Volume 17, Issue 2 - Special Issue: Literary Theory and the Network Turn

The essay proposes to think of the creative subject as an actor in a network, that is, following Bruno Latour, as a »moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it« (Latour 2005, 46). It explores what it means to bring a network analysis to lectures on poetics by employing both a structuralist visualization informed by a computational method and a sociological method according to Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). ANT is used to make traceable what with Hugh Kenner is called »elsewhere communities« consisting of spirits and minds along with objects and spaces. This serves to defend a method of criticism that is not oriented towards unearthing deep textual meanings, but which foregrounds the arts’ relatability and potential for provoking association and attachments. Network analysis in the arts and humanities, so goes the argument, has the potential to be much more than a formalist description of connections made. It offers means for detecting the implicit and explicit presences of a variety of different actors in or relating to works of art and challenges us to move beyond established analytical categories such as intertextuality and intermediality by opening the inquiry to a wider diversity of actors and to redefine our understanding of creativity. The article focuses on networks that emerge in lectures in which renowned artists from around the world share with general audiences their views on work processes, motivations to create, and artistic self-understandings. These are known as Poetikvorlesungen in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but do not have a distinct label outside of the German-speaking literary scene. The article departs from the observation that making connections and forming artistic associations are key components of these lectures as this feature can be found frequently. It first outlines genre characteristics of lectures on the arts with particular focus on networks that such lectures participate in. Emblematic examples are the Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann (given in 2014) and the Tanner Lectures by the Canadian writer and critic Hugh Kenner (given in 1999). Kehlmann depicts his artistic influences, sources of inspiration, and references to existing contexts by pretending to summon spirits, a rhetorical gesture akin to a necromancy. Kenner calls networks that evolve from making such connections »elsewhere communities«. The essay explores what a network-oriented analysis of this genre could look like by turning to the Norton Lectures by the German filmmaker Wim Wenders (given in 2018). These serve to test two different analytical approaches. The article relies both on network visualization and on tracing of networks according to Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). The article thus offers both a graphic representation of references from Wenders’ lectures and a textual tracing of associations according to the methodology outlined by Latour. An important finding is that network analysis, no matter its method, offers exciting opportunities in revealing the significance of relations and associations. Network analysis challenges literary scholars to revisit and rethink intertextuality, intermediality, or intersubjectivity and invites them to unearth a new diversity of actors. The article argues that graphic visualizations done with computational methods can be instrumental in the immediacy with which they communicate findings, especially when it comes to findings from a large corpus. The article then moves on to explore the nuances and theoretical implications that ANT offers in addition to the network visualization. A major appeal of ANT is, so the argument, that it offers insight into processes that are central to literary criticism: translation, mediation, and the evolving dynamics that stem from them. Since lectures on poetics are located at the intersection of artistic creation, authorial self-presentation, and criticism, they offer a particularly good window into the interactions of poiesis and aesthesis , of creative work and its dependency on the reception of other artworks. The argument concludes by suggesting that network analysis invites theorists to reconceptualize reader-response theory toward what scholars call comparative media studies. Finally, the article briefly considers lectures on the arts not as objects of criticism, but as a blueprint for scholarship that looks to re-envision literary criticism and its engagement of the reading public.

If, as George E.P. Box puts it, »all models are wrong, but some are useful« (Box in Ahnert et al. 2020, 79), what then, would be the merit and concrete gains of such an ambivalent model in the field of literature? This article stems from a hunch: that the use of the network metaphor to describe children’s literature (in the broad sense as referring to any cultural product developed for children) is not insignificant. Starting from that postulate, the goal of this article is to look beyond the metaphor and explore how the rhizomatic network could serve as a concrete model, supplementing the current toolbox used to study children’s literature. Indeed, many characteristics of the rhizomatic network – namely its unlimited, simplified, non-hierarchical, random-access, and visual nature – lend themselves to a broader and more inclusive conceptualization of children’s literature. Translator study scholar Rebecca Walkowitz makes a strong case for this approach, stating that »[i]n the future, we will need to read comparatively, by which I mean reading across editions and formats and also recognizing that any one edition and format contributes to the work rather than exhausts it« (Walkowitz 2015, unpag.). Concretely, I argue for the use of the rhizomatic network as a visual model of multimodal children’s literature at three levels: 1) a given storyworld as a network of interconnected versions; 2) the context of any given version of the storyworld as a network; and 3) the text (or multimodal ensemble) of any given version of the storyworld as a network of meaning-making resources (modes). I illustrate the network model at these three levels through two case studies: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (Rosen/Oxenbury 1989) and the Gruffalo (Donaldson/Scheffler 1999). In Cathlena Martin’s words, children’s texts »refuse« to stay confined (Martin 2009, 87), whether it be to one medium, or to one language. As a result, any storyworld of children’s literature can be conceptualized as a network of interconnected works, each of which expands it in a different direction depending on its features. This approach thus emphasizes the multidirectionality of influences between works and the »new set of relations« whereby »something unique is produced« (Cartmell/Whelehan 2010, 22). These new sets of relations involve not only the features of the work, but also its context, which can too be contextualized as a network of interconnected agents and organizations involved in the production and reception of the work. At the level of the multimodal ensemble, the model aims to map out the combinations of modes within any product of children’s literature. Since multimodality is inherently hierarchical, as it consists of modal categories, modes, and sub-modes, I propose a hybrid model (after Ban-Yam 2002) that combines the tree (hierarchy) structure and the rhizome structure (lateral connections). While it is important to keep in mind that the audience experiences meaning as a whole, as a synergy of modes and sub-modes (Sipe 2012), breaking down this synergy into its constituents is a useful way to better understand how children’s literature makes meaning, and how meaning is reshaped through medial and/or linguistic transformations. While the rhizome model undoubtedly has numerous benefits, it also comes with limitations. To begin, the concrete representations of the rhizome inherently carry a positioning bias, which stems from the researcher’s background and focus. Furthermore, these visuals tend to be text-centered. Although presenting information as a network adds a visual dimension, the content of the nodes (text) could be replaced by images or sounds when possible, in order to accentuate the multimodal and intermedial dimensions of network representations. However, using text is still the easiest, fastest, and most effective way to create a network representation that fits the space and format of an academic article. Another limitation is that the network arguably does not help dissipate the theoretical fuzziness surrounding the nature of the actual transformations undergone by children’s literature products (e. g., translation, transduction, localization, adaptation, parody, abridgment, rewriting, transcreation). Instead of proposing yet another set of terms, I contextualize the networks of versions within the broader context of »intertextual dialogism« (Stam 2000) and use Klaus Kaindl’s typology of translation (used by Kaindl to encompass adaptation) to focus on what changes between versions rather than what they are. The typology classifies translations according to two parameters: modes and culture. To this, I propose adding a third dimension, namely medium, to account for the specific affordances of the new product and their influence on the multimodal ensemble. This typology, together with the broader production and reception context, sheds light on the new product’s specificities and relations to other products. This article does not aim to avoid these limitations, but rather chooses to embrace them as stimulating signposts that the discussion surrounding the merit of the rhizomatic network model in (children’s) literature has only just begun.

In my contribution, I argue that a fruitful integration of computational network analytic methods into literary studies depends on how the ›interaction‹ of two characters in an abstract character network is formalized. I support this hypothesis by using the examples of co-presence, co-reference, and knowledge networks, which I analyze in Heinrich Kleist’s tragedy Die Familie Schroffenstein (1803). I assume that the co-presence of characters can provide the basis for more specific formalizations of interaction. But due to its basal specification of interaction, co-presence networks can only be integrated into rather limited questions of literary studies. I illustrate this circumstance by examining Franco Moretti’s approach in his essay Network Theory, Plot Analysis (2011): How does he connect his network analyses to concepts of literary studies? How does he reflect his methods? Which observational stance does he adopt? How appropriate is his approach to the object of study? And how does he tie his results back to literary theory? Moretti’s explorations show that his network analyses seem to be incompatible with established conceptions of characters – at least partially. Therefore, he demands a new conceptualization of dramatic characters in literary studies. To me, however, it seems to be more productive to put into perspective or enhance – under the auspices of network analysis – existing quantitative aspects of established character presentation (configuration, constellation). I therefore propose two additional formalizations of character interaction to create dramatic networks: co-references and knowledge transfers. Regular co-presence networks, which have widely been tested and discussed among (computational) literary scholars, will serve as a ground of comparison. I illustrate the merits and limitations of co-presence networks on both a single text analysis of Die Familie Schroffenstein and a larger corpus analysis of 587 German-language plays. Cursorily, I present the operationalization of co-references and knowledge transfers. The linguistic concept of co-reference means that two or more linguistic expressions refer to the same entities. A knowledge transfer, in my understanding, is a transmission of new information from at least one literary character to at least one other character. Manual annotations of co-reference chains and knowledge transfers serve as basis for the subsequent network creation. I compare these different manifestations of character interaction in terms of the resulting network visualizations as well as of various mathematical network metrics. The goal is to elicit how useful these two criteria are regarding drama analysis, e. g., the analysis of character properties, and to what extent they can complement, differentiate, or even replace the established co-presence networks. Co-presence, co-reference and knowledge networks reveal different aspects of the characters under consideration, picture different dramatic structures, and place different groups of characters at the center of the networks. Therefore, the three abstract textual representations seem to complement each other. In my article, I show that the extent to which the various criteria can be integrated into research questions of literary studies ought to be discussed on (at least) two levels. Firstly, it is necessary to ask how interesting, relevant, and informative a specific criterion is for one’s own research and whether it can relate to the terminology of literary studies. Secondly, it is important to consider how precise the respective criteria can be annotated manually and, subsequently, if and how reliable they can be annotated automatically.

In the present essay, I argue that lyric ecopoetry is particularly suited to alter our worldview in favor of a more ecologically-aware stance. In itself this position has been announced by numerous ecocritics, with some doubts as to its adequacy expressed by Timothy Clark in his Ecocriticism on the Edge . Partly in response to his critique, it is here argued that poems do offer a viable way of altering human modes of thinking not by what or how they evoke but by the way in which they register in the reader’s consciousness. To this effect, I depart from the theories of the lyric advanced in the last two decades by the likes of Jonathan Culler, Derek Attridge and the poet Don Patterson, all of whom argue that lyric poetry differs from any other form of linguistic expression in being itself the event it evokes rather than a representation of an event. This is because by dint of being performed by readers, lyric poems compel one to embrace the voices that comprise them as one’s own, as a result helping one interiorize an experience of ultimate otherness. It is this modus of poetry’s existence that makes it a particularly apt literary form for impelling one to appreciate the complexity of and one’s imbrication in the networks of planetary ecosystems. In this way, as I claim further on, poetry may be conceived of as a vehicle for instilling a form of thinking that Bruno Latour has recently theorized as Terrestrial. For him, the Terrestrial is characterized by what he calls the system of engendering, a way of dwelling in the interrelated systems of the Earth that is reciprocally beneficial for human and non-humans. After an overview of Latour’s idea, which is put forward as a potential political platform, and its relation to the extant theories of environmental humanities that emphasize poetry’s role in conjuring the awareness of the intricacy of natural processes, I suggest that lyric poetry offers not only a means of linguistic expression of the interdependence of all elements in any given ecosystem but also constitutes a language capable of swaying human modes of thinking in favor of the Terrestrial.