access to European funding; and crucially the residence status of our European colleagues, and th... more access to European funding; and crucially the residence status of our European colleagues, and the residence and fee status of our European students. More broadly, as narratives of nationalism resurface across the world, and national perspectives turn inwards rather than outwards, the question of why one might study a foreign culture, and a foreign language, simultaneously becomes intellectually clearer and yet politically more fraught. Furthermore, the whys and wherefores of studying one's own language, literature and culture have also become increasingly subject to scrutiny: consider the debates around the future of literary studies in Germanistik captured in the 2015 volume of Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, or the 'English: Shared Futures' conference in Newcastle in 2017 that sought to establish a common platform from which to articulate the position of English Studies in a changing world. Such crises are not unique to our era, of course -and as Nicola McClelland and Richard Smith have revealed in their extraordinarily extensive work on the history of language learning and teaching, the concept of crisis has repeatedly resurfaced in the story of the Modern Languages. 7 Furthermore, in what initially might appear as something of a paradox, German Studies as an intellectual discipline has, far from entering terminal decline, developed in exciting, innovative ways over the past decades, above all in moving beyond what has been termed the traditional 'literaturephilosophy-history' model and beyond the boundaries of an established literary canon, but without losing sight of either that original model or the ongoing usefulness of the canon. Here we might consider the range of popular 'trans-terms' as more than buzzwords, but indicative of the diversity and intellectual breadth that has always underpinned our subject: transnational, transperiod, translingual, transdisciplinary, and translatable. The rise of these terms has not led to the replacement of the canon, but rather to a new critical approach that recognises the hybridity and fluidity of what we study. As Sandra Richter, the recently appointed Director of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, has stressed, German-language culture 'entfaltet sich regional, interregional, international, global. So betrachtet fällt sie völlig aus dem nationalen Rahmen: Sie ist weder groß noch klein, kennt kein Zentrum, aber zahlreiche Peripherien '. 9 This multiplicity, 'worldliness' and interdisciplinarity of our studies has in turn been enshrined in research funding programmes, most notably the Arts and Humanities Research Council's 'Translating Cultures' strand, and the recent 'Open World Research Initiative', both addressed in several of the interventions in this article (notably by Braun, Kohl, and Schofield). Both schemes are also, one might add, built on the extensive ground staked out by the traditional 'literature-philosophy-history' model, but with the express desire of returning new research insights, and particularly methods, to it that are born of a broader exchange across cultures and disciplines. Equally, while impact is intimately associated with nationally-dictated processes like the Research
Abstract Germany has an unusually large number of literary prize foundations in international com... more Abstract Germany has an unusually large number of literary prize foundations in international comparison. The historical and socio-political reasons for such a widespread ritual appropriation of ‘award-winning’ authors can tell us a great deal about changing notions of German cultural identity. This paper argues that whereas the long-running named literary prizes (such as the Büchner and Kleist prizes) place their laureates in a retrospective tradition that is firmly tied to national and regional cultural politics, a new breed of prizes — spearheaded by the German Book Prize — has emerged since the beginning of the twenty-first century that deliberately seeks to propel authors beyond the confines of the German literary field. These prizes proactively ‘celebrify’ the author with the explicit intention of bringing to market a self-consciously contemporary, more diverse image of Germanness. Pursuing a literary career in such a context is both a challenge and an opportunity, as the specific case of Daniel Kehlmann shows.
This article engages with the criticism levelled at late twentieth- and early twenty-first centur... more This article engages with the criticism levelled at late twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary prizes in German-speaking Europe. It sets out how comments on the literary industry from contemporary authors and media commentators draw explicitly on the vocabulary of sport, and considers how this feeds into a long-standing discourse on literary prizes and literary value. I examine the notion that the competitive element shared by both sport and neo-capitalist society has undermined the value of literature as a serious intellectual endeavour, and I look at the different ways that Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek have engaged with these ideas in their various public expressions of authorship. Both authors not only engage directly with the problems posed by an image- and personality-obsessed society in their reflections on authorship, but also use both their own bodies and the larger body of literature they symbolically represent to argue for the ongoing social relevance of literary pursuits.
Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessibl... more Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: "Brill". See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2213-9729 isbn 978-90-04-29188-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29189-8 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by the Editors and Authors. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
access to European funding; and crucially the residence status of our European colleagues, and th... more access to European funding; and crucially the residence status of our European colleagues, and the residence and fee status of our European students. More broadly, as narratives of nationalism resurface across the world, and national perspectives turn inwards rather than outwards, the question of why one might study a foreign culture, and a foreign language, simultaneously becomes intellectually clearer and yet politically more fraught. Furthermore, the whys and wherefores of studying one's own language, literature and culture have also become increasingly subject to scrutiny: consider the debates around the future of literary studies in Germanistik captured in the 2015 volume of Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, or the 'English: Shared Futures' conference in Newcastle in 2017 that sought to establish a common platform from which to articulate the position of English Studies in a changing world. Such crises are not unique to our era, of course -and as Nicola McClelland and Richard Smith have revealed in their extraordinarily extensive work on the history of language learning and teaching, the concept of crisis has repeatedly resurfaced in the story of the Modern Languages. 7 Furthermore, in what initially might appear as something of a paradox, German Studies as an intellectual discipline has, far from entering terminal decline, developed in exciting, innovative ways over the past decades, above all in moving beyond what has been termed the traditional 'literaturephilosophy-history' model and beyond the boundaries of an established literary canon, but without losing sight of either that original model or the ongoing usefulness of the canon. Here we might consider the range of popular 'trans-terms' as more than buzzwords, but indicative of the diversity and intellectual breadth that has always underpinned our subject: transnational, transperiod, translingual, transdisciplinary, and translatable. The rise of these terms has not led to the replacement of the canon, but rather to a new critical approach that recognises the hybridity and fluidity of what we study. As Sandra Richter, the recently appointed Director of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, has stressed, German-language culture 'entfaltet sich regional, interregional, international, global. So betrachtet fällt sie völlig aus dem nationalen Rahmen: Sie ist weder groß noch klein, kennt kein Zentrum, aber zahlreiche Peripherien '. 9 This multiplicity, 'worldliness' and interdisciplinarity of our studies has in turn been enshrined in research funding programmes, most notably the Arts and Humanities Research Council's 'Translating Cultures' strand, and the recent 'Open World Research Initiative', both addressed in several of the interventions in this article (notably by Braun, Kohl, and Schofield). Both schemes are also, one might add, built on the extensive ground staked out by the traditional 'literature-philosophy-history' model, but with the express desire of returning new research insights, and particularly methods, to it that are born of a broader exchange across cultures and disciplines. Equally, while impact is intimately associated with nationally-dictated processes like the Research
Abstract Germany has an unusually large number of literary prize foundations in international com... more Abstract Germany has an unusually large number of literary prize foundations in international comparison. The historical and socio-political reasons for such a widespread ritual appropriation of ‘award-winning’ authors can tell us a great deal about changing notions of German cultural identity. This paper argues that whereas the long-running named literary prizes (such as the Büchner and Kleist prizes) place their laureates in a retrospective tradition that is firmly tied to national and regional cultural politics, a new breed of prizes — spearheaded by the German Book Prize — has emerged since the beginning of the twenty-first century that deliberately seeks to propel authors beyond the confines of the German literary field. These prizes proactively ‘celebrify’ the author with the explicit intention of bringing to market a self-consciously contemporary, more diverse image of Germanness. Pursuing a literary career in such a context is both a challenge and an opportunity, as the specific case of Daniel Kehlmann shows.
This article engages with the criticism levelled at late twentieth- and early twenty-first centur... more This article engages with the criticism levelled at late twentieth- and early twenty-first century literary prizes in German-speaking Europe. It sets out how comments on the literary industry from contemporary authors and media commentators draw explicitly on the vocabulary of sport, and considers how this feeds into a long-standing discourse on literary prizes and literary value. I examine the notion that the competitive element shared by both sport and neo-capitalist society has undermined the value of literature as a serious intellectual endeavour, and I look at the different ways that Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek have engaged with these ideas in their various public expressions of authorship. Both authors not only engage directly with the problems posed by an image- and personality-obsessed society in their reflections on authorship, but also use both their own bodies and the larger body of literature they symbolically represent to argue for the ongoing social relevance of literary pursuits.
Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessibl... more Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: "Brill". See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2213-9729 isbn 978-90-04-29188-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-29189-8 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by the Editors and Authors. This work is published by Koninklijke Brill NV. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use and to authorize dissemination by means of offprints, legitimate photocopies, microform editions, reprints, translations, and secondary information sources, such as abstracting and indexing services including databases. Requests for commercial re-use, use of parts of the publication, and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
This is a special issue of the journal Celebrity Studies, 7:4 (2016), co-edited with Emily Spiers... more This is a special issue of the journal Celebrity Studies, 7:4 (2016), co-edited with Emily Spiers. The journals consists of a research-led introduction, 7 academic articles, and a forum foregrounding 4 practitioners' voices, also with its own short introduction. Collectively, we show the range of disciplinary approaches and differentiated chronological and geographical coverage that are needed in order fully to understand the multiple ways in which literary celebrity exists in both contemporary media discourse and cultural analysis.
This edition of the journal _Seminar_ gives a German take on the topic of 'World Authorship'. The... more This edition of the journal _Seminar_ gives a German take on the topic of 'World Authorship'. The volume explores the notion of a 'world author' and the various methodological approaches that underpin the academic study of 'world literature' in the context of ongoing globalizing trends. With papers ranging from Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur as an individual performative act of literary resistance through to discussions of increasingly anonymous, culturally-inflected collective appropriations of Christa Wolf, the articles encourage a new way of thinking about notions of value and political and ethical accountability in the literary marketplace. They are complemented by an extensive research-led introduction that probes the conceptual frames of both authorship and world literature, and an epilogue that sets out the contribution that digital humanities can make to our research methodologies in this area.
This edited volume pioneers a systematic approach to the study of cultural impact in the German-s... more This edited volume pioneers a systematic approach to the study of cultural impact in the German-speaking world. ‘Cultural impact’ as a concept expresses how narratives of effect - something’s ‘cultural impact’ - are not only constructed as part of a contested collective cultural identity, but also in turn actively shape this wider cultural context. These narratives may concern specific artefacts (books, films, plays), individual figures (authors, artists, intellectuals), or wider historical, political or cultural events, but they are united by the effect they have on contemporary cultural discourse.
In order to examine this effect, the volume is divided into three sections, Theorizing, Directing, and Analyzing Cultural Impact. The first section considers how cultural impact can be conceived with reference to linguistic usage, cultural memory, popular film, authorship, and elite cultural production. The second section, covering heritage management, dramaturgy, and state-sponsored literary subvention, accounts for how cultural impact is managed in practical terms. The final section applies the theoretical and practical models of impact analysis developed in the first half of the book to individual case studies which further elucidate how public narratives of effect emerge from, evolve within and directly influence the changing cultural realm in the 20th century German context.
English-language throughout, this is a challenging research volume which systematically develops a new conceptual term and area of research in one. Like reception studies before it, cultural impact seeks to examine how cultural meaning is constructed for and by its receivers. Unlike reception studies, the models of cultural transfer developed and communities of reception examined are by no means exclusively text-based or discipline-specific; they retain a distinctly practical, experiential focus, and aim to keep the entirety of the impact process in view.
This study argues that Grass’s tendency to insert clearly recognisable self-images into his liter... more This study argues that Grass’s tendency to insert clearly recognisable self-images into his literary texts represents a coherent and calculated reaction to his constant public exposure in the media-led sphere. Providing close textual analysis of all of Grass's major works published after The Danzig Trilogy, as well as sustained analysis of his political activities, it underlines the degree of play which has characterised Grass’s relationship to this sphere and explains how a concern with the very concept of authorship has conditioned the way his work as a whole has developed on both thematic and structural levels. The major achievement of this study is to develop a new overarching interpretative paradigm for Grass’s work that explains for the first time how his playful tendency towards self-manipulation conditions all levels of his texts and is equally manifest in literary and political realms.
The significance of Günter Grass’s literary and political writings has all too often been discuss... more The significance of Günter Grass’s literary and political writings has all too often been discussed by the German media and by scholars within the confines of a specifically German context. Following the enormous literary success of The Tin Drum in the early sixties, however, Grass, whose major works have been translated into 34 languages, has enjoyed a high public profile far beyond the confines of his native country. His relentless social and political intervention all over the world from the 1970s onwards, the longstanding, high profile admiration of other so-called ‘world authors’ such as John Irving and Salmon Rushdie, as well as the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, have ensured that he has been integrated into numerous national discourses and assigned significance in both literary and intellectual debates quite different to those specific to the German context.
The essays gathered together in this volume consciously reflect on this wider international perspective. Following an introduction that situates an international approach within wider Grass scholarship and offers a first attempt at conceptualising internationalism with respect to authorship, the contributors explore how Grass and his work lend themselves to being incorporated into other national, international, or indeed trans-national discourses. While the first part of the volume looks at aspects of Grass’s work that either deliberately engage with other nations or particularly encourage a wider literary/socio-theoretical approach, the second part considers the author’s legacy for world history, politics and literature. Grass is presented as a model, whether wholeheartedly emulated or significantly adapted, that is employed by a host of writers, politicians, historians and journalists to a variety of effects.
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In order to examine this effect, the volume is divided into three sections, Theorizing, Directing, and Analyzing Cultural Impact. The first section considers how cultural impact can be conceived with reference to linguistic usage, cultural memory, popular film, authorship, and elite cultural production. The second section, covering heritage management, dramaturgy, and state-sponsored literary subvention, accounts for how cultural impact is managed in practical terms. The final section applies the theoretical and practical models of impact analysis developed in the first half of the book to individual case studies which further elucidate how public narratives of effect emerge from, evolve within and directly influence the changing cultural realm in the 20th century German context.
English-language throughout, this is a challenging research volume which systematically develops a new conceptual term and area of research in one. Like reception studies before it, cultural impact seeks to examine how cultural meaning is constructed for and by its receivers. Unlike reception studies, the models of cultural transfer developed and communities of reception examined are by no means exclusively text-based or discipline-specific; they retain a distinctly practical, experiential focus, and aim to keep the entirety of the impact process in view.
The essays gathered together in this volume consciously reflect on this wider international perspective. Following an introduction that situates an international approach within wider Grass scholarship and offers a first attempt at conceptualising internationalism with respect to authorship, the contributors explore how Grass and his work lend themselves to being incorporated into other national, international, or indeed trans-national discourses. While the first part of the volume looks at aspects of Grass’s work that either deliberately engage with other nations or particularly encourage a wider literary/socio-theoretical approach, the second part considers the author’s legacy for world history, politics and literature. Grass is presented as a model, whether wholeheartedly emulated or significantly adapted, that is employed by a host of writers, politicians, historians and journalists to a variety of effects.