to examine the literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries in terms of the history of art, society, and the media. As such, the study is a perusal of perception mechanisms that have remained with us to this day.
The positive revaluation of aesthesis and the emergence of aesthetics in the 18th century - from Bodmer and Breitinger to Baumgarten, Meier and ultimately Herder - established an aesthetic discourse centred on the sensual component of art and literature. In literature, this component is to be found in its visual imagery, its rhythms and also in its appreciation as a meaningful structure. The volume contains studies on Gryphius, Klopstock, Lessing, Wieland, Herder and Schiller. It systematizes the insights gained from these studies to demonstrate how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, aesthetic experience was enriched by a theoretical concern for its sensual aspects and conceptualized in a manner that is of essential importance for approaches to the interpretation of art and for hermeneutics.
The study defines the locus of early bourgeois wisdom within the history of the encyclopedic expansion of knowledge triggered by the invention of printing. It interprets the use made of that wisdom as a response to the crisis of the 'polyhistor' ideal. As an instrument for a selection of knowledge geared to the criterion of social utility, it challenged the privileged position of the universities in the quest for truth and brought about a shift of emphasis toward everyday communication as a medium for the achievement of knowledge. In so doing, it produced a political type of scholar acting as an expert observer of this new dissemination and circulation of knowledge.
Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur ('world literature') made its first appearance in his periodical »Über Kunst und Altertum« and displays three dimensions: historical diagnosis, moral injunction, a classicistic poetics of modernism. This book attempts to do justice to the wide-ranging implications of the concept by exploring two different avenues in the history of ideas. The first part examines 18th century theoretical debates on cultural difference and the formation of a global society (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Herder, Humboldt). The second traces the evolution of Goethe's program for a 'world literature' from the age of the French Revolution to the last decade of his life.
Up to now, the marriage between literary studies and sociological systems theory has been exclusively consummated on modern literature since 1800. This study is the first to adapt systems theory to the entirely different structures of poetology in pre-modern Europe (1600-1750). Central to the approach is the hypothesis that although the differentiation of the modern literary system has so far largely been described as an >event<, it should in fact be regarded both semantically and temporally as a very broad long-term process. Among other things, the study traces the conversions undergone by crucial poetological concepts, placing special emphasis on the central role of media in disseminating and developing poetological knowledge.
Can we clearly and strictly distinguish a literary text from a scholarly text? Can we neatly divide off the basic operations of literary studies (reading/writing) from the basic operations of literature (reading/writing)? What impact does literature have on the way it is described (and vice versa)? »Passagework« takes two central reading procedures (passage and analogy), which are as evident in scholarly disciplines as they are consistently passed over in silence there, to show how reading theoretical writings can turn into literature and vice versa. A study of Adalbert Stifter's »Nachsommer« and Michel Foucault's »Order of Things« demonstrates how discourses can turn into gardens and clouds into theories.
In the decades around 1700 profane natural law developed an impact that can hardly be overestimated. Initially most clearly observable in the domain of practical philosophy, it ultimately spread far beyond this to make itself felt in areas as diverse as the theory of absolute rule and manuals for correct behaviour in everyday situations. The study shows how a social ethics and theory of duty based on natural law left its mark on various genres of moralist literature (moralist journals, satire, didactic literature, novels) between 1670 and 1770.
Despite its stylistic oddities and idiosyncrasies Francisco López de Ubeda's »Libro de entretenimiento de la Pícara Justina« (1605) was translated into several languages. The study interprets the romance for the first time from the carnivalesque perspective (Bakhtin) and analyzes the adaptations by Barezzo Barezzi and Captain John Stevens against the background of the contemporary interest in Spain found in Italy and England. With reference to Barezzi's and Stevens' translations, the study explores the sociological question of the target audience aimed at by these influential intermediaries of Spanish literature abroad and the history of the impact they achieved with their efforts.
The form and function of popular encyclopedias went through very considerable changes in the 19th century. The study outlines the emergence of the general reference work as a genre in its own right and its differentiation into various types (Konversationslexikon, popular encyclopedia, specialized dictionary). The comparison of encyclopedia production in Germany and Britain, which is notable for a variety of reciprocal reception processes, clearly shows up the frequently non-synchronic stages in the process of change undergone by the genre, e.g. the increasing significance of these works as sources of information and reference as opposed to an educational tool.
Examining the mutual relationship between literature and the visual arts in the Fin de siècle the study explores the literary adaptation of ornamental style and the emergence of a specifically modern type of hermetic communication. Abundant intertextual references and allusions contribute to the suggestiveness and subtlety of aestheticist literature, which fascinated modern readers like Simmel, Cassirer and Adorno. Thus, in contrast to a common prejudice against aestheticism, its enthusiastic reception among modern cultural theorists reveals the lasting interest of Fin de siècle poetics in the 20th century.
This volume examines the reasons for Herder's foregrounding of the sense of touch. As such it fills in a significant research gap. Changes in the theory of perception since the early modern age are the constitutive factor involved. They led both to an upending of the hierarchy of the senses and to a leveling of the distinctions between sensus communis, body, sense of touch, and emotion. This casts light on inconsistencies in Herder's conception of the sense of touch that cannot be explained by looking at his works or his systematic thinking alone. The upending of the hierarchy of the senses is of cardinal significance for aesthetics and hermeneutics, as is demonstrated here with reference to the discussion on the definition of human beauty since the 16th century and in the literature around 1800.
Walter Benjamin's work is central to the debate on the crisis of remembrance in modern aesthetics. The study shows how, although Benjamin's poetics of remembrance is couched in terms of the traditional constellation of memory and writing, it increasingly turns against constructive actualizations. The first analysis of the author's entire literary oeuvre from this point of view traces the development of his »poetics of de-struction« as reflected by intertextuality and the rejection of autobiographic reading. The 'unwritability' of the »Passagen« documents a non-conclusive form of commemoration as the only adequate response to the task of representing the silent memory of the mute victims of history.
"Is reading historical?" The question is anything but anodyne. The answer is bound up with lead notions about changes in the communication media. In contrast to universal models and the tendency to trace the course taken by the history of reading to external conditions, 'internal' history sees reading as a medium with its own intrinsic resistances. It shows how, as cultural change in the communication media proceeds, reading techniques enter into certain alliances, and further pinpoints the functions operative in giving those techniques preference over other possibilities. The art of reading is a historical matter. But there is an identifiable model. It dates from the year 1735.
This comparison of 10 Bildungsromane (novels of formation) in German and French from the mid 19th century to the present is motivated by a dual interest. It sets out both to investigate the relations between literature and music and to elucidate the concept of Bildung. The study examines works such as George Sand's "Consuelo", Romain Rolland's "Jean-Christophe", Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus" and Thomas Bernhard's "Der Untergeher" with a view to delineating and providing a synthesis of the evolution and specific features of the 'musical Bildungsroman', notably pointing up the analogies between musical and literary structures discernible in them.
Drawing on texts of cultural and literary history from the 19th and 20th centuries the study describes the change of our concept of history after the age of historicism. It depicts how the authors gradually distance themselves from the idea of history as a unity in which genesis and genealogy intertwine. The works of J. Burckhardt, G. Lukács, E. R. Curtius and W. Benjamin represent different forms of this idea which is also expressed in their analyses, approaches and the rhetoric of their texts.
The circle of like-minded litterati that formed around the poet Stefan George (1868-1933) at the turn of the century represented one of the most outspoken and controversial responses to what at the time was widely seen as the 'crisis' of modernism. The lifestyle it propagated, a mixture of the aesthetic and the heroic, embodied an alternative not only to traditional social forms prevalent during the German Empire but also to established patterns of interpreting art and history. With its thoroughgoing synoptic view of the history of literature and the history of science, the study inquires into the program underlying the cohesion of this literary coterie and the resonances it set up in various sectors of society.
Our perception of the Others is based on our conception of ourselves. In theory the Others should be different. If necessary, we alter their images to accommodate the apperception of ourselves. Thus Chinesia, an amalgamation of facts and fiction, was created. In order to avoid previous repetition of stereotypes and prejudices, the present study re-examines the parameters which created Chinesia and traces its development to the end of the 18th century. The literary study begins with the analysis of European dramatization of the Manchu Conquest of China and its subsequent fictional Christianization. Then the Jesuit plays with Chinese themes are discussed, for the first time in literary history. Also analyzed is the reception of the Chinese Orphan motive in European literature which was the turning point in downgrading China, and subsequently Montesquieu's impact on Albrecht von Haller's novel "Usong" is examined. Thereafter, the study scrutinizes the contradictory positions of Herder and von Seckendorff (or Goethe, for that matter) in Weimar. The book concludes with a concise analysis of the 'eschatological sinism' of Hegel, Marx and Weber to indicate the development of the later centuries.
The social power of rituals is a function of their aesthetic fascination; the one is unimaginable without the other. In modern German literature, Stefan George's works (1868-1933) represent the most significant and consistent case of a ritualistic aesthetic. Indeed, the indissoluble unity between George's work and his life can be reconstructed in terms of the category of ritual. George's entire oeuvre is something akin to one huge transition ritual opening up German lyric poetry to the traditions of aestheticism and symbolism. His literary rituals proved their cohesive potency early on in connection with the master/disciple nature of his famous "Circle". They were of decisive importance for the major impact that George had on literature, politics and academe in Germany, an impact that has only just begun to be fully appreciated and examined.
The study examines texts by Julia Kristeva, Philippe Sollers, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Roland Barthes, stemming largely from the 80s and 90s, with a view to essaying a tour d'horizon of an important transitional period in present-day literature against the background of system-theoretical considerations. It transpires that the apparent paradoxicality of the concept 'post-avantgarde' is a constitutional element in the self-reflection and self-description of a number of authors long established as major representatives of avant-garde groups such as Tel Quel, Nouveau Roman and Oulipo. The (self-)observations of these authors have a number of things in common. Their reflections on the historical limits of a-historical, formalist and self-referential theory-formation and the narrative practice associated with it, and the all-pervading preoccupation with the evolution of literary forms are crucial elements in their quest for an aesthetic program. This engagement with the historicity of literary forms is both a common denominator and a contribution of genuine originality, extending to a philosophical concern with the theory of the subject.
This volume is designed as an aid to research into international connections in the poetry of the present day. It covers the scholarly studies published between 1945 and 1988 pertaining to the reception (in the broadest sense of the term) accorded in German-speaking areas to poetry written in other European languages, with special reference to the relation between this body of poetry and poetry in German. New is the broad range of languages (approx. 35) from Eastern and Western Europe and the Americas.
Towards the end of the 18th century there was a veritable boom in the production of novels in dialogue form. Whereas, however, the comparable genre of the epistolary novel centres around the letter and thus remains anchored in the medium of writing, dialogue stands at the interface between the written and the oral. The upshot of this is that 'dialogue novels' have not been regarded as a genre in their own right but discussed rather in terms of changing communicative parameters in the context of the evolution of writing, printing, literacy and reading. On the basis of a poetological discussion of the central idea of Vergegenwärtigung ('actualization'), the present study begins by outlining the theory and programmatic conception of dialogue as 'invented orality', proceeding from there to examine its relevance for the educational tenets of the period and then engaging in analyses of dialogue novels by Wezel and popular authors of the late Enlightenment, Klinger, Wieland, de Sade, Diderot, and Rousseau, pointing up in each instance the specific use made of dialogue as a literary technique.
The volume assembles the papers held at a symposium organised by the Heinrich Heine Institute (Düsseldorf), 20-22 October 1992, in cooperation with the Equipe Transferts Culturels of the CNRS (Paris) and the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico (Trent). They deal with the processes of cross-frontier cultural and scientific transfer from the 18th to the 20th century (with special emphasis on the 19th century). The scope of the treatment ranges from individual cases to broader overviews. The approach is not only international but also interdisciplinary, ranging from literature to historiography and the history of scientific institutions and branches of science.
This study employs methodological tools of a specifically literary nature to determine how in Proust and Musil a realisation of the late 19th century 'crisis of the subject' is dovetailed with a form of 'critical fiction' where the hero is at one and the same time a commentator 'at one remove' from the events he describes. An analytic lecture croisée of two of the major works signalling the advent of modernity is combined with close comparisons with other novels (Flaubert, Dickens, Th. Mann, J. Roth, Svevo etc.). It transpires that the underlying dynamic informing these apparently very different works in fact reflects identical aesthetic concerns on the part of the authors: the various forms of 'disarray' evidenced by the protagonist are in fact the point of departure for a new concept of the novel where the interaction between narrator, central figure and reader plays an essential role.
Die hier vorgelegten Studien zielen darauf ab, komparatistische Vorarbeiten zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik im 20. Jahrhundert zu leisten, möglicherweise auch einer internationalen Geschichte der modernen Lyrik den Weg zu bereiten, indem sie das Verhältnis zwischen nationalen Traditionen und internationalen Einflüssen in der Geschichte der neuesten deutschen Lyrik untersuchen. Vermittlung und Rezeption der französischen und nordamerikanischen Gegenwartslyrik seit 1920 stehen im Zentrum des Interesses, doch werden weitere Poesien mitberücksichtigt. Dabei werden am Beispiel wichtiger ausländischer Dichter wie Apollinaire, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, F. O'Hara sowie die Surrealisten u.a. die im deutschen Sprachraum für die moderne Lyrik verzögerten Möglichkeiten der Vielfalt studiert.
In seiner singulären Weise, künstlerische und theoretische Diskurse zu initiieren, zu transformieren und mit politischer Praxis zu verbinden, braucht Carl Einstein (1885-1940) den Vergleich mit den großen kritischen Geistern unseres Jahrhunderts nicht zu scheuen. Stets "weit an der Spitze" (Gottfried Benn) der europäischen Avantgarde, ob sie nun Expressionismus, Kubismus, Dada oder Surrealismus heißen mochte, vermittelt er zwischen den Künsten, Nationen und Kulturen. Sein literarisches Frühwerk "Bebuquin oder die Dilettanten des Wunders" (1906-1909) kann als kubistische Prosa avant la lettre verstanden werden. Seine "Negerplastik" (1915) begründet eine Theorie primitiver Kunst. Ethnologie und Psychoanalyse münden in Einsteins surrealistische Ästhetik, die 1934 unter dem Titel "George Braque" erscheint. Weltwirtschaftskrise und nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung ruinieren den freien Schriftsteller, der nach dem großen Erfolg seiner "Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts" (1931 in 3. Auflage) in Deutschland 'halb' in Vergessenheit geriet (Helmut Heißenbüttel). Seine "kometarische" Laufbahn (Franz Blei) wird erst heute, aus dem Blickwinkel der Postmoderne, überschaubar und verständlich.
Ein Gang durch die Kompendien der Poetik und Ästhetik erinnert zunächst an die Debatte um Lehr- und Lernbarkeit des poetischen Schreibens; in ihr manifestiert sich die Entstehung des modernen Literatursystems: Angesichts des Funktionsverlusts poetischer Regeln, Muster und Nachahmungsimperative konstituiert sich poetische Ausbildung und dichterisches Handeln schließlich im autobiographischen Schreiben. Lernen, genial sich selbst statt anderen zu folgen, lernen, Texte auf Lebensläufe zu beziehen, und lernen, durch autobiographische Kommentierung Textkontrolle und 'Überleben' bei der Nachwelt anzustreben: dies sind die Lehren jener Dichterautobiographien, die das 18. Jahrhundert hervorbringt, da Texte nicht mehr als gelehrte Handlungen gelesen werden.
In Einzeluntersuchungen, Längs- und Querschnitten entsteht ein für die deutsche, englische und französische Literatur tragfähiger Begriff des literarischen Realismus im 19. Jahrhundert. Neben den genannten Autoren werden ausführlich auch Flaubert, George Eliot und Fontane einbezogen. Abgrenzungen ergeben sich einerseits etwa zu Goethe, andererseits v.a. zu Zola und zur literarischen Moderne. Der theoretische Teil der Untersuchung ist an der pragmatischen Erkenntnistheorie orientiert, die in vielen Traditionen 'von Kant zu Peirce' führt und deren zentrale Begriffe sich als literarisch fruchtbar erweisen. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht eine Interpretation des "Grünen Heinrich" in vergleichender Perspektive; den immer neuen Erzählstrukturen und Wirklichkeitsentwürfen, die Keller für seine Geschichte erprobte, lassen sich jeweils Beispiele aus der europäischen Literatur zuordnen: von K. Ph. Moritz über den jungen Flaubert, Charlotte Brontë, die Goncourt und andere, bis zu Joyce und Proust. Die Untersuchung arbeitet eng an den Texten und enthält insbesondere in den mehr theoretischen Teilen viele anschauliche Beispiele. Alle Kapitel sind so geschrieben, daß sie jeweils auch für sich gelesen werden können.
Die Untersuchung schließt eine Forschungslücke, indem sie das Problemfeld der literarischen Masse mit ihren sozialen, politischen, kulturgeschichtlichen und massenpsychologischen Implikationen absteckt und bestimmt, eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme der bisherigen Forschungen vornimmt und das besondere Gestaltungsproblem der 'erzählten Masse' entwickelt und an Textbeispielen konkretisiert. Hoffmann, Poe, Hugo, Vigny, Dickens, Zola markieren wichtige Stationen auf dem Weg zu einer rhythmisch dynamisierten Massengestaltung, die in den avancierten Schreibverfahren der literarischen Moderne nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg entwickelt wird. In Detailinterpretationen werden die verschiedenartigen Erzählstrategien der Massendarstellung von Sternheim und Jung analysiert.
Die einzigen Begriffe, mit denen die Literaturwissenschaft zur Zeit hoffen kann, ihren Gegenstand - 'Literatur' - abzugrenzen, dürften Fiktion und Vieldeutigkeit sein. Diesen Begriffen wird hier in einer kulturhistorischen Rekonstruktion nachgegangen: vorwiegend anhand des Verhältnisses zwischen Romanen und ihren Lesern im 18. Jahrhundert. Die historische Rekonstruktion eröffnet dabei Ausblicke auf eine theoretische Schärfung der beiden Begriffe, die im systematischen Entwurf bisher nicht zu gelingen scheint. In der Verfolgung zunächst streng literaturwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen zeigen sich zentrale Aspekte der Kulturtechnik Lesen.
Die vorliegenden Lektüren paradigmatischer historischer Romane von Walter Scott, Berthold Brecht und Thomas Pynchon untersuchen die konkrete Form der Verarbeitung von Geschichte in Fiktion. In Anwendung der Theorie der 'Aufschreibesysteme' von F.A. Kittler wird dabei nach der jeweiligen Umsetzung der polaren Organisationsformen Übersetzung und Medientransposition in diesen klassischen, modernen und postmodernen Romanformen gefragt. Ziel der Lektüren ist jeweils die Bestimmung einer Textpoetik, die in der Metapher des Geschichtengenerators formuliert wird.
Am Leitfaden einer Geschichte von 'Verstellung' und 'Verstellungskunst' markiert die Untersuchung denjenigen historischen Umbauprozeß, in welchem die überkommenen rhetorisch-politischen Interaktions- und Kommunikationsformulare durch die aufklärerischen Ausdrucks- und Verstehenskonzepte ersetzt werden. Katalysator dieses Prozesses ist ein sich spätestens seit den 1720er Jahren etablierendes anthropologisches Wissen, das den Menschen und seinen Ausdruck in direkter Absetzung von der persona und ihrer actio konzipiert. Von dem kritischen Zugriff des modernen anthropologischen Wissens auf eine nun als vormodern verstandene rhetorische Tradition distanziert sich die Untersuchung. Mit Hilfe der Vorgaben von Begriffsgeschichte und historischer Semantik, strukturalistischer Sprach- und poststrukturalistischer Schrifttheorie sowie systemtheoretischer Analysen zum Verhältnis von Bewußtsein und Kommunikation gelingt es, die rhetorischen Beschreibungen kommunikativer Prozesse neu zur Geltung zu bringen.