Volume 7, Issue 1-2

The genre of national literary history was an invention of Friedrich Schlegel, who in his History of the Old and the New Literature , a series of lectures delivered in 1812 at the University of Vienna, presented the ethnolinguistic and historical singularity of German literature in the historical frame of other and older national literatures. It was born from a bitter political frustration ensuing from the recent collapse of the German Empire in 1806 and aimed to serve the consolidation of the shaken German national self. Offering resistance to Europe-wide cultural expansion of French culture throughout the eighteenth century and searching for international allies to strengthen that resistance, German »dominated nationalism« (Balibar) displayed a strong interlocking inclination. In the course of the international expansion and institutionalization of French »literary cosmopolitanism«, the hegemonic class universalism of the latter’s inaugurators was dismantled, which the leading German intellectuals attempted to counter precisely by introducing national literary history as a new basis for international solidarity. That is to say, even though it was national, it reclaimed cosmopolitanism in the form of a peaceful coexistence of autonomous nations, as opposed to the French republican universalism that sells national values at the same time as it denies its national determination. It affirmed the right to self-determination of all nations put under similar assimilatory pressure. Hence contrary to Casanova’s strong opposition of the bright-minded French cosmopolitan and the narrow-minded German national literature, her putative opposites are inextricably interrelated and captured in a mutually conditioned relationship. Yet even if it offers a resource for effective collective action and mutual support among the less powerful, the advocacy of ethnic solidarity at the same time forges an instrument of the powerful exclusion or at least marginalization of others. While German national literary history, establishing a new ethnolinguistic basis, assimilates co-nationals diffused over foreign countries, it dissimilates non-national fellow-citizens at home. This equivocation forms the gist of its trauma narrative pattern (Alexander): Even if on the one hand it triggers significant repairs in the civil fabric, on the other hand it simultaneously instigates new rounds of social suffering. In becoming a multidirectionally connectable platform for collectivities established by traumatic experience that begin to support and enforce each other across social, cultural, and historical boundaries, the pattern of national literary history gradually develops huge symbolic power of its own. Invented by the »engineers« of social memory for the primary sake of reconciliation and consolidation its self-rescuing maneuver sets in motion horrific group conflicts. As a matter of fact, German Romanticists promoted German language as the platform of unification and consolidation of the homeless, »humiliated and insulted« individuals and nations at the beginning of the nineteenth century, trusting that it would become universal currency for all foreign spiritual wares and that Germans would concomitantly take over the command of the world partition of symbolic values. For a nation that pretends to set global terms for the huge diversity of other nations, limitless cosmopolitan adaptability to the changing international context is the most cherished property. The pattern of national literary history thus paves the way for the gradual transformation of the German Volksgeist from the subservient local enabler into a self-propelling global agency in the relentless search for genuine distinction and comparative advantage in the international cultural space. To make Germany into the key agency of human history, German Romanticist intellectuals engaged in the huge mission of turning other nations into its enablers. The latter were, in the narrative pattern of national literary history, presented only as the continuous backdrop of the march of German emancipation into the future. German nationally oriented cosmopolitanism thus imperceptibly acquired the same profile that characterized its fierce opponent. Having accumulated national »symbolic capital« in an enormous acceleration of the opponent’s speed as demonstrated throughout the 18 th century, it raised an analogous claim for imperial domination. Inventing affinity between the German past and present as well as co-nationals at home and abroad, national literary history established an imaginary »community of fate« ( Schicksalsgemeinschaft) urging all Germans to gain close acquaintance with its legacy. But some of them were unable to fulfill this task. This is how new schisms were introduced into a story written with a unifying intention, such as the division between the true and the false national spiritual tradition. The false tradition is, in Friedrich Schlegel’s interpretation, significantly represented by literary works unable to qualify for the leading principle of Germanness because they are devoid of the sacred national memory that is »the most excellent business of literature«. In lieu of being united around the allegedly merely re constructed genuine national spirit, the Germany forcefully constructed through literature was finally divided into proper and improper Germans. Yet the fierce resistance of German national literary history to the universalist model of the French Republic of Letters was not an exclusively German enterprise, nor a completely pioneering one, as it was pre-designed by the French dissident Rousseau a good half-century earlier. As Rousseau’s rebellion against the shortcomings of French »national cosmopolitanism« takes place within the French culture and not outside it, I take it as a welcome reminder that national cultures are never homogeneous and that an all-too-easy opposition between French and German concepts of the age has to be reintroduced into each of these alleged opposites. A continuous clash between the processes of Vergesellschaftung (the uniting diversification of society) and Vergemeinschaftung (the disuniting homogenization of its particular groups and communities), characteristic of all modern nations, inhered to both of them enabling alliances with remote and unknown foreigners along various axes. Contrary to its reclaimed consistency, French cosmopolitanism was torn apart by internal national antagonisms, not only between Rousseau and Voltaire but also between the two rebels Rousseau and Mme de Staël, as I try to demonstrate in some detail. Whatever its basis turns out to be – (inter)national, (inter)cultural or (inter)confessional – no cosmopolitan or national alliance is smooth, uncontroversial and permanent. Despite their systematically produced homogeneous appearance, all trauma narratives remain equivocal and conflict-ridden composures.

This article explores the various aims of literary historiography. Although this is an issue of crucial importance to dealing with literary history, it has not yet received the attention it deserves. Scholars have rarely devoted more than incidental thought to this matter. Furthermore, there is disagreement as to what may count as a legitimate and worthwhile aim of literary historiography. In this article, we try to provide a comprehensive overview and systematic account of these aims. Neutrally put and in accordance with the colloquial use of the word, we consider an ›aim‹ to be what one is intending or trying to achieve by doing something. One could speak of the ›task‹, the ›purpose‹, or the ›function‹ of literary historiography as well – the respective differences in meaning are of no importance here. It is our main contention that one can reasonably distinguish between two broadly construed ›conceptions‹ of literary historiography, each of them comprising at least four aims. We take a ›conception‹ to be a set of general theoretical assumptions and methodological rules pertaining to a group of approaches to literary historiography. Thus understood, a conception also includes a set of global strategies that forms the general framework for particular aims. By drawing on relevant research literature since the 1970s, predominantly in German, we hope to provide evidence for our claim that the aims we have identified capture the prevalent scholarly practice adequately. It can be shown that these aims are in accordance with what scholars explicitly or implicitly take to be the intention of their research. The first conception of literary historiography we describe is the ›historicizing conception‹ (in German: historisierende Konzeption ) which more or less exclusively focuses on literature in its historical context of production, distribution, and reception. Generally speaking, it aims at scientific knowledge of literary history. Therefore, it has to meet criteria such as objectivity and verifiability. It primarily addresses other scholars through genres like articles in scientific journals, doctoral theses and habilitation treatises, encyclopaedias, or handbooks. This conception implies the following four aims: (i) establishing true (or probable) propositions about literary texts in their historical contexts, i. e. the aim of ›reconstruction‹ ( Rekonstruktion ) (ii) providing the historical background information required for analysing and interpreting literary texts, i. e. the aim of ›informing‹ ( Information ) (iii) elucidating the historical conditions that have shaped today’s scholarly practice, i. e. the aim of ›reflection‹ ( Reflexion ) (iv) collecting the substantiated state of knowledge in literary history and conveying it to other scholars and in particular students, i. e. the aim of ›codification‹ ( Kodifikation ) The second conception of literary historiography we discuss directs the scholar’s attention to those aspects of literary history that are deemed to be relevant in the light of present-day concerns ( aktualisierende Konzeption ). In particular, literary texts are studied with respect to the potential functions they might fulfil for contemporary audiences. Accordingly, literary texts are judged by criteria like, for instance, their cognitive value, their subversive potentials, or their impact on cultural memory. Among the intended audience are not only other scholars, but also non-professional readers. Therefore, non-fiction genres are typical of this conception. This conception, too, comprises four aims: (i) imparting knowledge of literary history to readers who are not professionals in this field, i. e. the aim of ›popularisation‹ ( Popularisierung ) (ii) exploring the significance of literary texts of the past and applying them to problems of the present, i. e. the aim of ›application‹ ( Applikation ) (iii) criticising contemporary literary practice with reference to its historical development, or exploring the subversive potentials of literary texts, i. e. the aim of ›critique‹ ( Kritik ) (iv) forming and preserving literary tradition and handing it down, for example as a contribution to cultural identity, i. e. the aim of ›commemoration‹ ( Erinnerung ) The article is structured as follows: At the beginning, we will sketch our leading question and our procedure, briefly comment on the current state of research and clarify the central concepts (cf. 1.). The main part of the article will be devoted to delineating the two conceptions and the corresponding aims (cf. 2. and 3.). In a concluding section (cf. 4.), we will summarise the systematic results of our considerations. We will try to show that the distinctions and explanations we have introduced are correct. We will argue that the eight aims of literary historiography can be informatively characterised and that they can be distinguished from each other in a sufficiently clear way. Moreover, it can be demonstrated how these aims relate to one another. In view of these results, we will conclude by suggesting that the theory and practice of literary historiography prima facie allow for a circumspect pluralism of aims: There is not just one single legitimate and worthwhile aim of literary historiography, but several, some of which can even be combined. Still, what is required in all these cases, of course, is that the respective aims are integrated into a well-founded theory of literary historiography. At any rate, it is not the objective of our investigation to come to a decision with regard to the question whether some aims are acceptable while others are not. We do not evaluate, but try to describe the possible aims of literary historiography in a satisfactory and clearly laid out manner.

In this article I assume that the writing of literary historiographies is inextricably bound up with questions of comparison. On a macroscopic level, literary historians circa 1800 began to consider texts as expressive of a national imaginary and the modern nation-state. At the same time, the alternative notion of a world literature emerged. Under the current research agendas of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and transnationalism, which dominate North American literary studies and comparative literary studies in the U.S., the notions of the nation and the world are transposed to various understandings of the planetary and to the representation of differential identity scripts, which inform contemporary attempts of rewriting literary histories. In this essay I discuss two complementary interventions by Franco Moretti and Gayatri Spivak who represent two divergent positions but who both understand the task of writing literary histories as one of the complete assessment of the literatures of the world. These macroscopic literary historiographies are problematic insofar as they have to foreclose an understanding of literary texts as singular events. In order to conceptualize a less taxonomic frame of comparison, which is centered on close readings from within and against discursive constraints and categories, I suggest a return to Theodor Adorno’s concept of the constellation. While he initially understood it as a mode of interpretive philosophy, it also offers a method of reading for intermedial literary constellations – a microscopic foil to the literary historiographies of planetary totality. In a first step, the essay offers a discussion of the approaches by Franco Moretti and Gayatri Spivak. While both approaches mark two divergent ends of the New Left, they share the assumption that a comparative literary historiography under the contemporary telos of the planetary should strive for a complete assessment of the literatures of the world. In his Stanford Literary Lab and in various publications, Moretti suggests the practice of distant reading. From within an analysis of world systems, he conceptualizes this practice as a transfer of quantitative methods from the natural and social sciences to literary studies. The historiographies Moretti thus produces focus on indicators such as genres and tropes. His deliberate mobilization of the natural and social sciences comes at the calculated cost of surrendering a former core competency of literary studies, close reading, that Moretti, in a puzzling assessment, still takes to be the common, institutionalized practice in U.S. humanities. I contend that in striving for a complete taxonomy and in catering to the tropes and models of representation of the presumably »hard« sciences, Moretti follows a principle of the accumulation of data. In doing so, he ultimately naturalizes the parameters he uses to organize literary histories. By contrast, Spivak, who partly argues against Moretti in Death of a Discipline , wants to renovate the discipline of comparative literature by linking the practice of close reading in the original language with a postcolonial redirecting of Area Studies. I contend that, at closer inspection, her account not only perpetuates an already institutionalized and intentional politics of corrective or resistant rewriting, which endows the position of the postcolonial critic and writer with a privileged position of subversion based upon strategically reclaimed identity scripts; structurally, it also functions analogous to Moretti. Both follow a principle of accumulation and want to chart the planetary in its totality: Moretti by assuming stable generic categories and tropological structures, Spivak by naturalizing the link between the mastery of original languages and the acquisition of an irreducible totality of differential identity scripts. In a second step, my essay suggests an alternative way of writing literary historiographies, which retrieves another end of the New Left: Theodor Adorno’s concept of the constellation, which he understood as a mode of interpretive philosophy, and which I re-conceptualize as a reading for intermedial constellations. Writing against scientific positivism, Adorno rejects identification, representativeness, and totality, and instead privileges nonidentity, representability, and the constellation. His self-reflective approach focuses on the conditions of the modes of inquiry itself, while upholding the notion of artworks as singular events, which should be assessed from within and against institutionalized narratives and discursive constraints. Such an interpretive philosophy undermines the correspondence between question and answer, between a receptive expectation and its fulfillment. Transposed onto the reading of literary texts, it remains open for the possibility that literary fictions, while embedded in social scripts, may gesture toward positions of singularity and individual authorship, which cut across these scripts and the conventions of reception they establish. Constructing the concept of an intermedial constellation, I read the opening scene of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy as the negotiation of a Künstlerroman , a contemporary novel of the arts, from within and against the confines of the postcolonial Bildungsroman . Kincaid’s novel reconciles artistic modernism by entering an intermedial, ekphrastic constellation, which foregrounds the conditions of representability (The Brooklyn Bridge as dramatized in the works of Hart Crane, Frank Stella, and Walker Evans) rather than that which is represented. In doing so, Lucy demands the construction of a contemporary literary constellation, which arranges literary texts according to their investment in artistic forms instead of their presumed representative speaker position. Its formal investment thus demands the re/writing of at least two literary historiographies at once: a reconciliatory tracing of the legacy of artistic modernism that, at the same time, effectuates a critique of a contemporary literary historiography according to the tenets of U.S. literary postcolonialism and multiculturalism.

Since the publication of the first of his three-volume Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987, within Classics and the disciplines concerned with the history of the ancient Near East, Martin Gardiner Bernal (1937–2013) has been an object of much ridicule and a little curiosity. A sociology of knowledge of Classics, volume 1, subtitled The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 , claimed that the fount of Western civilization, ancient Greece, in its remote past was conquered and civilized by its »superior« neighbours from Egypt and Phoenicia. This view of history, which Bernal labels the »Ancient Model« and which he claims is referred to in the writings of Classical and Hellenistic Greeks, was the accepted view on Greek cultural origins, until it was overthrown in the nineteenth century by an »Aryan Model«. Bernal attributes the overthrow of the Ancient Model – the victorious Aryan Model denied Egypto-Phoenician settlements in Bronze Age Greece and postulated an Indo-European speaking Hellenes’ conquest of mainland Greece around 2300 BCE – not to contemporary scholarly developments within Classics, but to the cultural milieu of the age, which, in addition to being charged with notions of Romanticism, racism, and Progress, was beset, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, by fear of revolution. The controversial nature of the book’s claims and its author’s status as an outsider to Classics notwithstanding, volume 1 went onto win the Socialist Review Prize (1987) and an American Book Award (1990); was the subject of a Presidential Panel in the annual meeting of the American Philological Association (in 1989); and was translated into Arabic, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Four years later Bernal came out with a second volume – this time, to prove the Near Eastern provenance of Western civilization. This new history – drawn up by means of »competitive plausibilities«, rather than proofs – had at its heart a contradiction: whereas the book’s subtitle promised archaeological and documentary evidence, many of its major claims were corroborated through the analyses of myths, legends, and rituals, or through the employment of etymology. The book demanded a radical revision of the existent, accepted chronologies for the second millennium BCE Egypt and Aegean – the problem, though, was that the arguments and evidence offered for such a revision, and the methodology employed failed to persuade the specialists. All the same, the book won an A. N. C. Kwanzaa Award (1991), was the Mainichi Shimbun Book of the Year (2004), and was translated into French, Italian, and Japanese. The hostile reception and outright rejection of his account of history saw Bernal, in between volumes 2 and 3 (2006), systematically responding to his critics and, in the process, coming up with the massive Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics (2001). Perhaps, by now, Bernal’s critics had realized the futility of their enterprise and given up: neither the response, nor the final instalment of Black Athena – aimed to furnish linguistic evidence for the claim that close to forty percent of the Greek vocabulary with no known Indo-European cognates has its roots, in fact, in Afroasiatic languages – elicited much of a response. The apathy notwithstanding, the period witnessed the Asiatic Society of Kolkata, in 2005, honouring Bernal with the Indira Gandhi Memorial Gold Medal, and him delivering a lecture – published, later, in the Society’s journal – titled »India in the Making of Europe«. After China, Greece, and the Near East, it was now India’s turn to be taken under Bernal’s wing. Within a history of the reception of Black Athena and the controversies courted by it – indicated above – the article juxtaposes the books’ main contentions with their major criticisms – in the process, demonstrating the import of Greece to the story of civilization. Further inquiry into the relation between Greece and civilization reveals that Greece as the fount of civilization is a retrojection from the inside that is civilization – thereby, undermining the view that civilization is by and because of Greece. But a theoretical, meta-historical account that discloses origin as a discursive imposition, and history as operating and operable within a site-of-the-moment – and not within space and time, thereby calling into question the relation between history and truth, and the notion of history as truth – can it (or better, should it), based on its credence within its domain, strive to influence the internal operations of its object of inquiry? The article, through an example – where radiology and the sociology of knowledge of radiology are juxtaposed – answers in the negative, and concludes that such an attempt is a case of mistakenly extending the rules of one domain into another. Bernal’s attempt to outflank Classics – a discipline informed by the rules of history – by means of his sociology of knowledge, and the Classicists’ attempt to fend off his assault were instances of this misapplication. The multiple forms of knowledge issuing from a plethora of object-framing practices have as their consequence and possibility incommensurability and the attendant bedlam; even so, given that disciplines emerge from discursive compulsions, and that they are embedded within an unfolding, groundless event – an event that transforms, engenders, and draws from disciplines and practices – cross-disciplinary influencing remains a distinct possibility. The proof of which, the article submits, is that Classicists themselves were – after the advent of social science history and the rise of postmodernism – moving away from an isolationist paradigm toward one that emphasizes contact and cross-fertilization by the time Black Athena appeared on the scene.

It is generally acknowledged that verbal auditory imagery, the reader’s sense of hearing the words on a page, matters in the silent reading of poetry. Verbal auditory imagery (VAI) in the silent reading of narrative prose, on the other hand, is mostly neglected by literary and other theorists. This is a first attempt to provide a systematic theoretical account of the felt qualities and underlying cognitive mechanics of VAI, based on convergent evidence from the experimental cognitive sciences, psycholinguistic theory, and introspection. More generally, the aim is to isolate a new set of embodied experiences which, along with more widely researched phenomena such as sensorimotor enactment or emotion, contribute to our understanding of literary narrative. The central argument is that distinctions within the domain of embodied VAI also apply to higher-order meaning-making, i. e., that discrete types of VAI are associated with discrete tendencies in spontaneous literary interpretation. Spontaneous literary interpretation stands for any process of meaning-making, however inarticulate, that reaches the reader’s consciousness in an uninterrupted course of reading. Although the necessity of phonological access for the silent processing of print is disputed, the experimental contexts in which VAI has proven to depend on lower-order embodied processes, and/or to have a pronounced effect on silent reading, are countless. But what is it like, in terms of embodiment, to consciously experience VAI? The basic felt quality of all VAI is that the linguistic medium of a written narrative enters the reader’s awareness qua spoken discourse. This description of VAI, however apt, is not very elaborate. But as we begin to study narrative VAI experiences in greater detail, they soon fall into two distinct types, or more precisely, position themselves between two ends of a continuum. The two ends will be referred to as outer and inner reverberations. Outer reverberations put the reader in the position of a vicarious listener, feeding on activity in the mind’s ear only. Meanwhile, inner reverberations reach the mind’s ear via subvocal rehearsal, i. e., covert articulatory activity in the reader’s mouth and throat. While outer reverberations represent text as situated speech and may accommodate perceptual detail of the imaginary voice, inner reverberations rather tend to represent text as raw language, where the only auditory qualities to be explored are those of first-person (subvocal) speech production. Although outer reverberations can feature some kinesthetic qualities such as a sense of resonance in the reader’s torso, kinesthetic experience is much more pronounced in inner reverberations, and felt motor activity in the articulatory apparatus is a distinctive trait of inner reverberations alone. Outer reverberations may effectively be prompted by textual cues such as oral style, speaker familiarity, and situational embedding. By contrast, inner reverberations may be more likely to occur with discourse particularly lacking in such cues. However, the cuing process is subject to many variables pertaining to the text, the individual reader, and the specific reading session. More generally, then, inner reverberations can be said to result from the language of an utterance appearing markedly non-situated. As a consequence, inner reverberations entail a sense of medium opacity, while outer reverberations may rather be associated with a relative sense of medium transparency. On the level of higher-order meaning-making, outer and inner reverberations link with the presence or absence of spontaneous interpretation, respectively. This is due to a trade-off between one’s degree of openness to interpretation on the one hand and one’s bodily appropriation of the discourse on the other. The more one is engaged in what X could mean, the less one can possibly be engaged in the saying of X, and vice versa. In analogy to ordinary overt speech: When the voice is mine, the thought is mine as well. It is only when the voice is not mine that one is left to wonder what the underlying thought and meaning is. Other speakers are always ambiguous to some extent, requiring some interpretation. Meanwhile, as the firsthand speaker, one is unambiguous to oneself. Although one may be surprised at the specific course one’s speech has taken, one does not reflect, on equal terms with one’s interlocutors, on the many coexistent meanings of one’s utterance. Consequently, meaning may be experienced as more dynamic and less firmly tied to wording in outer compared to inner reverberations. The particular words experienced in an outer reverberation are quicker in receding outside awareness, possibly due to the load of concurrent meaning-making. Because of the experiential intensity of such meaning-making relative to the baseline, »literal« meaning-making associated with inner reverberations, the words chosen may seem comparably arbitrary. In inner reverberations, on the other hand, this impression of comparable arbitrariness is less likely. Meaning is felt to be constricted, as it were, to wording proper. The observations made in this essay are consistent with empirical findings in various fields of psychological inquiry, ranging from reader response and memory studies to experiments investigating willed VAI. For instance, it has been reported that imagined verbal stimuli are more ambiguous when the imaginary voice belongs to an extraneous speaker (in analogy to the proposed notion of outer reverberations), compared to when imagined as voiced by oneself (in analogy to the proposed notion of inner reverberations). In other words, there is experimental evidence that language heard in the mind’s ear can be more firmly or more loosely tied to meaning, depending on the imaginer’s level of self-implication in its production.

Are screenplays – or at least some screenplays – works of literature? Until relatively recently, very few theorists had addressed this question. Thanks to recent work by scholars such as Ian W. Macdonald, Steven Maras, and Steven Price, theorizing the nature of the screenplay is back on the agenda after years of neglect (albeit with a few important exceptions) by film studies and literary studies (Macdonald 2004; Maras 2009; Price 2010). What has emerged from this work, however, is a general acceptance that the screenplay is ontologically peculiar and, as a result, a divergence of opinion about whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be literature. Specifically, recent discussion about the nature of the screenplay has tended to emphasize its putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film, its supposed inherent incompleteness, or both (Carroll 2008, 68–69; Maras 2009, 48; Price 2010, 38–42). Moreover, these sorts of claims about the screenplay’s ontology – its essential nature – are often hitched to broader arguments. According to one such argument, a screenplay’s supposed ontological tie to the production of a film is said to vitiate the possibility of it being a work of literature in its own right (Carroll 2008, 68–69; Maras 2009, 48). According to another, the screenplay’s tenuous literary status is putatively explained by the idea that it is perpetually unfinished, akin to a Barthesian »writerly text« (Price 2010, 41). Contemporary theorists interested in the screenplay as a potential literary form thus face three interrelated questions – one about the screenplay’s ontology, one about its literary status, and one about the methodology of theorizing the screenplay (both with specific regard to ontology and literary status, but also more broadly): (1) Are we to proceed in our theorizing under the assumption that the screenplay is, as the current theoretical trend suggests, ontologically mysterious – something that essentially lacks autonomy from the film (despite appearing to be textually instantiated) or is essentially incomplete? (2) Are we to proceed in our theorizing under the assumption that the screenplay’s literary status is somehow problematized by its ontological nature – by the kind of thing it is essentially? (3) Is our theorizing about the screenplay – specifically in terms of (1) and (2) but also more broadly – to be constrained by our actual creative and appreciative practices? Most proponents of the recent theoretical trend I describe would, I think, answer »Yes« to all three questions. However, I want to argue that answering »Yes« to (3) obligates us to answer »No« to (1) and (2). This essay examines a kind of fan-fiction work – »scriptfic« – as a case study for analysing and evaluating current theories of the screenplay. In the first part of the essay, I briefly describe the practice of writing »scriptfic« and the sorts of screenplays produced by that practice. In the second part of the essay, I argue that a particular sort of »scriptfic«, the virtual series screenplay, not only shows that extant accounts of the screenplay as essentially linked to a screen work or as essentially unfinished fail, but furthermore that our theorizing must be constrained by our actual creative and appreciative practices. »Scriptfics« may take the form of feature length screenplays, one-off teleplays, or an entire »series« constituted by teleplays. The latter, which are known as »virtual series«, will be my focus here for challenging some of the prevailing ideas about the nature of the screenplay and its literary status. Roughly, a virtual series is a web-based, fan-authored television series that »airs« in the form of uploaded texts that usually either present an entirely original narrative (original virtual series), continue the storyline of an actual television series that has ended (virtual continuations), or use certain elements of an actual series as jumping-off points to tell an original story (virtual spin-offs). My central argument is that if the goal of theorizing the screenplay is to actually explain the evidence supplied by our practices, then theories that involve ontological claims about the screenplay’s putative lack of ontological autonomy from the film and/or inherent incompleteness must be abandoned. I shall argue that virtual series traffic in screenplays that are ontologically autonomous works that have been finished by their authors in just the ways these theories claim they are not. If this is right, it follows that such accounts of the screenplay’s ontology do not in fact offer reasons or explanations for denying that screenplays can be literature. This is because ontological claims are claims about the essential features of a given kind – that is, the features that the kind has of necessity . Virtual series screenplays offer strong evidence, I submit, that practitioners determine the boundaries of our screenplay concept, that our screenplay concept has changed over time, that we are now in an historical moment when some screenplays are complete, autonomous works, and that we are also now in an historical moment when some people write screenplays with the intention of creating literature while certain communities of readers appreciate them as such.

This paper explores certain aspects of the interconnectedness of perceptual and non-perceptual features with respect to how a work’s authorship affects the concept of authenticity. In order to do so, I progressively restrict the focus of the discussion from theorisations about the ontology of the artwork to the field of literature, then to the genre of lyrical poetry, and finally to a case study which concerns the critical reception of Oscar Wilde’s collection Poems . I begin by reviewing the distinction between the concepts of »perceptual« and »non-perceptual« properties of the artwork with reference to the theories of Dutton and Wimsatt, arguing that the concept of »style« (which, in turn, consists of both properly stylistic and axiological dimensions) functions as a connection of the two fields, so that normally (in spite of extreme cases such as Van Meegeren’s forgeries) one does expect to see perceivable signs of that which authenticates the artwork (its authorship) within the perceptual properties of the work itself, so that a neat division between the two is not feasible. Then I consider Dutton’s distinction between »nominal« and »expressive« authenticity and argue that the latter entails a concept of »appropriateness« that will be looked for in the work itself. When considering literature in general, I draw a distinction between the concepts of »text« and »work«, arguing that where the former is an object definable by its formal features (in the case of literature »perceptual« does not equate »sensory«) the latter entails a notion of »agency« on the author’s part; this agency may or may not coincide with the author’s intention, and may also comprise theories which attempt to explain the production of artworks in terms of unconscious revelation, symbolic self-placement etc. In contrast to theorisations such as Currie’s, I argue that the opposition between work and text should not be framed in terms of reciprocal extension, but rather as pertaining to the divide between considering the object of interpretation as an »object« (the text) or as an »action« (the work). When considering the genre of lyrical poetry, I show how notions related to the concept of authenticity have a specifically rhetorical dimension, that is, one which can be seen in the textual manifestation of the artwork itself. I take into consideration the notion of »utterance«, and review Beardsley’s and Ohmann’s uses of speech-act theory, in particular their argument that one must always postulate the presence of a fictional utterer even when none is explicitly present in the work and that this necessarily severs the author from any views, notions, feelings contained in the artwork; I argue that, the defensibility of these theorisations aside, the specificity of lyrical poetry in this respect is precisely that its utterances have no (explicit) fictional utterer and that, since to consider the work as action entails the postulation of a subject who utters the work’s utterances, lyrical poetry is, similarly to essays and unlike dramatic poetry, likely to be read as an authorial utterance. Wilde’s Poems and its reviews constitute a case in the expectations connected to lyrical poetry, and in how such expectations may frame a work’s reception. I show that for many critics at the time, Poems was unsatisfactory both from the point of view of nominal authenticity and from that of expressive authenticity. As for the former, the critics pointed out the derivativeness of Wilde’s poems, stopping short of accusing them of plagiarism; I argue that »derivativeness« pertains to nominal authenticity just as much as plagiarism, but differs from it in that it considers the artwork in terms not purely textual. As for the latter, I show that Wilde’s Poems , by propounding irreconcilably contradictory views of the political situations it deals with, was felt by reviewers to be »insincere« – therefore expressively »inauthentic«; this shows how to consider a work as an action on the part of the author tends to entail the (normative) expectation that the work have something to say and that it be coherent in saying it. The case of the collection and its reviews ultimately shows how ostensibly »non-perceptual« elements of an artwork connected to authorship (on which the concept of authenticity is based) do have a perceptual dimension in the way in which an »appropriate« relationship between the author and the work is expected to be perceivable within the artwork’s formal/aesthetic properties. In sum, the paper shows that the concept of authenticity includes properties both perceptual (pertaining to the work as object) and non-perceptual (pertaining to the work as action), that the author is likely to be taken as the utterer whenever the utterances contained in the work are not explicitly dramatised and that there is a specific set of expectations as to the rhetorical features of an artwork which constitute an »appropriate« relationship between it and its author.