Forms and Functions of Authorial Epitexts in the Literary Field of the Present

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Döring
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425796101

The term 'paratext' generally describes the types or elements of texts which accompany, complete or comment on a basic or main text, they predominantly belong to the authors themselves or were authorised by them. We can differentiate between peritexts, such as prefaces, mottos or eponyms, which are medially tied to their reference text, and epitexts, such as interviews, letters or diary entries, which generally appear in material distance to the text they refer to. The research project designed in cooparation with the University of Siegen examines – subsequently to the FWF project "About the Function of Authorial Paratexts for the Production of Authorship", which took an exemplary close look at the time around 1800 as well at the classical modernity – different forms of epitexts and their function in the German-speaking literary field of the present. This does not only imply a literary-historical shift but also the consideration of changed cultural, econimical and especially medial conditions. The basic text corpus does not exclusively consist of written sources anymore – as still the case in the previous project – but partially also of audiovisual material. Because authorial epitexts, such as interviews or literature prize speeches, have been available on YouTube and other chan-nels for quite a while. Not only with regard to media technology can we assume that forms and functions of authorial epitexts currently differentiate, with the epitextual spectrum therefore extending and significantly gaining importance for the contemporary German-speaking litera-ture, while it evidently cannot be reduced to its notorious role of an 'embellishment'. It rather has to be questioned how far the literary work increasingly offers occasion and setting for the epitextual staging of authorship. Examining these interrelations exemplary in a theory-led and material-saturated way on the basis of a clearly defined, German source corpus is the target of our project – which we have structured in three work packages for this purpose. Beside the epitexts initially voiced orally in the context of author readings and literature prize award cere-monies, the focus also lies on the proliferating variants of fabricated epitexts, which make par-atextuality part of an aesthetic game, which surpasses the borders of text and paratext produc-tively – at the same time marking them anew.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Thomas Wegmann