Volume 17, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Mediating Literature Guest editors: Natalie Binczek, Hanna Engelmeier, Armin Schäfer

The article argues that today publishing is no longer solely an institutionally bound professional practice of so-called gatekeepers. Through self-publishing via digital infrastructures, it has become a format of action for both amateurs and professional authors alike. The widespread possibilities of self-publishing arise, on the one hand, from the establishment of self-publishing platforms such as Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu or Wattpad, the acceptance of which has increased significantly due to the development and successful marketing of reading apps such as Kindle or iPad. On the other hand, they arise from the omnipresent possibilities of interactive online media, i. e. through self-publishing on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Both forms of self-publishing are part of what has been referred to as the ›appification‹ and ›platformization‹ of knowledge economies. The determination of the relationship between publishing and posting remains a gap in self-publishing research, which this article seeks to address. The article defines ›ubiquitous publishing‹ as the sum of self-publishing practices that are situated within a continuum of publishing and posting and give rise to hybrid publication models. The concept of ubiquitous publishing is to be determined from the coexistence and linkage of everyday and professional self-publishing practices. The goal is to understand ubiquitous publishing as a platform-based modeling of self-publication that competes alongside institutionalized publishing landscapes, shapes them, and questions them. With the multiplication of self-publishing, an intertwining of literary production with its infrastructural conditions, of literature and its mediation, takes place. In the first section, the text argues that self-publishing is an everyday competency or literacy, and that it is accompanied by new forms of professionalization and legitimization. The historical classification of self-publishing within the service economy is considered in the second section. This reveals a dependence of professional self-publishers on the audience’s needs, mediated by the market. New procedures for generating resonance and increasing publication frequency result from this dependence. Analyzing the self-publishing and subscription project Der Teutsche Merkur by Christoph Martin Wieland in the second section shows that these procedures were already essential for self-published journals in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Through constellation with Rupi Kaur’s Instapoesie in the fourth section, common determining aspects of self-publishing emerge despite fundamental media-historical differences between analog and digital self-publishing. These include, above all, the procedures of serialization and (self-)commentary as well as the addressing of the audience. All of these procedures generate feedback between author and audience and allow mediation to become a constitutive component of the literary text. Against this background, self-publishing within digital infrastructures appears as a generally accessible social practice based on the socio-technical mechanisms of filtering and amplification. New procedures and standards for legitimizing literature and the literary are established. The article concludes that the concept of ubiquitous publishing is a significant aspect of the current state of self-publishing. It demonstrates the intertwining of literary production with its infrastructural conditions and reveals new forms of professionalization and legitimization. And it shows that self-published literature is always literature in mediation. The article contributes to the ongoing debate on the definition and understanding of self-publishing.

How ›literary mediation‹ is observed from the perspective of literature is discussed in this paper on the basis of Clemens J. Setz’ Bot. Gespräch ohne Autor . It is described here as a network of multiple operations and interconnections that take up excerpts of what has already been published and combine them with something new, and, at the same time, it is made recognizable as a fundamental moment of literature. What is reconstructed here on the basis of and from an exemplum is systematically relevant. The systematic connections that are of interest here, in turn, can only be made plausible by means of the text. This constellation is theoretically indissoluble. This paper discusses this using both the notion of ›epitext‹ and incorporating the concept of ›mediation‹ unfolded by Bruno Latour. It brings the two together and opens the theoretical territory of ›literary mediation and promotion‹. It follows that mediation is defined as an operation that transforms, that is, not conserves and preserves, transferred into terms of literary mediation: not simply explains and comments, but transforms by inscribing and imprinting itself on what it mediates, is emphasized here. For the understanding of literary mediation, it follows that – instead of being in the service of a literary text conceived as an unchanging entity – it is always modifying and translating it in order to continually bring it forth as something new. While peritexts, however supplementary, constitute compact units, the epitextual perspective brings about their spatial and temporal dispersion. Literature is to be grasped epitextually not as a unity, but as an ensemble or network of different elements, references, and functions that project into a virtually expanded environment of a text. With such a reformulation of the concept of literature, it is stated that epitexts are not attributed to the mediation of literature, but to literature, and that the boundary between these areas is thought to be permeable. The article examines how a text file becomes a printed text and how this shapes the understanding of ›digital literature‹. This also addresses the problem of big data , which requires distant reading procedures and to which Bot. Gespräch ohne Author reacts in a specific way, by capturing context-independent »word distributions« (Piper 2018, 43) to use them for new connectivities. The article reveals the shifts between the possibilities of digitization, its literary adaptations, and a literature oriented to the categories of work, author, and book. It is not concerned with replacing texts designed according to traditional criteria with digital surfaces, but rather with pointing out the untranslatability of one system into the other. An untranslatability, however, that can only be demonstrated in the process of translation, the médiation . By taking up concepts of digital culture and incorporating them by quoting, reflecting, and parodying them, the book, consisting of printed paper bound between two covers, allows them to emerge in a disguise as mediators who participate in its shaping. On the one hand, it suggests that there can be no non-digital literature in a digital ecology, even if it ultimately presents itself in paper form; but, on the other hand, it also suggests that an artificial intelligence can only be described as text or code. It can show that and how literature subjects its mediations or the institutional and medial processes linked to literary mediation to (literary) scrutiny and thereby continually negotiates its own literariness. Where mediation meets the concept of literature, it is also challenged as a literary-theoretical category. With the help of the conceptual pair peri- and epitext, which corresponds to the distinction between literature and literary mediation, as well as with the inclusion of Bruno Latour’s concept of the › médiateur ‹, not only the category of the work in the sense of a stable entity distinguishable from its context is questioned, but also – directly related to this – the authorial function as a collectivity of technical operations was traced. A questioning that takes on a particular urgency under the auspices and with the instruments of digitality, bringing to light the traditional concepts of literature as (re)translations, which is exemplified by the transfer of a digital data set into a printed book.

This article deals with constellations of critique and the critiqued in conflicts over difficult texts. To this end, conflicts are observed in which difficulty is treated as a problem of comprehensibility of texts, which not only concerns stylistics, but also has an ethical dimension. However, the fact that difficult texts require explanation rather than being mediated conveyed is not only a cause for criticism, but also an occasion to prove the competence of the critic. Criticism of obscuritas or obscurity is a familiar topos in the history of rhetoric. The discussion of texts designated as difficult has taken place mainly implicitly in research on intelligibility and incomprehensibility. The relevant works deal primarily with the rhetoric and aesthetics of not only literary, but also philosophical texts. Difficulty emerges as a phenomenon that makes special demands on competence in reading texts (in the emphatic sense), a feature that can irritate readers. This irritation is by no means always judged negatively, as research has shown, particularly with regard to modernist literature, and here especially with regard to poetry. The difficult text, in its manifestation as an incomprehensible text, has been rehabilitated once again since the 20th century as evidence of special poetic quality. At the same time, difficulty also fulfills a function for hermeneutic and aesthetic theory formation, initiating new approaches again and again. Discussions about the comprehensibility of texts – and high or low difficulty as a criterion for comprehensibility – exhibit a strongly self-reflexive character: What appears to be in need of explanation is not only what a text has to offer in terms of form, aesthetics, or content (and what may make it incomprehensible or difficult), but also the role of the person who comments on this text as a critic or defender. The paper discusses this constellation on the basis of cases in which the normative dimension of the criterion of difficulty is mobilized in politically charged academic disputes. In the process, it becomes clear that accusations of tactical difficulty are made again and again. George Steiner described tactical difficulty as a procedure that he attributed primarily to literary avant-gardes, which he did not necessarily regard as negative. For Steiner, this meant texts whose authors use references, vocabulary, and rhetorical devices to force their readers to approach the work through other mediating texts such as commentaries. Steiner sees another motivation for the application of such tactical difficulty in the pressure for artistic innovation on the part of authors, who, against the backdrop of literary history, are left with only the path to particularly complex codifications in order to lend their work an original signature. In the first part of the paper, tactical difficulty is reconstructed alongside the other types of textual difficulty that George Steiner developed heuristically in his essay ›On Difficulty‹ (1978). In addition to tactical difficulty, Steiner distinguished contingent, modal, and ontological difficulty. The latter is present, for example, in hermetic texts that resist comprehension by the very fact that it is difficult to paraphrase them. Modal difficulty concerns the challenges of readers in approaching a text across great historical distance and new literary preferences. Tactical difficulties are the focus of the following sections of the paper. The second section focuses on the dynamics that can develop from the attribution of such difficulties when they are treated not solely as a phenomenon that occurs in literary texts, but also in scientific texts. In this context, ethical questions arise in a particular way. I illustrate this point using the so-called Sokal affair (1996) as an example. Through a parodic contribution, the physicist Alan Sokal took it upon himself to denounce the merely apparent difficulty of the texts of some poststructuralist authors as a tactical maneuver with serious epistemic consequences. The accusation of this form of tactical difficulty has been raised regularly ever since. As an example, in the third section, the article takes up a dispute between Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), who accused Nussbaum of evading criticism of her concept of gender by mystifying it and thus doing considerable damage to feminist concerns. Butler responded in a paper in which she emphasized the value of difficulty. This value, in her view, consists in the fact that the work of mediation that a difficult text requires indicates that the linguistic formulation of political concerns in particular cannot be common sense. With Adorno, she characterizes the call for common sense as a feature of potentially totalitarian societies. An update follows in the fourth section, based on a contemporary example. A review in one of Germany’s largest daily newspapers (2022) criticized an issue of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal of Media Studies), which, for the first time in its existence, systematically addressed the question of discrimination against minority groups in its own field. The review points out that the criticism of difficult texts is repeated in a stereotypical manner, and that such criticism has become formulaic to a certain extent. Here, normative dimensions of textual difficulty are brought to bear above all in disputes in which the discourses of political movements are reflected in particular modes of writing.

This article examines the institution of dramaturgy in theatre as an agency of mediation. The term »dramaturgy« still has a double meaning in most European languages. In many situations, it continues to designate the art of writing plays, and a dramaturge in French or Spanish is also a playwright. However, a few years ago, the originally German notion of the dramaturge also started spreading into other European languages and into theatre in Europe and around the world. This article traces the evolution of dramaturgy from its first appearance in the works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to its use in contemporary independent theatre – especially in the sector that is referred to as the Freie Szene in German. Dramaturgy came into existence during the transition from the episteme of »representation« to the episteme of »man« diagnosed by Michel Foucault (2003). Once the sovereign had exited the stages of theatre and politics, Lessing, the first dramaturge in history, searched for another affective bond between the isolated »subjects of interest« (Foucault 2004b) in civil society. Lessing translated Denis Diderot’s treatise on a theatre of intimate scenes into German; these scenes, hidden behind an invisible fourth wall, were to be watched by a public consisting of mere »witnesses one does not know about« (Diderot 1996, 336). It is especially remarkable how Lessing’s interpretation of Diderot as well as his own work as a dramaturge was shaped by Protestantism. His theatre was supposed to mediate a clear message that concerned each of the individuals assembling in the theatre directly. A comparison between Lessing’s reading of Aristotle’s Poetics and Luther’s brief notes on Protestant liturgy shows that both understood the proceedings – the performance of a play or service – not as a ritual that is temporally structured by poetics or liturgy but as an event that conveys a certain message. For Luther, the clear reading of the translated bible and the sermon were central to the service; Lessing, who fiercely fought Johann Christoph Gottsched’s attempts to write a new poetics of the theatre, translated and reinterpreted Aristotle’s concept of kátharsis into a concept centered on feeling pity for human beings »of the same stamp and grain« (Lessing 1988, 422). Theatre, like the service, became an event that concerns each visitor directly. Dramaturges exercise what Foucault calls »pastoral power« (cf. Foucault 2004a, 173–200, and passim) and become the herdsmen of the spectators assembled to cry for their own kind. Their regulative position is thus related to that of the police (Schiller 1982; Vogl 2006; 2008; Müller-Schöll 2020). But the post-sovereign and – not just in Lessing’s case – eminently Protestant governance of affects is again and again confronted by the persistence of the representation of sovereignty despite the epistemic transformation to »man« analyzed by Foucault, not only in the colonies of European states (Spivak 2008) but also in a playful, but not always harmless way in state and city theatres, where it takes the form of (artistic) directors acting as eccentric and intrusive »berserks«. The dramaturge is assigned to those sovereigns as a consultant and mediator who has the rehearsal schedule at hand and communicates with the media und the public. Due to his or her knowledge of post-sovereign techniques of government, the dramaturge can escape the tyrannic rule of the berserk directors. In his analysis of the German baroque Trauerspiel , Walter Benjamin finds that the Janus-headed, double figure of the sovereign and martyr is always assigned an intriguer, who he analyzes as the »forerunner of the ballet master« – and thus also of the dramaturge, who does not decide himself, but mediates and plays the »human affects as creature’s calculable mechanism« (Benjamin 1997, 274). After discussing the historical definition of dramaturgy as a means to mediate civil society to itself, this text addresses the textual infrastructures of contemporary independent theatre in Germany, where the scene, due to sizeable public funding, is somewhat different to similar scenes in most other countries. The notion of infrastructure is put forth to designate the persistent dispositions that furnish environments (Peters 2015) and constitute what can and cannot be perceived. Hence, as long as infrastructure functions, it tends to escape perceptibility. Theatre depends on electricity, a water supply, streets, and the like, but as Jean-Jacques Rousseau already remarks in his long letter to Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, it does not just require infrastructure but also generates it (Rousseau 1978). However, in this text, the notion of infrastructure will not only be limited to technological facilities but will also be used to describe the modes of subjectivation, the basic assumptions, and the silent convictions that keep the theatre business going. As one example of textual infrastructure, the text will examine tender offers for independent theatre projects. This money handed out by cities, regions, or the state is essential for their funding. The proposals and applications generally written by dramaturges are required to be essentially new and innovative, but should also run to schedule (cf. Klug 2021). Textual practices of reading, revising, copyediting, and translating inscribe artistic work into the discourses of the funding institutions and the underlying models of artistic subjectivity. Again, dramaturgy serves to mediate civil society to itself. All these practices address the isolated individuum with its competences of communication, innovation, and commiseration. The outlook given at the end tries to sketch other dramaturgical practices that acknowledge the fragility of all mediation. On the one hand, aesthetic experience can never be fully mediated. On the other hand – and maybe more importantly – not all Earth inhabitants are members of civil society or can be approached by means of the regulating arts of governance that pastoral dramaturgy practices: the question of who can be a member of Western civil societies and appear on their not only theatrical but also political and juridical stages is determined by the harsh and brutal politics of exclusion that neither enable nor require mediation.

This article deals with contemporary interweavings of literature and visual art. It asks to what extent they include their own form of mediation of the literary and can be relevant in terms of literary theory. This is prompted by the currently diagnosed migration towards ›Literature’s Elsewheres‹ (Annette Gilbert), which, within the omnipresent digital culture, leads away from its traditional media and places. As one of these refuges, the art museum has already come into focus. In addition to being a shelter, it also promises to be a site of reinvention for literature because it offers different modes of presentation, display structures, and modes of experience. Nevertheless, while the literariness of media art has already been explored (Claudia Benthien et al.), less consideration has been given to the spatializing means of exhibition display and, in particular, art installation. Particularly revealing are those examples that attempt to connect the museum and the digital elsewhere of literary writing. For this second site of transformation is usually considered as part of the mass-practiced digital reading-writing culture, so that bridges to the visual arts emerge primarily through related conceptual approaches of appropriation rather than through the specific experiential framework of the art context. As a starting point, therefore, serve theses on the writing of contemporary artists understood as a practice of appropriation that increasingly involves publication gestures and mediation performances (Stefan Römer). Thus, artistic appropriations of literature and poeticized theory can be brought into view, which are performed in physical as well as virtual spaces and, for this purpose, are subjected to a process of datafication as two selected works of contemporary art show. In addition, the concept of atmospheres anchored in recent aesthetics, literary and media theory proves helpful in approaching such examples. For as »spheres of sensed bodily presence« (Gernot Böhme), they imply a mediation-relevant concept of aesthetic experience that privileges body-bound presence over hermeneutics and also open up a different reality of literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). At the same time, as a concept linked back to space it enables an expanded understanding of space/body/object ensembles and can be intertwined with theories of atmospheric media including their immersive environments (Tim Othold). On this basis, the first main part of the article explores the tendencies towards conceptualization, spatialization, and the performative, which are particularly at work in the intermediation of literature and the visual arts. A common point of reference here is the conceptual as uncreative writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, which shows distinctive publication performances and uses of the physical space of art exhibitions. In order to further ground forms of the spatial-installative exhibition of literature in literary theory, recourse is made to Roman Jakobson’s reflections on meaning in poetic language, which is evoked by the very positionality of words and the equivalences they evoke (Heike Gfrereis). Furthermore, it is necessary to briefly define the relationship between literature and visual art in the sign of the digital, which still favors their entanglement due to the detachment from the printed text. The paragons proclaimed by Goldsmith, which aim at a competition in terms of avant-gardism as well as digital-cultural contemporaneity, only seem informative because they promote an equation of writing, reading, and theorizing and thus imply a circular but also quite closed model of mediation among writers as readers and critics of themselves. Beyond this, the premises of fluid boundaries between the arts and of an»interdisciplinary and audio-visual method of language work« (Catherine Bergvall) are more profitable for analyzing reciprocal mediations, going back to Katherine N. Hayles and her early genre-spanning definition of digital art with the core characteristic of the literary instead of textuality. Regardless of the now multimodal research agenda (Thorsten Ries) and the conceptualization of digital literature/art as ›speech before our eyes‹ that focuses on an embodied literary experience (Brooke Belisle), however, screen-based images often remain in the foreground. Concerning the spatialized-environmental entanglements of art and literature, the theorization of the ›text as event‹ provides some more clues. Following reflections on the digital poem (Katherine N. Hayles), it has been further developed for the sublinguistic calm technologies of ubiquitous computing (Roberto Simanowski). While the resulting ›culture of presence‹ is seen as a-semantization, the two artworks by Pierre Huyghe and Jazmina Figueroa in the second main part give rise to discuss whether these antagonisms must be maintained. Selected for this purpose are Huyghe’s exhibition, which transfers Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucke t into a so-called musical staged on the three floors of the Bregenz Kunsthaus, and, a lecture performance that Figueroa conceived for the virtual replica of an exhibition space at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe. The two artworks can be examined as paradigmatic surrounding textual atmospheres, each of which performs its own specific virtualization of the literary. In Huyghe’s case, his exhibition presents an already datafied but largely pre-digital artistic staging of a classic of world literature literally condensed into artificial weather events. Figueora, in turn, transfers such a score into a VR environment, where it allows for an individually navigable listening experience of her spatialized spoken words, which present a motivically condensed, poeticized appropriation of theoretical fragments and mythological themes. In conclusion, these exemplary artistic fusions of the museum and digital elsewhere of literature are considered regarding their forms of storage and temporality, which enable a re-experiencing of texts as atmospheric presence-events.

This text intends to contribute to the transformation of the classical printed book to its alternative forms and shapes, praxeologies and customs. Besides digital variants, this also applies to those that specifically emphasize other forms of reception, those that shift the reading experience into the virtual sphere. At the same time, the book has an enormous capacity to persist in the economy of mediation. This applies both to the customs of its use and to its cultural status in general. It is self-evident that this transfer of the book’s appearance does not take place without interruption. Of course, there are significant differences both in reading habits and in reading scenes. Reading modalities have also changed, diversified and differentiated. However, the appearance of the classical book and the traditional ways of dealing with it persist. It is necessary to situate this appearance of the book and thereby put its persistence in relation to the phenomenal formations, to the changed arrangements, infrastructures, and materialities. The book remains valid as a semantically as well as phenomenally equally resilient center of organization, not least because it succeeds in regaining terrain by the use of technical possibilities and thus also by reaffirming its historically vouchsafed phantasmatics, for instance by using new sensualities. Procedures of virtualization and augmentation turn reading into an advanced reception possibility, adapted to the state of the art of the technical world of living and reading. In the course of this shift, not only did the possibilities of reception change, but also the object of reading. Both aspects can be condensed into two core concepts, which also characterize the title: Multisensory and Uniqueness. Multisensory integrates other senses such as tactility and haptics in addition to seeing and hearing. Whereas the concept of uniqueness encompasses moments that promote a regionalization of literature. The corresponding narrative appears increasingly data-driven (data epics): It is based on a sensorial recording of life circumstances, and on the individual and personal set pieces which can be found in the respective environments. Not the major themes of world literature, but the respective life conditions with their everyday objects and behaviors become the driving force of narratives and reading moments. This finding is particularly striking in view of the possibility of typographic duplication and contradicts common expectations. The object of reading and thus of literary mediation is thus less a canon of literary works that is considered authoritative. Rather highly personalized narrative forms and narrative moments are tapped in the course of changed receptions. These emerge in different places and with different target groups as effects of these new possibilities. In this way, an almost poetological momentum is unleashed that not only works its way through predefined narrative patterns and a canon of works considered authoritative and translates them into other reading environments, but also creates them autopoetically. Both aspects, the expansion of the senses and the radicalization of what there is to write and read, contribute in their own way to making the concept of mediation more flexible and to freeing it from the appearance of the social-distributive, that is, of the field of markets, editors, forms of distribution, and event routines. Literary mediation thereby becomes a process of mutual references between production and reception, but by no means a moral custodianship and transfer of a set of texts, however stably conceptualized, that are commonly understood as literature. In the derivation of these changes, there is a peculiar overlap with historical ways of dealing with and stations of reading. It turns out that above all the possibilities of a multisensory addressing are themselves literarily prefigured – in a reading that Friedrich Kittler has reconstructed prototypically for the writing system of 1800. In the course of the New Reading, cultural technique and media technique, imagination and immersion, enter into a relationship of mutual modeling. Reading forms alliances, for example, with the technical possibilities of designated immersion scenarios, thus, under the conditions of virtuality. The discussion of altered sensualities is laid out, for instance when haptics for affective reading or reading under new highly technical reading environments are inquired about. This paper demonstrates that the book survives these movements in many ways. It maintains its persistence through strategies of flexibilization and participation. But it also persists by changing the praxeologies associated with it, as the persistence of page-turning shows. It opens up to new forms of multisensory experience. In the course of this transformation, virtuality becomes nothing less than a mediating instance of certain notions of literariness. And even more: virtuality promotes storytelling in a variety of ways. It enables collaborations and organizes occasions; it opens up residues of the participatory and the co-speculative. Located in an environment that, under titles such as Research through Design , Speculative Design , or Design Fiction , wants to break away from functional monotonies and guaranteed affordances, the design of alternative futures thus becomes possible. The book appears in the mode of the tailor-made, the personal tailored, the issued unique. Uniqueness and multisensoriality thus constitute the center of a new reading.

The article discusses the position of retelling in literary studies. Retelling does neither play a role in narratology, nor raises further questions for text theory. In the focus of literary didactics retelling is often limited to the pragmatics of use. ›Retelling‹, however, is not a term used in literary studies. Although the term denotes a widespread cultural technique, which is used in schools and is accordingly also discussed in the didactics of literature, it has not yet been able to be acknowledged in the discipline. The greatest obstacle standing in the way of a conceptual version of retelling probably lies in its distinction from narrative. Narratology has not found any specifics in retelling that fundamentally distinguish it from narration. And the tools of trans-textuality and intertextuality developed especially in structuralism to describe textual relations are available for narrative texts anyway. Thus, literary studies already apply theories and tools that are useful for analyses of retelling: narratology, text theory and classification of a second-order literature, the theory of trans-textuality and intertextuality, and material history, as well as research on media transposition and adaptation. Defining retelling as a second-order narrative, or meta-narrative, inevitably raises the question of what is being repeated at all, and how, by means of narrative. Medieval studies particularly emphasize the aspect of repetition (›re-telling‹), which precedes a specific mediality of narration. Retelling as a variety of repetition neither presupposes a pre-text nor requires that a narrative be repeated. Rather, in retelling, the narrative procedure enters into the service of repetition. On the one hand, it is a variety of repetition, but not every repetition is also a narrative. On the other hand, one and the same text can be described from the point of view of narration or that of repetition. Literary studies that focus on the uses of retelling will pay attention to the varieties of repetition and should look at the relationship between the act of narration and repetition. Obviously, in retelling, the modes and ways, but also the degrees of reference to the pre-text can vary, so that it remains to be discussed which varieties of reference count as valid repetitions. In addition, there is the fundamental question of what falls under the concept of narrative and what components constitute it. Is narrative to be understood as a turning back with linguistic means? As an organization of events, which in turn are to be understood as displacements of actors across semantic or even physical boundaries? As little as a repetition by means of narration is linked to a preceding narrative text, it is equally questionable where and how a boundary between narrative and non-narrative representation could be drawn. In this respect, the following discussion of retelling touches, on the one hand, on the distinction between describing and narrating, which itself required its own discussion in literary theory and history. On the other hand, the distinction between retelling and paraphrasing raises the question of the suitability of linguistic and rhetorical categories of analysis for an analysis of narrative. The article will not address such fundamental questions, but only selected examples will be presented to discuss ways of retelling. The article shifts the broad question of what a retelling is into a smaller, more manageable question of how retelling is done. This shift in the problem leads to specific examples and puts the spotlight on the uses of retelling. The selection of examples presents extreme cases that lie at the edges of a normal range where research has mostly focused its attention. The discussion of examples, which comes from Thomas Bernhard/Peter Handke, Wilhelm Termeer/Herman Melville and Clemens J. Setz, is intended to show that retelling allows both an integration, appropriation or fusion of narrative voices as well as an entanglement of narrative discourse and narrative histoire . The ambiguity of the retelling, which, by retelling a histoire , always carries its own discours , contrasts with forms of use such as summary. Although content summary and retelling can be distinguished as text types according to pragmatic criteria, summarizing a narrative text and retelling a histoire can also be mixed and merge into each other. The ease with which the practice of retelling can be understood should not obscure the fact that it is not easily grasped in terms of literary theory or narratology, and brings into play fundamental questions and problems.

The paper develops ideas for a theory of the transmission of literature, or Literaturvermittlung . It connects a historical with a systematic perspective and focuses mainly on educational institutions and especially school. At the center of the historical analysis is Heinrich Düntzer, an early protagonist of German studies who, from 1855 onwards, publishes a series of reading guides called Erläuterungen zu den deutschen Klassikern . Düntzer’s ideas are repeated, yet modified, by Albert Zipper and his series Erläuterungen zu Meisterwerken der deutschen Literatur , which appears as part of Reclams Universal-Bibliothek between 1896 and 1922. Düntzer and Zipper draw from a European tradition of literary commentary while developing a genre of study guides, or Lektürehilfen , that is still existant and influential today. Although in the long run schools prove to be the primary institutional address of these guides, this is not clear when Düntzer begins his project in 1855 and only becomes obvious in the 1890s, when Zipper publishes first texts. Both authors explicitly address educated readers in general, yet also, e. g., actors. Since literature in German is a new subject in schools in the 19 th century, this is not completely surprising. The historical part of the paper takes an additional look at Georg Witkowski’s book Textkritik und Editionstechnik neuerer Schriftwerke from 1924, which is skeptical of written commentary in teaching literature. Düntzer and Zipper both write texts which accompany their series of study guides and explain aims and intended usage. While Düntzer does so in quite some length in 1862, seven years after beginning to publish the Erläuterungen , Zipper adds short opening paragraphs to his first guide in 1896. Both authors are interested in supplying cheap publications to readers of literature. These publications are supposed to explain literary works and their qualities in detail. Düntzer also wants to help readers develop advanced aesthetic judgment. He outlines that the Erläuterungen are supposed to be studied carefully while also reading the literary works. Although an understanding of literature is possible without relying on study guides, these guides, according to Düntzer, provide a comparatively quick access to literature. He also makes clear that his study guides are to provide readers with a coherent text which does not convey information in isolated chunks or jumps from one aspect to another. The rather short introductory paragraphs by Zipper are less ambitious than Düntzer’s, yet also stress the aim to explain literary works in depth. An exemplary analysis of Düntzer’s and Zipper’s study guides on G.E. Lessing’s Nathan der Weise shows strong similarities between the different Erläuterungen . They both present contextual information on the literary work, its creation and background, information on its characters, its language and, most importantly, its plot. At the same time, there are differences when Düntzer composes a rather long text in full sentences, while Zipper’s guide relies to a significant extent on short summaries and the explanation of isolated words and expressions from Lessing’s work. The examination of Witkowski’s book Textkritik und Editionstechnik portrays him as protagonist of a different approach to the transmission of literature. Especially in school, Witkowski wants to avoid extensive explanations in the way of written commentary. He favors an approach to literature that involves readers with the literary work itself and gains necessary support mainly from teachers. Transmission of literature also is supposed to focus on literary works as literature and not as texts providing readers with factual knowledge. Witkowski explicitly rejects Düntzer’s texts and similar writings as misguided and focuses less on a rational and methodological approach to literature than on aesthetic experience which directly affects the reader. The paper sketches a theory of literary transmission by drawing together the historical findings. It assumes that Düntzer, Zipper and Witkowski, despite their obvious differences, share common problems of literary transmission. Moreover, their thoughts are complementary in different ways, which is still relevant today. Witkowski’s idea of literary works that do not need any written explanation is best suited in contexts where such explanations already exist and are contained in commentaries and study guides. Also, the emphasis on emotion, which in 1924 is influenced by the new Geisteswissenschaften , has a basis rather than an opposition in the sober and instrumental approach of Düntzer. The paper argues that in the case of all three authors, theories of the transmission of literature have their key problem in the incapability to model and directly influence the mind of recipients. As a consequence, the authors make a variety of different offers to further literary reading and understanding which at first sight seem to contradict each other, yet in reality work together. Two results of this are (a) that Literaturvermittlung wants to derive aesthetic experience not only from reading literature but also from philologically working on and around literary texts and (b) offers an alternative way to understanding literature by conveying information instead of trying to prompt literary experience.