American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy
Final Report Abstract
The research project "American Literature and the Transformation of Privacy" has taken as its starting premise the observation that privacy consists of social practices, technologies, and hermeneutics that are historically variable and that are currently undergoing a structural change. Literature has historically been crucial to the articulation of a liberal conception of privacy. It is this historical link between literature and privacy that provided the research question for this project: how can the structural transformation of privacy that we witness today be made sense of with the help of literary writing - which itself must be regarded as undergoing structural changes concerning the status of fiction, publishing technologies, etc. Rather than limiting itself to a narrow perspective on the contemporary moment, the research project has tracked the historical co-evolution of the literary and privacy by pairing two subprojects, the first centering on the late nineteenth century, the second on the early twenty-first century. Subproject 1, "Emily Dickinson, Privacy, and Literary Theory," develops a concept of privacy based on Emily Dickinson’s poetics and takes this conception as the basis for an outline of a general literary theory of privacy. The literary study of privacy has so far tended to borrow its understanding of the private from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and political theory. Dr. Stephan Kuhl complements these approaches by drawing attention to the aesthetic dimension of privacy. At the core of the book-in-progress (near completion) lies the question of how Dickinson’s intention to keep her poetic works out of the public has impacted her poetics; and to what extent this intentionally private nature of her writings remained traceable and shaped its meanings once her work was published. In the second subproject, Prof. Dr. Johannes Völz approached privacy in the “network society” through an analysis of contemporary literature. His studies (which have appeared in numerous articles and will culminate in a monograph) investigate the aesthetics of "networked privacy" in relation to the international phenomenon of "autofiction" - a form of literary writing, often self-consciously experimental, that explores the borders between the fictional and the non-fictional, and that tends, in ist recent permutation, to point towards a moment of the meta-nonfictional (rather than metafictional). No longer residing in a spatial or psychic sphere protected from public scrutiny, the private is currently being relocated inside network structures. Drawing on media sociology and affect theory, the subproject has brought to light how contemporary literary aesthetics consolidates a new concept of the private, and by extension of the self.
Publications
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“The American Novel and the Transformation of Privacy: Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (2015).” The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments – Critical Analyses. Ed Michael Basseler and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2019. 323–337
Voelz, Johannes
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“Der Wert des Privaten und die Literatur der ‘Neuen Aufrichtigkeit’.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 01–2016: 145–155
Voelz, Johannes
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“The Private Sphere of the Text: Emily Dickinson’s Literary Practice and Her Public.” American Counter/Publics. Eds. Haselstein, Kelleter, Starre, Wege. Heidelberg: Winter, 2019. 343–358
Kuhl, Stephan
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How to Read the Literary Market: An Introduction. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 69(1), 3-8.
Breitenwischer, Dustin; Löffler, Philipp & Völz, Johannes
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Autofiktion und die Poetik der Singularisierung. Special section of WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 01–2022
Voelz, Johannes
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“Affektlagen der Singularisierung: Tao Lin am Rande der Erschöpfung.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 01–2022: 99–111. (Special issue: Autofiktion und die Poetik der Singularisierung, ed. Johannes Voelz)
Voelz, Johannes
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“Stichwort: Autofiktion und die Poetik der Singularisierung. Einleitung.” WestEnd: Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 01–2022: 75–82
Voelz, Johannes
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Autofiktion und der Strukturwandel des Privaten. Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 97(4), 927-939.
Völz, Johannes
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Mary McCarthy and the Genealogy of Progressive Liberalism. New American Studies Journal, 74.
Voelz, Johannes
