Authors and the World: Literary Authorship in Modern Germany

Description

How do authors relate to the wider world in which they live and work? What are the mechanisms that make one bestselling author famous well beyond her lifetime while another sinks without trace while still alive? And where does literature fit in to a complex society’s attempts to understand itself, both in terms of what it has been and what it has the potential to become? Authors and the World traces how four core modes of authorship have developed and inflect one another in the particular contexts of late 20th- and early 21st-century Germany. In so doing, it provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about what literary authorship is in different places and how it draws in different people from across the Western world. This study traces how four core ‘modes of authorship’ have developed and inflect one another in modern Germany through a series of twenty different case studies, including the work of Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Anna Seghers, Walter Höllerer, Felicitas Hoppe and Katja Petrowskaja, and original interview material with contemporary writers Ulrike Draesner, Olga Martynova and Ulrike Almut Sandig. ‘Modes of authorship’ are attitudes taken towards being an author that can be seen both in what an individual author does and in how a particular literary tradition or trend is perceived and mediated by others both within and beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s literary field. Consequently, they deliberately straddle questions of literary production and reception. Building on concepts drawn from literary theory, cultural studies, social geography, and science & technology studies (particularly actor-network-theory), the six main chapters set out how the commemorative, celebratory, utopian and satirical modes interact with one another to produce a number of models of authorship that carry either foundational or otherwise normative force for society. These make way for new models only comparatively slowly over the seventy-five years covered in detail by this study (1945-2020). In varying combinations and with deep roots in nineteenth and early twentieth-century practices, the four modes of authorship create a remarkably (and at times troublingly) stable German literature network that to a large degree still determines the way contemporary German-speaking authors enact their cultural significance in their writing, engage with their local circumstances, and are more broadly received around the world. In so doing, the study provides not just a radically new approach to German literary history but a thoroughly new paradigm for thinking about literary authorship. Cover page New Directions in German Studies Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents Figures Acknowledgements Note on Translations Introduction Rethinking Goethe’s World Literature through Questions of Authorship Gabriele Wohmann answers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Placing Literature in the World Authors and the World: Continuity and Change across German-speaking Europe One Four Modes of Authorship across the German Twentieth Century Celebrating and Commemorating Authorship in Theory and Practice The Celebratory Mode: From Romantic Genius to Literary Celebrity The Commemorative Mode: Authorship and the Memory of Places The Utopian Mode: Multiple Persons in Multiple Places The Satirical Mode: Against Celebration The Four Modes in Flux: Filmic Relocations of the Gruppe 47 in the Provincial German Landscape From Modes to Models of Authorship Two The Exemplary Creator: Modelling Authorship in Post-War West Germany Rebuilding the Linguistic Foundations for Creative ‘Erkenntnis’: How to Live in the German Language Establishing Foundational Cycles of Creation and Commemoration in Literature: Günter Grass’s‘ Danzig Trilogy ’ Against Foundations: Gisela Elsner’s Dystopian Divergence and Fritz J. Raddatz’ Concentric Entrapment Three The Exemplary Pedagogue: Alternative Foundations for Belonging in the German Democratic Republic Living Literary Examples: Comparing the Careers of Johannes R. Becher and Anna Seghers Refining the Model: How Christa Wolf Thinks Through and After Seghers and Becher Exemplary Differences Four Mediating Authorship in Berlin and Frankfurt, 1959–1989 Extending Authorship across a Sociological Plane: Actor-Network-Theory Walter Höllerer’s Literature Network: Authorship in Cold War Berlin Non-Human Actors in the Literature Network ‘Memory of Place’ Reconsidered: TV Portrayals of Literature Networks in the 1970s and 1980s Mediating Authorship Five After the Death of the Author: The Rise of the Utopian Mode,1988–2018 The Poetics and Politics of Late Twentieth-Century Authorship: Christoph Ransmayr and Herta Müller ‘Man liest nicht, was der Autor oder der Text ist, sondern wasman selbst ist’: Felicitas Hoppe’s Collaborations Across Time and Space Six New Collaborations: Models of Transnational Authorship in Contemporary German-speaking Europe Ghostings: On Commemorating What Cannot be Heard and Celebrating What Cannot be Seen The Parallel Worlds of Contemporary German Authorship In Conversation Ulrike Draesner: On Creating Contexts for Literature In Conversation Olga Martynova: On Living in Multiple Literary Worlds In Conversation Ulrike Almut Sandig: On Collaborating across Media, Genres and Countries Bibliography Index Series page