Project Details
Projekt
Time-Writing: The 'Chronopoetics' of Journal Literature and the Genesis of Literariness
Subject Area
German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
Term
from 2016 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262766954
This sub-project considers the interface between 'time' and 'text,' which is constitutive of periodicals and newspapers as distinctive media formats. As is indicated by the German terms Zeitschrift (periodical) and Zeitung (newspaper), both are intrinsically time-bound and time-related media. Taking its cue from this temporal factor, which is fundamental to the production, reception, and distribution of journals, the sub-project focusses on those journals in which time plays a crucial role within the production process of an issue or even functions as a thematic 'guiding thread.' It will examine journals that exhibit a proximity to the day-to-day structure of newspapers and thus unfold the reflexive potential inherent in the concept of the 'time-writing' (Zeit-Schrift)-whether by exposing it as a point of rupture or affirming it as a particularly sensitive point of intersection. The guiding hypothesis of the research is that the possible friction between 'time' and 'writing' inherent to the journal format surfaces when the experience of discontinuity calls into question established practices of serial reporting. On this basis, the sub-project will consider German-language journals published during the Napoleonic Wars of 1813-1815 as a form of laboratory in which the interaction between time and writing can be observed during an interim period of de facto press freedom. Particular attention will be given to journals which: a) were founded within this period and which expressly refer to it, thus exhibiting certain 'irregularities'; b) were designed, as far as their format was concerned, as 'news-papers' (Zeitblätter), in which politico-historical and military reporting was juxtaposed with cultural and literary content; and c) reflected on their own status as journals. The task of giving a representative account of the 'news-paper' format at the time of the Wars of Liberation is linked to the more fundamental project of drawing on extreme cases in order to elaborate paradigmatic insights into the journal-book difference with respect to the relationship to time. One of the key aims in favour of the research group's overall project is thus to analyse the 'chronopoetics' of journal publications. Alongside this consideration of the journal as 'written in time,' the sub-project will also challenge the opposite perspective, which conceives the book as 'timeless,' or as a work that is lifted out of time.This perspective would seem natural insofar as, symptomatically, it was precisely these Napoleonic era 'news-papers' in their close relation to current events that positioned themselves in relation to the book form, regarding it as a distant goal, albeit one that was not yet 'appropriate for the time.'A further key question addressed by the sub-project is therefore genesis of literariness, which on our working hypothesis is to be understood as an effect of the cultural reception of works in the course of their transition from the journal format to the book.
DFG Programme
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