Volume 22, Issue 1

Coinciding with the cultural turn in the humanities, a critical discussion in literary studies has begun in recent years that relates to the problems of rejecting social questions and an associated turning away from social history. Against the backdrop of this debate, my research report offers an overview of the conceptual possibilities and methodological problems in a ›return of society‹ within medieval philology. This is based on three established research areas of socio-historical literary studies: postcolonial literary criticism, literary ecocriticism and literary economics.

In the early decades of the eighteenth century, a number of German authors published poems that combined features of occasional and didactic poetry. The article examines ›occasional-didactic poems‹ by Johann Christoph Gottsched and Abraham Gotthelf Kastner that were read out loud at academic ceremonies. The study seeks to show that Gottsched and Kastner used this hybrid genre to intervene in, or to comment on, quarrels and controversies within the learned world, in particular controversies involving different faculties and disciplines. Thus, these poems should not be dismissed as mere attempts to upgrade the much-criticized genre of occasional poetry by adding philosophical digressions. Rather, they constitute one of the specific forms of communication developed within the Enlightenment republic of letters. In addition, these poems are instructive with respect to the development of eighteenth-century didactic poetry in general.

Sergei Eisenstein’s visit to Hollywood and Mexico, from 1930 to 1932, finds the famous director in rather unfamiliar territory. While his stay yielded little artistic output, in the form of an unfinished movie on Mexico, his theoretical reflections on American film and its foremost champions, Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney, count among the most fascinating, yet also contentious elements of Eisenstein’s intellectual biography. A central part of his American aesthetics is his theory of »totemism«, which he develops in an intricate dialogue with the various encounters on his journey as well as from a plethora of literary references that seems to betray the agenda of his communist beginnings. The article argues that, despite its mystical overtones and logical contradictions, Eisenstein’s theory of »totemism« remains connected to his earlier convictions through an attempt to reconcile his new insights with a critical social or sociological theory.

The article explores the experience of physical and mental illness in the works of two 20 th -century Polish poets, Aleksander Wat and Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki. Wat’s writing concentrates around his neurological disorder and the feeling of isolation it induces. Dycki, on the other hand, constructs the speaking persona of his poems around schizophrenia. He creates his own characteristic poetic diction, full of obsessive repetitions, which is meant to embody mental illness in a textual form. The article looks at how different aspects of suffering are expressed in modern Polish poetry, based on the example of two representative and well-known authors dealing with illness.

During the last 30 years, talking about worlds in narratology has been largely based on the terminology and presuppositions of Possible Worlds-Theory (PWT). This branch of research originally developed out of analytical philosophy’s modal logic, and it treats the content of narrative fiction as entities that inhabit a world of their own. In recent years, some of PWTʼs major goals - like proposing a general theory of fictionality - have repeatedly become the object of criticism. Prior to this, PWT already had to deal with the problems that came up when texts were considered worlds. The aim of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to examine and illuminate general problems of PWT, some of which have not been broadly recognized. Second, it reconsiders Umberto Ecoʼs Lector in Fabula as an earlier but forgotten methodological attempt to describe world structures in narrative fiction. Ultimately it can be shown that a significant proportion of PWTʼs shortcomings, emphasized in the first part, could be compensated by a partial return to a textpragmatic model such as Ecoʼs.

This study examines paratexts and images in works of primatology. In order to classify generic traits of primatographical publications, all paratexts, images and narrative positions of a large corpus of such monographs were registered. The analysis of these data allows for the determination of three distinct genres: scientific books, illustrated books and autobiographical/popular science books. The paratexts also reveal the strategies employed in the presentation of the books: They address a lay public, underline scientific objectivity or generate authenticity. The form of the texts indicate the audiences that the books address and enact an intimate relationship between non-human primates and human beings. Images showing researchers in close contact with non-human primates as well as paratexts addressing monkeys or calling for their preservation and conservation embed these field studies within a Christian iconography, invoke the life of saints or martyrs and appeal to the empathy of the readership.

Research on established ›practices‹ in literary studies often includes an analysis of tacit assumptions or implicit norms. In this article, we deal with what we consider a central issue for this kind of research: the question of ›making it explicit‹. We concentrate on the practice of argumentation in literary interpretation and ask how implicit aspects of arguments can be made explicit, and what the problems of such an undertaking are. We proceed in three steps. As a point of departure, we take an interpretation of the poem .Der Knabe im Moor. by Annette von Droste-Hulshoff and analyze which parts of the arguments usually remain implicit when they are presented in literary interpretations. Then, we suggest different reasons for why this might be the case. The third part of our paper argues that rational reconstructions of this kind must always deal with several of the issues that we encountered in our analysis of the case study, especially with the problem that the analysis of implicit elements of practices cannot be purely descriptive.

One of the most extensive texts of the neolatin poet and Jesuit Jacob Balde is his ›Battle of the Frogs and Mice‹, a Latin version of the Batrachomyomachia, an ancient Greek epic, which for a long time was seen as a work of the founder of European literature, Homer. The pseudo-Homeric Batrachomyomachia was read as a humorous travesty of the Iliad. By assigning the comic text to Homer, scholars implied the appealing, yet wrongful idea that the author of the greatest mythical war was mocking his own work, thereby parodying the respectable genre of heroic epics. With Balde’s creation of a new version of this Greek poem during the Thirty Years’ War, the question arises as to whether his text is no more than an intertextual play on a famous literary genre, or whether it reacts to the recent historical events in early modern Europe - or both.

This article explores the ›poetics of the real‹ in three contemporary texts that describe the siege of Magdeburg by Tilly’s troops in 1631: The most important chronicle of the century, Merian’s Theatrum Europaeum, Bogislaw von Chemnitz’ Koniglich Schwedischer in Teutschland gefuhrter Krieg, and finally Georg Greflinger’s carmen heroicum Der Deutschen Dreysig-Jahriger Krieg - the first poetic representation of the entire war from the perspective of a contemporary. Real experience, historical facts, and literary convention are intertwined, thus creating a space of conceptual tension. The article aims to demonstrate that Greflinger’s strategies of rhetorical emplotments are part of his historiographic poetics that make the catastrophes understandable to the recipient. In this way, the literary framing supports the representation of truth. A comparison with the two historiographical texts illustrates this claim.

In contrast to the literary production in certain vernacular languages like French or German, the period of the Thirty Years’ War was a very productive period for Neo-Latin epic poetry. Two examples discussed in this article elucidate the different purposes of these poems: With his Turcias (Paris 1625) Francois Le Clerc Du Tremblay tried to unite the European Christian rulers and to convince them of a common and united war against the Turks. On the other hand, the Jesuit Jacques d’Amiens published in Douai in 1648 his Bellum Germanicum, the first (and only) part of an epic poem that supports the Catholic part in the Thirty Years’ War. A comparison of the depiction of the enemies in particular in these two poems makes the differences visible.

The article draws on recent conceptualizations of ›eventfulness‹ and ›narrativeness‹ in order to argue that the significance of a particular event during the Thirty Years’ War may be not only a product of historiographical narrativization, but the collective effort of contemporary news media. The battle of Lutzen (1632) illustrates how the weekly periodicals established a set of factual data from which broadsheets, pamphlets and serial chronicles could select and arrange information to construct the eventfulness of the battle.

The article explores how Johann Michael Moscherosch’s Gesichte Philanders von Sittewalt implement a modified concept of satirical writing in order to cope with the life-shattering experience that we have come to know as the Thirty Years’ War. Traditional satirical features like allegory or irony lose their significance when confronted with the imminence of violence and, as a consequence, certain moral dilemmas. With war being a key component of their poetics, the Gesichte establish a certain style of satire that takes (political) reality and its immediate presence into account. By lifting the veil that separates factual and fictional representations of the world, the Gesichte emerge with a concept of satire that is able to meet the demands of wartime.

This article assesses how historical events play an important role for the narratological structure of Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus Teutsch and Courasche. Furthermore, it asks whether it was possible for the contemporary literate reader to foresee parts of the books’ plots based on his historical knowledge. The plot devices thought to be most promising for such an analysis were descriptions of battles in which the main characters were engaged. It can be shown that battles, as datable and locatable events, allow the reader to estimate the duration between certain parts of the story line.