Volume 8, Issue 1

This article begins by using representative examples to present an overview of the diverse ways in which contextualization is practiced in literary studies. Under the rubric of the terms ›universal‹ ( indifferent ) and ›complementary‹ ( distinkt ) contextualism, antihermeneutic and hermeneutic approaches are interrogated with respect to their premisses, methods, and intended insights. ›Universal contextualism‹ refers to those post-structuralist methods that operate with a relational concept of the sign and assume that all texts, indeed all the material artefacts of a culture have the same ontological status. A material manifestation of context, or intertextuality, is not assumed here; the aim is insight into regularities of discourse and into media practices. ›Complementary contextualism‹ is intended in its weak form to refer simply to making an indispensable distinction between a text and its contexts – in this case generally in the form of texts – and in its stronger, more clearly hermeneutic version to refer to making a distinction and setting up a hierarchy between a text and its textual or extratextual environment. The focus of attention is progressively narrowed in the course of the article: the forms and manifestations of universal contextualism are excluded from the remainder of the discussion insofar as the concepts of text and context no longer function as a complementary pair if one ceases to assume a hierarchy, indeed a distinction, between the (literary) text and the connections that explain it. Approaches that go down this path may reveal the practices of discourse in a universe of texts of equal status, but they do not draw on contexts to interpret texts or elucidate the meanings of texts. In the next step, the weak form of complementary contextualism – Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicist approach – is distinguished from stronger versions of complementary contextualism. In abandoning textual autonomy and textual authority and adopting a certain formal-aesthetic indifference, New Historicism dispenses with a strong concept of the text, even if its concentration on canonical authors means that it proceeds in a distinctly literature-centred fashion. Its intended insight, nonetheless, is not the understanding and improved understanding of the literary text in the context in which it originated, but instead ›understanding differently‹ and ›making new voices heard‹: its aim is to reveal the social and cultural conditions of possibility of canonical points of textual reference, with the texts and their generally intertextual contexts mutually conditioning one another in the sense of a ›circulation of social energies‹ and thus unable to be placed in a hierarchy. Stronger forms of complementary contextualism, on the other hand, work with a form- and language-oriented concept of the text that, depending on whether their interest is defined by authors or problems, can refer respectively to a narrow domain of canonical texts or to an extended domain of high literature and commercial literature. These forms of contextualist literary analysis, though, share premisses of understanding and textual meaning, as well as hermeneutic and philological tools with which reference is made to texts and their extra- and intertextual contexts. Here, nonetheless, a wide spectrum unfolds. It reaches from what tend to be narrow, author-centric approaches guided by concepts such as ›intention‹, ›influence‹, ›edition‹, and ›commentary‹ to a line of research that engages in a form of contextual analysis whose perspective goes beyond the individual subject and has been broadened to address cultural history. It distances itself from strong authorial intentionalism on the one hand and the associativeness of New Historicism on the other, and is to be understood as a culturalistic extension of social history. Finally, drawing on a hermeneutically negotiated, context-sensitive cultural historiography of this kind, three possible criteria are suggested for selecting contexts of an inter- and extratextual nature: relevance, representativeness, and usefulness. They serve to limit what is per se an unlimited set of textual environments and have previously been formulated in the literature in a similar manner. At the end of this increasingly focused research review, which draws on the whole range of contemporary approaches to the problem of text and context, before finally foregrounding a contextualism that is philologically grounded and extended to address cultural history, there follows a transition to the three individual articles in the section we have edited. They are concerned with three different possibilities for dealing with contexts of an inter- and primarily extratextual nature, are all located inside the hermeneutic and philological space we have mapped out, and can to this extent be considered an inexhaustive taxonomy of a contextualism that has been extended to address cultural history: society as a context of literature, knowledge as a context of literature, and finally the text-context relation as a bipartite combination of problem and solution. Whereas the first two approaches involve classes of context that are defined by content, the final one works with a formal definition of ›context‹ and is to this extent a more broadly conceived one, because almost all political, social, epistemic, and abstract quantities that are external to the text can be formulated as problems. The article, to conclude, is intended to provide an overview that brings order to a markedly heterogeneous, diverse research landscape, as well as to stake out a grounded position within this heterogeneous field.

Taking as its starting point an example from literary history – Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s invention of hymnic poetry with free rhythms in German – this article argues that the concept of the problem should be the primary context referred to by literary historians in their reconstructions, analogously to authorial intention in the interpretation of individual texts. The task of literary history is, accordingly, to answer with regard to the particular series of texts involved in any given case the following question: what was the problem, or what were the problems, to which responses are presented in the texts involved? In choosing a particular primary context for their reconstructions, literary historians are confronted with a variety of notorious difficulties for literary historiography: the problem of relationship to the real world ( Verknüpfungsproblem ), the problem of explanation, and above all the problem of text and context: in principle, I can relate a series of texts to a great many different contexts. Choosing the history of problems as an approach provides a rule for determining relevance and thus restricting what is a potentially limitless context. In this respect, it proves helpful to consider whether identifying the problems that are seen as contexts for a given series of texts might not be an arbitrary process. It is shown that this concern cannot be adequately addressed by means of a precise explication of the problem as a concept, for the explication of the concept gives no indication of how it should be empirically materialized in actual use. The concern that the assignment of problems to texts is arbitrary can, though, be adequately addressed by arguing that ›problem‹ should be understood as a methodological category and an ideal for regulating the assignment of meaning that proves itself only in the actual argumentation in each individual case. Nonetheless, a viable explication of the concept of the problem must consider two things. The first is the fact that the concept of the problem is based on a bipartite relation. Problems provoke responses insofar as they represent a challenge when seen against the background of a normal state. The second is that an appropriate explication of the concept must consider the fact that problems emerge from ›competing systems of understanding‹ (Matthias Löwe). The article further discusses the extent to which the concept of the problem should be seen as dialectically related to the concept of the everyday or real-life world. Only when a situation takes hold in the everyday world that cannot be dealt with routinely do we speak of a problem occurring. Where the standard of reconstruction is concerned, the history of problems aims to follow a middle way between discourse history and text-centred literary studies. From the perspective of the historian of problems, the methodological standards for relating text and context are too lax in the case of the former and too strict in certain instances of the latter. It is argued that the history of problems provides a model for literary historiography that is superior to the alternative models of intertextuality studies, social history, and the history of knowledge. In formal terms, the intertext is one of the central types of context, but it is not clear why it should be treated as the primary context in literary historiography, just as it is not clear why society and the social should be given this function, however important they may be as content-related types of context. Knowledge, finally, represents a further central type of context for literary history. Relating series identified in literary history to a history of knowledge (however we understand it), though, runs the risk of producing a rather static picture of literary history, even if the history of knowledge is conceived of as a history of knowledge claims in the manner of Lutz Danneberg. The history of problems, by contrast, considers the dynamic component of movements in literary history. Furthermore, we see the extent to which a perspective based on the history of problems is compatible with models from intertextuality studies as well as with concepts from social history and the history of knowledge, and how it can contribute to a methodological foundation for these approaches. Finally, it is shown why it is theoretically mistaken to operate with oppositions between suprahistorical and historically variable concepts of the problem and between intentional and non-intentional histories of problems. In both cases, the oppositions are illusory and point to a theoretical ›sterility‹ that cannot do justice to the situation on the ground in literary history. The normal case with responses to problems in literary history is neither the timeless presence of unsolved problems nor the continuous evolution of problems and responses – instead, problems and types of response appear and disappear in various forms, different kinds of problem and response coexist, and repeated attempts are made to worry away at similar problems with recurring types of response. Furthermore, ›problem‹ is a concept that has features that are shared by intentions but also ones that intentions do not have. For this reason, it is well-suited to mediating between intentional and non-intentional levels. Finally, a number of terminological suggestions are made for a nuanced language of reconstruction. It proves sensible, first, to understand problems as embedded in problematic situations; second, to assume that problems often appear within larger clusters of problems; third, to take into account the fact that the urgency of the problem can vary from case to case; and fourth, to distinguish different types of problem that are relevant with respect to literary history. The article treats the ›history of problems‹ not as a catchy phrase which would ultimately result in a new line of research, but as a perspective on literary history that is encountered in various kinds of theory that have been developed in literary studies; that thus appears to have a high degree of plausibility for theoreticians of various schools; and that therefore should be pinned down and refined further in methodological terms. Discussions about the concept of the history of problems have become increasingly lively in literary theory in recent years, and this article responds to them.

Central problems in the disciplines that interpret texts and signs are a consequence of the knowledge that is discovered and used in various ways of dealing with texts and contexts. In order to survey this area of difficulty, the challenge posed by various kinds of relationship between ›texts‹ and contextual ›environments‹ is first discussed, before relations between ›literature‹ and ›knowledge‹ are modelled. In a final step, ›observing‹ ( Beobachten ) is presented as an epistemic practice that is of indispensable significance in the creation of text-context relationships. That is to say: observations are made and presented by authors, characters in texts, and speaking voices, are (re)enacted by recipients in various ways, and are realized on different levels of literary communication, and they produce the fundamental acts of discrimination that make it possible in the first place to form textual worlds and orientate oneself in them. Because observations also play a central role in the construction and use of contexts, they make it possible to reconceptualize the relationship between literature and knowledge with reference to fundamental practices of observing, and that is what is attempted here. A central area of difficulty in literary studies, and one that was much discussed long before the end of the twentieth century, involves the multiplicity of the elements of knowledge that play a role in how »texts« and »contexts« are dealt with and the complex relations between them and those that observe them. Simplifying to make the point, and setting the details aside, these problems – for there are many – can be drawn together in a single question: under what conditions and by what means can we identify and delineate elements of knowledge that are relevant when it comes to drawing productive and plausible connections between texts and (parts) of contexts? This question has consequences that are not to be underestimated – for both the theory and the practice of critically grounded ways of dealing with texts. For one thing, the quantity of (various kinds of) knowledge and epistemic procedures that can be drawn on when dealing with literary texts and their ›environments‹ cannot be underestimated. On the contrary: almost every engagement with textual worlds and their content has something to do with knowledge. Elements of knowledge are taken for granted or acquired, problematized and discussed, but also ignored and dismissed, in every action involving texts and contexts. Clarifications of the underlying concepts of knowledge are therefore just as necessary as internal distinctions. For another, there are no intrinsic limits to the linking of texts and contexts: a text or an element of a text can in principle be linked with anything that might occur to a reader or an interpreter. Given the per se unlimited possibilities for producing text-context relations, there is a need for rules that define the actual text , as it manifests itself in generic terms and with the conditions in which it originated, as a quantity that conditions the construction of contexts – rules that in the process guide, above all, the operations of observing and apportioning (hierarchized) elements of the textual and non-textual ›environments‹ of a text. Last but not least, it remains to be explained why enquiries into the links between literature and knowledge are made at all – we often know nothing at all about what to do with all the knowledge that accrues in various ways of handling texts. After a brief discussion of the clusters of problems outlined above, the thesis is advanced here that a state of sustained alertness to the epistemic dimensions of texts and contexts can help to grasp the acts of observation that are specific to literature and literary communication – which should make it possible to draw up, alongside a more precise concept of knowledge, formulas that can be put into practice for observing observations. To achieve the necessary succinctness and concision in surveying the (rather complex) area of difficulty that has thus been outlined, the following discussion is presented in three sections. In a first step, I would like to explain briefly why the relationships between ›texts‹ and their contextual ›environments‹ present the disciplines that interpret texts and signs with a challenge. In a second step, I model the complex relationships between ›literature‹ and ›knowledge‹ as forms of relation between text and context, and in the process consider various solutions that have been put forward in the context of epistemology and literary theory. In a third and final step, I would like to present ›observing‹ as an epistemic practice that is of indispensable significance in the creation of text-context relationships. That is to say: observations are made and presented by authors, characters in texts, and speaking voices, are (re)enacted by recipients in various ways, and are realized on different levels of literary communication, and they produce the fundamental acts of discrimination that make it possible in the first place to form textual worlds and orientate oneself in them and, likewise, in their contexts. Precisely because observations also and primarily play a central role in the construction and use of contexts when texts are handled by specialists, they make it possible to reconceptualize the relationship between literature and knowledge, and the relations between ›texts‹ and ›contexts‹, with reference to fundamental practices of observing, and that is what is attempted here.

This article is concerned with the question of what we mean by contextualizing a literary text in terms of social history. What are we setting a text in relation to if we assign ›society as a context‹ to it? And what is the nature of this relation? An attempt is made to answer the first question by defining society as communication. The article teases out the forms of communication that can be understood as a ›text‹ and those that can be understood as a social ›context‹. The second question picks up what is known as the Vermittlungsproblem (correlation problem) – that is, the problem, for which a solution is not believed to have been found, of how to theoretically model the relationship between text and context. In the final part of the article, this problem is steered toward a conceptual solution by distinguishing between different kinds of context (communication setting, the problem at stake, cultural knowledge, communication situation). The article begins with a brief historical outline of the field, which takes us back to the origins of the concept of »social history« in the history of scholarship. The characteristic innovation of the sozialgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft (sociohistorical literary studies) advocated in the 1970s and 1980s is identified as its attempt to arrive, drawing on contemporary models of structural sociology, at a more complex social theory than had been used by the earlier sociology of literature shaped by Marxism and ideological criticism. This led to two problems that were still to be satisfactorily solved in the 1980s. First, it seemed as though the sociological models could be used to describe only ›literature as social system‹, but not ›literature as symbolic system‹, because the sociological concept of action was unable to capture the special features of literary activity. Second, the starting point for theoretically conceptualizing the relation between literary ›text‹ and social ›context‹ was the special historical case of an autonomous system of art in a society where it was functionally distinct, which meant that the scope of the sociohistorical paradigm was confined to literature from the modern period. Both these problems, the present article suggests, can be solved by applying the model of sociocultural evolution that was developed above all by Niklas Luhmann and following it through to its logical conclusion. The first stage in showing this more clearly is to provide a vertical outline of literary communication, in other words to ask how, out of the totality of social communication events, particular communications can be identified as potentially relevant for the interests of research in literary studies. In a first step, a special type of communication distinct from normal communication is identified. It is marked by a characteristic embedded communication structure which we can describe as objectification or metalinguistic referentialization . An embedded structure of this kind is present if a given communication (e. g. »once upon a time a horse …«) is metalinguistically referred to by other communications (e. g. »tell me the story about the horse«). The basic concept of literature defined in this way is very wide-ranging and does not consider any criteria of the ›literary‹ in the sense of a certain quality of the text; instead, it is based solely on the criterion of ›textuality‹ (as a result of communicative objectification). Any further restriction ›above‹ this basic concept can be carried out only in a historically empirical manner, that is, by analysing the objectified communications themselves and the adjoining communications that are centred around them. That is the second step in narrowing things down. On the basis of the elements that recur in such communication settings, it is possible to identify structures of expectation that have become stably established in communication and together form a particular (e. g. ›literary‹) semantics . By »semantics«, Luhmann, following Reinhart Koselleck, understands a cultural repository of rules for processing meaning. Talking in rhymes, or cultural concepts such as ›novel‹, ›fictionality‹, ›author‹, are examples of such rules for processing meaning in the literary domain. They are, that is, part of various historically specific literary »semantics« or »symbolic systems« of the literary. Such structures have been stably established to a high degree in literary ›genres‹, which have already been described by Wilhelm Voßkamp as »socio-literary institutions« along these very lines. In a third step, the degree to which such developments in literary semantics are separated from other semantics that structure social communication is considered. The article argues against the assumption that there is a system of high literature that has been established as distinct since the transitional time between the early modern and modern periods, and puts forward instead a bottom-up model of literary microsystems, each of which may become stably established, that do not necessarily form part of an overarching social system of ›literature‹ but can enter into historically variable combinations with other communication contexts. As can be seen from the longevity of the old concept of literature in the sense of the totality of learned tradition ( historia litteraria ), large fields of literary communication in the mid-nineteenth century, for example, are closely intertwined with other social discourses of knowledge in what has, in the sense of this broad concept of literature, been described by Peter Uwe Hohendahl as a literarische Öffentlichkeit (literary public sphere). Whether a particular area of literary communication under consideration can be treated as a communication system that operates as a closed system, can in turn be determined only by analysing its historical and empirical processes of communication. Of crucial importance is the fact that the communication settings involved form such a high level of recursiveness and self-referentiality that they develop an understanding of themselves as distinct from their surroundings . Historically variable processes of system formation of this kind are part of structural change in society as a whole, and a more detailed analysis of such processes of change in the domain of the literary in relation to the rest of social communication could, in the long term, lead to more appropriate periodizations of literary history. After this outline of literary communication, we return to the problem of contextualization in literary studies. If literary communication is, as described, understood as dynamic subfields of social communication, four different concepts of context can be distinguished: ›Context‹, in a basic sense, means the place of literary communication in general social communication, that is, other communication events that are close to it in time . ›Context‹, in the sense of a literary studies that seeks to explain, often means the historical problem at stake , the solution to which is treated as the function of a particular structure of literary communication. In addition, other (non-literary) semantics ( cultural knowledge ) of the time are often referred to as ›contexts‹. ›(Real) historical context‹, often used synonymously with ›social context‹, encompasses not only the social but also the non-social – that is, for example, physical, biological, or psychological – surroundings of literary communication, and is terminologically accounted for here using the linguistic concept of the communication situation . With the help of this differentiation, the particular kind of contextualization that sociohistorical literary studies aims to provide can be described as follows: sociohistorical literary studies examines the embedding of ›textual‹ acts of communication in larger communication settings that are connected with them in the manner of adjoining communications (context1). It does so in order, first, to determine more precisely the nature of such communication settings (structures, level of stability, self-description) and, second, to identify, through the functional analysis of the semantics they use, relevant problems at stake (context2) and cross-discourse referential structures (context3). The focus in the process lies on socially conditioned problems at stake (economics, politics, culture); non-social aspects of the literary communication situation, which are, moreover, present in context4, lie outside the sociological descriptive remit of this form of literary studies.

This paper investigates the question of whether it is possible to talk about aspects of the meaning of literary texts in a context-free manner. Its starting point is a detected discrepancy between the assumption that some (not purely formal or quantitative) approaches to literature operate in a context-independent manner, and the thought that processes of understanding are necessarily interpretive and/or context-dependent. The exemplary field of investigation is (structuralist) narratology, which is often said to be a »context-free« approach to literature. To determine whether narratology actually is context-independent, I first offer an explicative definition of ›context‹ applicable to the field of literary studies, based on aspects of the meaning of ›context‹ in everyday use. According to this definition, ›context‹ in literary studies is to be understood as a sum of additional extra-textual facts that may be consulted in order to foster the understanding of a text. This definition implies that neither the text itself nor any of its parts may be properly regarded as possible contexts for a given text; consequently, neither the sentences which a text consists of nor the propositions these sentences express are possible contexts of that text. A more general upshot is that any reference to the propositions expressed by the sentences of a text qualifies as a context-free approach if said propositions can be accessed without drawing upon contexts. The question of whether this is possible is subsequently investigated with the help of a three-stage model of grasping linguistic meaning, fit to analyze the processes which are involved when understanding linguistic utterances. As it turns out, linguistic meaning is indeed accessible without drawing upon contexts in many, but not all cases. The next step of the investigation involves a close examination of the application conditions of two types of narratological categories: categories for the analysis of the discours of a narrative, i. e. the presentation of a story, and categories for the analysis of the histoire , i. e. the elements of the story itself. Two major results emerge from this investigation. First, as it turns out, the question of whether an approach to literature requires reference to contexts should be distinguished from, on the one hand, the question of whether an approach is interpretive , and, on the other, the question of whether an approach puts forward a theory of »work meaning«. For while questions about whether an approach is contextual are determined by whether additional »input material« is used in order to foster the understanding of a text, whether the approach is interpretive concerns what type of inference method is used to understand a text. Whenever non-necessary inference methods are used, i. e. inference methods that, in contrast to deduction, can produce more than one legitimate result from the same input material, an approach is interpretive in a broad sense of the word. Similarly, whether the approach puts forward a theory of work meaning concerns whether specific input material is mandatory for fostering the correct understanding of a text. This mandatory input material may be of contextual nature, but it can also consist of (parts of) the text itself. Consequently, processes of understanding a text that involve non-necessary inference and aim at discovering »the one correct meaning« of a text are to be qualified as interpretive in a narrower sense of the word. Second, in addition to the knowledge of which kinds of textual features a narratological category aims to grasp and the process of subsuming a specific textual feature under a category, the application of both discours - and histoire -categories requires the understanding of the linguistic meaning of parts of the text. Since both the reconstruction of linguistic meaning (in many cases) and the process of subsuming a textual feature under a category (in every case) involve non-necessary inference, narratological categorization always is interpretive in the broader sense. Now, concerning the question of whether narratological categorization requires the inclusion of contexts, we have different answers for the two types of categories. While both require the inclusion of contexts in some cases, simply in virtue of the fact that linguistic understanding sometimes requires the inclusion of (extra-textual) contexts, histoire -categories depend on contexts in far more cases than discours -categories. This is because, in comparison to discours -categories, the application of histoire -categories generally presupposes many additional processes (like the (re)construction of the fictional world), which in turn requires the integration of common world knowledge (and sometimes other types of knowledge as well). So while both types of categories can in theory be applied without drawing upon contexts, the proportion of cases in which discours -categories can be used context-independently is much higher than for histoire -categories.

Why do texts have contexts at all? Why can contexts be assigned to texts? What property of the text makes it possible to set text and context in relation to each other? With the help of heuristic questions such as these, this article aims to question productively some common paradigms for conceptualizing text-context relationships that can be identified on the basis of prominent attempted definitions, such as the relevant influential entries in handbooks and reference works (e. g. those by Lutz Danneberg and Moritz Baßler). Where Danneberg seeks to extend the scope of the extratextual context while at the same time characterizing it in terms of its function for the interpretation of texts (the use and construction of contexts), Baßler moves in precisely the other direction: he develops, following in the footsteps of the ideas of New Historicism, a concept of culture whose textual dimension makes it a possible context for literature. Both positions attempt, albeit in opposing ways, to make the concept of context at once narrower and wider: either an all-encompassing context (which includes reader, author, and culture) is characterized as a component of interpretation (Danneberg), or conversely the concept of culture is textualized through-and-through in such a way that archives and discourses govern the relations between text and context(s). These positions are themselves, in turn, heuristically interesting for two reasons. First, they show that the concept of context becomes interesting for literary studies, for the concept of literature, and for the understanding of textual interpretation when recent approaches reach out in the direction of cultural media studies (Schönert). Second, they are heuristically interesting when they concurrently, implicitly or explicitly, set themselves the aim of finding new, flexible accounts of the relation between text and context. In this respect, the applications of systems theory in literary studies can be considered; they go through models for determining this relation and seek, for instance, to understand a text in terms of its difference from context. Here, in essence, there emerges a logic of text and context that is reminiscent of the hermeneutic logic of question and answer (Gadamer). In this way, texts become able to be understood as contexts of texts. In the process, the problem of how to distinguish culture from literature while still relating it to it becomes inescapable. The present article outlines an answer to this quandary by making the following suggestion: if we turn our attention away from the problem of the textuality of the context and instead focus on the contextuality of the text, we can see that text and context are not be distinguished from each other aesthetically or epistemologically, or analytically or ontologically, but instead mutually condition each other. The text is always already a text in a context and the context is always already a textual structure. Thus, by the contextuality of the text we mean a textual disposition in which the text is always already positioned in a context or, seen from the opposite angle, is even treated as secondary to the context and understood as a segment extracted retrospectively from one context or many contexts. The focus is on a textual structure that is an essential part of text-context relationships and also, where literary theory is concerned, of a concept of the text that has been extended accordingly. Such a concept of the text would be the foundation for a concept of context that could serve as a fundamental concept for literary studies. First, it could make clear that context and interpretation go hand in hand insofar as it is solely the contextuality of the text that guarantees its interpretability. Second, it could contribute to a reconstruction of the history of the subject’s methods by making clear how and which contexts can be identified for literature in a particular school of thought. At the same time, it thereby becomes apparent that the problem of determining the relation between text and context gives rise to new forms of reconceptualization of the text: think, for instance, of the concept of ›texture‹ as a ›key term‹ of literary studies (Reinfandt) or the idea of conceiving of literature as a medium (Reinfandt, Jahraus). The literary text would then be a medium because it always already mediates between text and context, that is, for instance, between consciousness and communication, imagination and writing, the individual and society, the specific and the general, and so on. At the end of the article, two examples of a context-sensitive literary studies are presented in order to demonstrate the possibilities and limits, the achievement and the problems of such models with reference to existing schools of thought: the technological media history and poetics of knowledge that Friedrich Kittler and Joseph Vogl respectively have sought to put forward. Almost all of Kittler’s scholarly output can be reconstructed against this background as an attempt to allow literary studies to access technological media history as a context for literature that does not remain external to literature but acts intrinsically as an essential part of literature, correctly formatting its production and its reception in equal measure. Vogl’s interest concerns the problem of how a new context, namely bodies of knowledge at the time, can be made productive enough for the text itself to be read in two directions: as a document of knowledge and as a contribution to knowledge. To deal with this, a mediating function is installed in this model, namely aestheticization, which acts as a relay station between literature and knowledge and, so to speak, gives knowledge a literary potential and literature an epistemological awareness. On this basis, finally, a tool is presented for evaluating, in terms of methodology and literary theory, contemporary and recent attempts to lay claim to new contexts for literature. It is shown that it is not enough simply to place literature in new contexts. New contexts must, instead, give voice to the contextuality of the text. This does not just mean being superficially useful in interpretation but rather contributing to literary theory in the true sense of the word. Such contextualizations must also lead to a concept of the literary text that is richer in terms of literary theory by making clear, from the perspective of literary studies, what such contextualizations can tell us about literature itself.

Theories of meaning, even outspokenly textualist ones, have always dealt with the question of relevant context as well, to some extent at least. In many fields of research, the idea of an encompassing theory of context has surfaced now and then, and there have also been actual attempts at such a theory, some of which are discussed in this article. At the same time the very concept of context is difficult in many ways. The term has been said to be one of the most widely used and widely abused terms in the humanities and social sciences. Brenda Dervin claims that »there is no term that is more often used, less often defined, and when defined defined so variously as context« (Dervin 1997, 13–14). More specifically, its analytical force suffers from the fact that it encompasses such a vast array of different elements. The many concepts that clearly deal with the relationship between text and context, however in a more limited or specific way, are one proof of this. The focus in the article is on the project character of ›explicit‹ theories of context – that is, theories which are framed and named as such, and where the concept of context is the key term or one of the key terms. The questions are: what kinds of projects are theories of context? What can they offer and can they surpass the limitations of their starting-points, not the least the very distinction between text and context? What kinds of models of context do these theories rely on? On what levels of analysis (ontology, epistemology, ethics…) are the theories operating and having consequences on? And what is the role of texts in theories of context? The theories discussed in more detail are the ›contextualism‹ of Murray Krieger, Teun van Dijk’s discourse analytic theory of context, radical contextualism represented by Lawrence Grossberg and others, and the contextualist world-hypothesis as described by philosopher Stephen C. Pepper. Theories of context provide us with different solutions to the dichotomy problem. Krieger’s solution is to bring in some aspects of the context e. g. by way of accounts of reading. A theorist of context may also resort to subsuming both text and context to a wider frame, for instance theory of action (Stierle), or introducing a mediating factor, for instance social cognition (van Dijk). A more radical solution to the problem is to conceptualize both texts and contexts as parts of networks with no obvious centre (Bennett, Hall, Grossberg). In such a configuration, the interpreting subject is also presented not as something apart but as part of a network. In the latter case especially, the concept of context gets heavily redefined. Even though the text-context distinction is increasingly questioned, it is also obvious that one cannot just do away with the distinction altogether, even by means of alternative conceptualisations. Interpretation is always interpretation of something, and dualism is hard to evade. This has been the problematic point for many scholars advocating a non-dualist approach to meaning. Giving up dualism means giving up some of the answers and perspectives it made possible. This idea of the inherent transitivity of interpretation is very probably deeply rooted in our general modes of perception and supported by both language and our everyday practices, as Stephen C. Pepper pointed out, so that our notions of meaning and interpretation, too, basically follow this assumption. And there is the additional fact that our tacit knowledge of the world lends ample support to this idea. Why should we keep theorizing context, in spite of the many conceptual problems? First, as Lawrence Grossberg has pointed out, contexts are not »out there« to be picked up – instead, context is both starting point and end of analysis at the same time. Contexts are as much in need of conceptualization as texts. This is a good guiding principle regardless of one’s discipline. Second, contexts are often invisible, especially when they are familiar contexts! They must be teased out, made visible, and this is facilitated by a theoretical contextualist framework. Third, even if we do not aim at and believe in the possibility of an overarching theory of context, we nevertheless cannot avoid dealing with tacit notions of context. These range from notions supported by language and our everyday perceptions and practices to taken-for-granted assumptions often supported by our institutions. This is the reason some scholars, for instance Ansgar Nünning, emphasize the need to theorize context: context theories are always »there«, and if we do not tackle them, they may and will have the kinds of influence on us that we would not like it to have. What is the role of the text in different theories of context? For Murray Krieger, text is the definite centre. Textualism may be out of date ontologically, but the ›power of the text‹ that Krieger is interested in is something to be paid attention to by theories of context as well. Besides, another reason to keep text in the picture is that, after all, as Pepper and radical contextualists point out, text is context for its contexts! And even in a contextualist framework, bracketing a context has its value: in some cases it may be more fruitful to bypass the most obvious and salient contexts and take up counterintuitive ones, as for instance New Historicists prefer to do. Is there still need and use for theory of context? Without necessarily aiming at an overarching, systematic grand theory, it is useful to think, with Stuart Hall, that a theory of context as such is not a goal, but to understand meaning-making, we must keep on theorizing context and contextuality.

The age-old rift between analytic and continental philosophy has never been as passionately and vehemently questioned as it has been in the last two or three years. The main line of attack, however, has been to demonstrate, following the example of Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, that continental philosophy is no longer as tethered to an anti-realist position as it was for so many years, particularly, these same thinkers argue, during the period when Derridean deconstruction, Foucaultian discourse analysis and other such »poststructuralist« philosophies held sway; it is hardly surprising, then, that attempts at relating these purportedly surpassed figures to currents in analytic philosophy have been fewer and farther between. The present situation cannot but overspill into the context of literary theory, where for numerous reasons of varying persuasiveness these same poststructuralists have long been chided for their textualist or culturalist excesses and for their lack of attention to matters of more substantial interest: society, history, politics, reality, the world at large. It may be argued, however, that some of these philosophies retain much potential for articulations across the analytic-continental gap, articulations that have as yet passed unseen and, once identified, call for further analysis; in the context of literary studies, this is particularly important if the shift from a textualist or culturalist paradigm to a realist or materialist one is not to yield yet another epoch of monotonous and ultimately self-defeating insulation. One such articulation, I argue in this essay, is capable of bringing together two philosophical outlooks with well established literary-critical counterparts which at first sight have but little in common: deconstruction and the so-called possible-worlds interpretation of modal logic. This articulation begins from the definition of a possible world. In contemporary philosophical logic, the concept of possible worlds is commonly interpreted as designating possible events or states of affairs that determine the extension or existential scope of the conceptual unity involved. On this view, the class of logically equivalent possible worlds corresponds to a unified set of possible reinterpretations of one and the same sentence and accords to each possible reinterpretation its own domain of individuals and relations. Assimilable into one and the same conceptual unity, these sets or states of affairs are usually conceived as alternatives to one another: every world that is possible with regard to a conceptual unity is conceived as a state of affairs that could have been realised instead of the actual one and therefore represents an alternative to the latter. This essay argues that as such the definition of a possible world does not differ from Jacques Derrida’s definition of context as the set of present elements that determine the meaning of a sign: for Derrida, each signifying unit may be repeated in various different contexts which are conceptually equivalent to the precise extent that that repetition of the signifying unit maintains the identity (whether semantic, graphic, or otherwise) of the unit in question. The essay argues that in this sense, reinterpretation may be considered logically analogous to the Derridean notion of iterability, or the potential for any sign or existent to be subtracted from one context and grafted into another, upon which the above discussion of possible contexts relies. Iterability, however, causes the notion of a possible world, or more precisely that of a plurality of possible worlds, to become part of a structure that is no longer merely semantical or epistemological but also deconstructive and ontological; the relation between iterated units is not solely conceptualised in terms of alternativeness but additionally in terms of substitution. In the context in which it is iterated, the iterated unity may be said to substitute for what could have been actual in its stead; the iterated unity is therefore conceptualisable in relation to those unities which, as was also the case with respect to possible worlds, could have been realised in its place. On the basis of this observation the essay extends the analogy between possible world and possible context and argues that the issue of reinterpretability and substitutability provides the possibility for a thoroughgoing rethinking of possible-worlds semantics in terms of deconstruction, and vice versa. The limited equivalence between iterability and reinterpretability thus involves or is transformed into a limited equivalence between alternativeness and substitution: there is no alternativeness except between substitutables and no substitution except between alternatives. If it is possible to reinterpret every semantically salient totality with respect to possible worlds, reinterpretability, considered as a semantic modality of Derrida’s notion of iterability, will thereby be seen to extend contextual substitutivity all the way to the referent itself. The referent itself, apart from its inclusion in a conceptual unity, exists as a substitute of those referents or existents which could have realised themselves in its place. The referent itself – in its being and not merely as conceived – becomes thinkable as substitutable. This reversal, I argue, will then permit the reinterpretation of the modal distinction between the actual and the possible, and the consequences of this are at least twofold. On the one hand, if reality is substitutive, a semantics founded on substitutability will be able to account for this reality in an adequate manner; on the other, if actuality is paradigmatic substitution, it follows, given the relationality of substitution, that the actual always exceeds that which can at any given moment be said of it. This gives rise to the possibility of conceiving deconstruction anew such that it affirms a realist epistemology and a substitutive ontology of the actual. The actual, I argue, is the only thing that merits being considered as paradigmatic substitution; this permits the classically deconstructive notion of futurity to be incorporated into a realistically oriented philosophy and thus allied with a literary theory that seeks a way out of the old dichotomies that continue to dominate great parts of the theoretical field.