Volume 48, Issue 2

Johann Fischart’s parody of encyclopaedic literature was first published in his German translation of Rabelais’ „Gargantua“ as „Geschichtschrift“ (1575), in later editions as „Geschichtklitterung“ (1582, 1590). The German author provides an astonishing number of catalogues, among them an exuberant list of ‚lusoria‘ (names of games and entertainments), which is with more than six hundred entries significantly larger than Rabelais’ famous catalogue of two hundred seventeen games. Within their literary and epistemical contexts, these catalogues indicate the anti-encyclopaedic character of Fischart’s novel. In their poetical excesses, they show Fischart’s efforts to obscure and transgress the rules of knowledge and knowledge-organisation, thus exposing the other side of encyclopaedic order.

Early modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.

In a programmatic way, Jean Paul’s novel “Titan” illustrates in how far novels are inclined to become ‘encyclopaedias’. First, it is based on abundant knowledge resources that are linked together in a complex way and may be regarded as ‘encyclopaedic’. On the intradiegetic level, the different kinds of knowledge are partially represented by single characters. Secondly, Jean Paul’s “Titan” reflects upon different strategies of creating orders of knowledge as well as of representing and mediating knowledge. Thirdly, it can be regarded as an encyclopaedic arrangement that reflects different novelistic genres. In order to cope with the complexity of encyclopaedic dimensions characteristic of this literary text, it appears to be helpful to present the multiple aspects concerned in alphabetical order.

Though James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leatherstocking-Tales (1823–1841) seem unlikely candidates for an encyclopaedic poetics, they encompass frontier life in an extensive scope, integrating a wide range of sources as well as using immense descriptive detail that often enough overgrows their plot. Even more to the point is the often voiced scepticism towards academic knowledge. By taking the tales as a test case for the ‘encyclopaedic novel‘, I explore how encyclopaedic reference shifts in the genesis of these five novels. In addition, a survey of contemporary publishing shows a similar fluidity in the various bearings that encyclopaedic forms could take on at the time. Given the double flexibility of the status and formation of encyclopaedic knowledge, both in the Leatherstocking tales and in contemporary discourse, the article suggests a less strict, more profane and popularly grounded, as well as more historically relative notion of what constitutes an encyclopaedic narrative. As to the Leatherstocking tales, I suggest that they occupy an epistemic space that was then only recently given up by academic encyclopaedic thought, and that they do so by claiming an encyclopaedic function of their own.

Emile Zola’s novel „Au Bonheur des Dames“ abounds with excessive enumeration and description of clothes. The overwhelming arrangement of these clothes in the department store does not only irresistibly attract female customers but also draws the reader’s attention to a poetics of encyclopaedic writing. Thus, the novel opens up spaces that are filled with goods, systematically organising them in various stores and exhibitions. In view of the novel’s detailed depiction of architecture, economics and customer traffic, the paper argues that Zola asks for a conjunction between the novel and encyclopaedic discourse.

The ca. 3,000 pages of Dalcídio Jurandir’s (1909–1979) cycle of ten novels contain an encyclopaedic abundance of information on the everyday history and culture of the inhabitants of Amazonia, especially the lower classes. The story narrated in this work has the structure of a Bildungsroman, a novel of individual development, and a Gesellschaftsroman, a novel about society. The action takes place in the 1920s and is located in the regional metropolis of Belém and its fluvial surroundings. My analysis and interpretation of this work as an encyclopaedia of Amazonia draws on the following concepts: 1) “Cycle”, especially in the form of the genre of a “roman-fleuve”; 2) “Paideia”, in the original meaning of “education of children and young people”; 3) “Dictionary”, as a reference to the Dictionnaire raisonné of the French Encyclopaedists, but above all in the etymological meaning of a collection of “dictions”: of remarkable phrases from the people. Using the notion of “magical encyclopaedia”, taken from Walter Benjamin, I emphasize how Jurandir confronts the practical wisdom of popular culture, based in part on legendary and mythological elements, with the challenges of modernity.

In contemporary German literature, Dietmar Dath (born 1970) is arguably the most prolific encyclopaedic author – a designation that refers not only to the amount of scientific, discursive and popular knowledge included in his books, but also to their shere volume. Since the mid-1990s, Dath has published a huge amount of fiction and non-fiction, with manifold transitions between these two categories. I propose to read Dath’s novels – especially „Für immer in Honig“ (2005, revised edition 2008) and „Die Abschaffung der Arten“ (2008) – as encyclopaedic Science Fiction: a kind of literary knowledge presentation that is at the same time extremely polyhistoric, highly entertaining, and strictly progress oriented in the vein of classical Marxism-Leninism. After sketching these programmatic aspects of Dath’s writing, I examine some of his crucial political and scientific issues and the way in which they figure in the aforementioned novels: posthumanism, scientific socialism, and mathematical category theory. To conclude, I discuss Dath’s preoccupation with the narrative integration of the multifarious elements of his writing, which is also the attempt of including them into a coherent narrative of his own authorship.

The main issue of the Pygmalion myth is the vitalisation of an artificial woman. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses it is motivated by the intervention of Venus. This article deals with Pygmalion-like protagonists since 1800, in which the crucial point of vitalisation is no longer based on divine volition but on semiotic theories that Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe and others used in the eighteenth century. In these cases, the protagonist’s perspective gives rise to the impression of vivification. The examples of Joseph von Eichendorff, Oscar Wilde and Georg Heym show that this shift also had an impact on the narrative techniques, for their concreteness allows the reader to retrace the vivification of the figures himself. In the twentieth century Georg Heym modernised the techniques of the eighteenth century by connecting them with associations of the new medium film. In the course of time the pygmalionic observer turns into a pygmalionic narrator, whose narration obtains with the aid of the reader an enormous vitality.

Heinrich Heine and Paul Celan have often been compared, mainly because of their shared Parisian exile and Jewish identity. Yet we should add another dimension to this comparison, by examining the authors’ relationship to the French versions of their texts. In fact, although Heine and Celan have always considered themselves as German-speaking writers, their perfect bilingualism and active participation in French literary circles made it possible for them to exert an early and considerable influence upon their own reception in France. This particularly affected the translation of their works, which were intensely managed and controlled by both poets. However, their influence took very different forms: Heine alleged to be the author of the French version of his writings, hiding the work of the translator, whereas Celan never wanted to appear as a self-translator, even if he played a key role in the development of the French translations of his works. Thus Heine’s French works appear to be staged self-translations, produced mostly by French translators, while many of the French translations of Celan are actually very close to disguised self-translation. In both cases the original connection between the author and his text is upheld and the movement of estrangement and disappropriation, inherent in translation, is impeded or even stopped.