Within the alphabet of facts and fictions. The encyclopedia as literature

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Tanja van Hoorn
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 388545292

Since the Early Modern Ages, reference works such as lexicons, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias have been organized in alphabetical order. The ABC warrants for the fast availability of the factual information provided in a lemmatized way in single articles. In contrast to the evident normative tendencies of its format, the lexicon has epistemologically also been defined as an open, anti-systematic conceptual space which tentatively scatters archipelagos of ideas (Serres, Barthes).However, satirical dictionaries, lexicon novels, and parodies of primers bear witness that the lexicon format is able not only to liberate thought, but also to be aesthetically productive. In a rather conspicuous way, the arbitrary ABC structure has since the Enlightenment been used for literary criticism, artistic polemics, and avant-garde artefacts. Along Zedler and Brockhaus, a line of contrary pseudo-lexicons has emerged, spawned by the critical dictionaries of Bayle (1695/97) and Voltaire (1764), and leading via myriads of satirical almanacs, bestiaries, and alphabetically organized autobiographies to lexicographic anti-narrative projects such as Raoul Tranchirers Enzyklopädie für unerschrockene Leser [Raoul Tranchirer's Encyclopedia for Undaunted Readers, since 1983] by Ror Wolf.All those texts adapt the lexicon format, yet want to be more than pragmatic reference works: throughout, they are playful and simultaneously provocative intellectual and literary experiments, acting in the force field of micro-textual methods on the level of the single articles and the macro-structure deriving from the arrangement of entries lemmatised according to the ABC. This tension generates the specific poetics of literary lexicography. At the same time, this is the place where the specific participation of those works in the production of knowledge is formed, the major thesis being that fake lexicons provide a fruitful literary laboratory in which knowledge is produced through genuinely aesthetically, partly fictional methods. The history of this epistemologically productive lexicographic literature has as yet been unwritten; a gap which the projected monograph is designed to fill.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants