1 Felski draws on Eva Illouz’s discussion of “ontological (in)security” - following Anthony Giddens - which pertains to interpersonal relations, while we aim to broaden the scope of this sense of uncertainty to include epistemology. The Undead Arts and Humanities Against the Swansong of Mourning and Decline Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning 1 Introduction Uncertainty is one of the defining features of the modern condition and the current epistemic climate (see Heffernan 2021). An encompassing sense of being unmoored has been caused by an intricate entanglement of social, ecological, economic, political, and cultural dynamics often referred to as the “polycrisis” (Lähde 2023) or a “crisis complex” (Fraser 2023 [2022]: xvi). Anthropogenic climate change and its increasingly manifest consequences such as extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity, danger to (more-than-)human life and habitat, the commodification of elements of social reproduction such as care, the increased precarity of large parts of the globe’s population, the financialisation of the future (Komprozos-Athanasiou 2022: 4) and the environment, terrorism, wars, and other violent conflicts - all lead to a heightened and pervasive “sense of being adrift, anxious, and unable to predict or control one’s future” (Felski 2024: 4). 1 Making sense of - and living with - the complexities of the twenty-first century calls for strong arts and humanities, which have proven their dynamism in moments where versatility is needed. Although academic disciplines tend to be relatively slow in responding to new challenges and changed contexts, the hu‐ manities in general, and literary and cultural studies in particular, have recently extended their purview by working on the intersections of various disciplines, by linking intellectual traditions, by reaching across disciplinary boundaries, and by stepping into the interstices of hitherto separate research fields. As a result, new cross-disciplinary approaches and research areas have emerged that attempt to find adequate responses to the proliferation of challenges, crises, and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 2 Spaßgesellschaft emerged in the 1990s in German public parlance as a mostly derogatory term describing, and criticising, the rise of a purportedly shallow and irresponsible hedonism and consumer culture. Cultural critics, however, have since invited a more nuanced view on the term and the societal phenomenon it describes (see Maaß 2003; Schulz and Strukelj 2019). pressing social issues that matter globally and that threaten the future of our planet. These include, for instance, the environmental humanities (see Heise 2017) and approaches like ecocriticism and cultural ecology (see Zapf 2016), which open up new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Literary and cultural studies rarely provide definite conclusions (or clear solutions) but teach us to dwell in uncertainty (Olson 2020), to stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016), as well as to embrace open-endedness, ambiguity, and complexity (Levine 2023: x). They pose burning questions and cause necessary trouble where concepts, methods, and practices run the risk of ossifying. Moreover, they provide the skills to understand the role narratives play in some of the crises mentioned above (Nünning 2012: 59). Literary and cultural studies are, additionally, needed to make sense of the stories that captivate us, help us understand why and how we are “hooked” by literary texts, plays, films, and other art forms (Felski 2020: viii). However, the value of literature and the arts is not limited to critique and to questioning the status quo. What is too often sidelined - both in the professional field of literary and cultural studies and in the broader public perception - is literature’s potential to inspire and to build. Frequently overlooked and belittled is its unique capacity to provide aesthetic experiences that incite pleasure, immersion, and joy - not as idle escapism or as superficial and passive entertainment in the sense of the Spaßgesellschaft  2 but as an essential human experience and condition. These are not frivolous and trivial niceties we can allow ourselves to indulge in when all basic needs are met and all the important problems attended to, but fundamental aspects of human existence. Literary and cultural studies rest on the firm conviction that literature and the arts are important and valuable, notwithstanding the fact that considerable dispute exists regarding the question of what exactly it is that makes them valuable (see the chapters in Nünning and Nünning 2021). And, from time to time, we need to remind ourselves, and society at large, of literature’s central role for the individual and for the community, which rests, for instance, in its unique capacity for worldbuilding and in its affordance for honing our imaginative and aesthetic faculties. In this respect, we see a need to counter a broader development, noticeable also in the academe, where, as Melissa Kennedy puts it, “[t]he imagination has been […] marginalised as an occasional and optional 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 14 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning 3 Kennedy further contends that a “[l]ack of imagination is a structural problem that therefore requires structural answers” (286). It is therefore the aim of this introduction to map some of the structural changes under way in literary and cultural studies. For discussions of the value(s) of literature see the edited collections by Baumbach, Grabes, and Nünning (2009) Literature and Values and Nünning and Nünning (2021) The Value of Literature. 4 For further reading, see the list provided by Jay (2020). luxury rather than as integral to the human intellect” (2024: 285-6). 3 We also align ourselves with Ansgar and Vera Nünning and Alexander Scherr, whose call for “reinvigorating literary studies for the twenty-first century” proposes an approach that stresses the value and the positive uses of literature: “passion, pleasure and purpose are essential prerequisites that enable human beings to flourish and thrive” (2020: 5). What is needed, therefore, is more insight into what the arts and humanities actually do, how they do it, and how they, ultimately, envision the future of their scholarship and of academia. This entails an overview of emerging research fields, methods, and objects of study which this volume aims to provide by illuminating current key topics, critical junctures, and pressing concerns through a collection of contributions by arts and humanities scholars from a wide range of specialisations. They consider which conjunctures (sensu Grossberg 2010) and trajectories will become central and what role the field in which their individual contribution is situated will play in the future. This volume, consequently, highlights how these developments give rise to new scholarly questions and emerging (sub)fields. Thus, this collection sets itself the task of bringing together current trends and concerns - of course, without claiming to be complete or conclusive - in literary and cultural studies, with the gaze directed towards the future: How do we attach ourselves to literature and art now and in the future? Which forms get us hooked? Which affects do they evoke? How do these “tie-making[s]” (Felski 2020: xi) inspire new and future imaginaries? And: What do we, as scholars, have to offer twenty-first century realities? How can we maintain our relevance, and what futures, in turn, can be imagined for literary and cultural studies, which are currently undergoing extensive transformation? In this introduction we wish to ask what research questions, concerns, and topics have been relevant in literary and cultural studies in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and to chart some of the trajectories and conjunctures the contributors to this volume probe. While the “Crisis of the Humanities” (Perloff 2004) has incited ample metadiscourse about the value, aims, and future of the humanities (see Jay 2020) 4 - in particular with regard to the value of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 15 5 Interdisciplinary research on the “literary reading brain” is, among others, conducted by Sibylle Baumbach, who has secured a 2.5 million Euro ERC Advanced Grant on “Lit.Attention: Literary Attention in Short Fiction, or: What Literature Knows About Attention and Attention Politics” to examine the ways in which short fiction incites, retains, and trains attention: https: / / www.uni-stuttgart.de/ universitaet/ aktuelles/ meld ungen/ Kurzgeschichten-fuer-mehr-Aufmerksamkeit/ . 6 Although the quote may suggest an overly negative and pessimistic assessment, Citton is quick to relativise this “apocalyptic tone” (2017: 144). literary and cultural studies, to which we will turn below - we focus on those trajectories mapped out by the contributions to this volume. The concluding section gestures towards further emerging fields and research questions not covered here, showing that the humanities are alive and kicking. But first, more on the swansong. 2 Of Elegies, Epitaphs, and Epistemic Prowess If we take a look at said metadiscourse in our field, it seems that the study of literatures and cultures is locked in a constant crisis and perpetually unravelling: “Like clog dancing, the art of analysing works of literature is almost dead on its feet. A whole tradition of what Nietzsche called ‘slow reading’ is in danger of sinking without a trace” (Eagleton 2013: ix). 5 Scholars worry that the “literary reading brain” (Nünning, Nünning, and Scherr 2020: 16) might be “heading towards extinction” (Citton 2017: 144). 6 Pupils and students are allegedly losing interest in reading, and even Ivy League freshers arrive at university unprepared - and often unable - to read an entire book (Horowitch 2024: n.p.). A diminishing status of literature and reading is frequently attested across the field and set to foreshadow serious consequences that go far beyond arts and humanities departments: If “the book-based attention that encourages concentration” is eroding, some argue, this will weaken the foundation of “our modern and democratic civilizations” (Citton 2017: 143). The general impression is that reading - for pleasure, as scholarly practice, in teaching, as an art and a skill - is in decline, and has been so for a long time. The same seems to hold true for the academic field of literary and cultural studies. An anxious murmur is a steady companion to the arts and humanities in the twenty-first century, a pessimistic undertone runs through most self-reflexive discourse in a field which seems to be persistently on its deathbed or already laid to rest: “One of our most common genres today”, writes Margaret Perloff in 2004, “is the epitaph for the humanities” (1). Twenty years later, things have not changed much: “[s]ome argue that mourning is what the humanities are best equipped to offer” (Levine 2023: x). And what about literature itself, what about 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 16 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning 7 See also Bulaitis’s Value and the Humanities (2020). the current state and future of creative production? The pedal point of doom sounds loudly here as well: as literary creation encroaches itself in differently organized epistemic spaces, as the weight of cultured literacy withers away from the societal sectors of education and of culture - literature eventually risks being left behind, devoid of the underwriting it has been privileged with, as a ghost in want of its blanket: another marginalized art form afloat on an aggressive global marketplace for mass-produced text. (Tygstrup 2020: 160) Ah Bartleby! Ah Humanities! Certainly, no one can deny that the pressure is real - a pressure that is economic, political, structural, and increasingly ideological (see also Fleming 2021). The humanities in particular are facing serious opposition and a threat of near extinction in universities across the globe as funding cuts, restructuring or even the closing of entire departments make employment for lecturers and researchers increasingly precarious, which makes a rich and broad teaching curriculum difficult to sustain. Darling and Mahon cite a few cases in the British university landscape, which are indicative of a global process of unravelling: Roehampton University has seen cuts to Philosophy, Anthropology, Classics, and Creative Writing, while Sheffield Hallam University has withdrawn its ‘low value’ degree in English Literature entirely. Restructuring plans at Dundee University have led to downsizing or merging across the Humanities and Social Sciences, while at Birkbeck University significant job cuts have been proposed in departments of English, Geography, Politics, and Philosophy as well as Languages, Cultures, and Applied Linguistics. (2024: 384- 385) One of the unfortunate results of the impact of neoliberalism on higher education and of what Peter Fleming has aptly called “The Authoritarian Turn in Universities” (2021: 50) is that the value of higher education and in particular of a degree in the arts and humanities is increasingly understood in monetary terms and thus as a future return on investment. 7 From the perspective of a student who incurs debt and forgoes at least three years of earning to more often than not end up in a precarious employment that will not even enable them to repay their student loan, this is a very reasonable and valid aspect to consider before opting for a study programme. It becomes problematic, however, if public policy and university administration make the same calculation: “The ‘low value’ Arts and Humanities degree can only be described as such because 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 17 8 See also Grünkemeier et al. on the effects of the economisation of academia, which has added to the renewed interest in economics in the humanities (2018: 121f.). 9 Exemplary of this trend is a senator’s wishes to eliminate humanities programmes at the Technische Universität Berlin: https: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuilleton/ debatten/ tu -berlin-senatorin-will-die-geisteswissenschaften-streichen-110320274.html. 10 Felski, however, argues that this economic and political pressure results in larger outputs of online publications for broader audiences, further blurring the boundaries between scholarship and personal attachment to literature (2024: 10). value is bound up in discourses of economy, and economy is itself bound up in endless growth and intensified extraction” (Darling and Mahon 2024: 395). The ongoing “corporatization of higher education” ( Jay 2020: 2) 8 has resulted in an understanding of “[a]cademic units” as “valued by the revenue they produce through research grants, and the professional training they provide to students” ( Jay 2020: 2). Cultural theorist Lawrence Grossberg further argues that “[t]he economic is becoming the domain in which history is made and experienced and resistance defined” (2010: 151). And as of the mid-2020s, drastic funding cuts, which hit humanities departments across the globe particularly hard, 9 are joined by an attack on universities and academic freedom in general, spearheaded by authoritarian governments from Hungary to, more recently, the USA, which rightfully and justifiably causes us to look towards the future with concern. This sense of uncertainty, which grips science, scholarship, and tertiary education, is particularly acute in the humanities, not least due to very real and existential threats to intellectual life and livelihoods. This external pressure cannot be denied, but hardly any scholar would make common cause with or argue in favour of it. 10 A further problem comes from within our field and has to do with the metanarrative of crisis and decline mentioned above as well as with a habitual gesture of self-devaluation. If, as Jerome Bruner has famously argued, “stories are a culture’s coin and currency” (2003: 15), it is quite surprising that the arts and humanities continue to tell their own story as one of endless crises and doom. It is, moreover, enfeebling and makes us ill-equipped to counter the economic, political, and ideological pressures faced by our field on a global scale. What we should do instead is to insist on our value and importance. It seems hence fair to say that literary and cultural studies is facing a double legitimation crisis: Since the knowledge we create and share does not always yield a marketable product or lead directly to a spin-off or a start-up, the neoliberal Zeitgeist does not know what we are ‘good’ for and how to measure our surplus value. The other crisis comes far too often from the arts and humanities themselves. There is a concern that, in light of the world’s crises, it is irresponsible and privileged to dwell on Shakespeare’s sonnets, postmodern 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 18 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning 11 Kennedy comments on a similar aspect as, according to her, “it remains unclear whether any humanities forms of knowledge will survive, as they have failed to establish a narrative of value to counter that of the sciences” (2024: 289). Nünning et al. also point out that the onus is on the humanities to spell out “why reading and studying literature still matters today” (2020: 2). 12 The outlook provided by Andreas Reckwitz in his latest publication, Verlust. Ein Grundproblem der Moderne, tellingly titled “Ausblick: Die Moderne reparieren? ” points to this reparative moment. fiction, or Instapoetry, that we should rather engage in concrete action, and that we are fiddling while Rome burns. We are a rare case where practitioners from within the field regularly question the value of their own work, or at least seem to take for granted that they should, or have to, explain and defend its relevance. It appears that the humanities suffer from an inferiority complex and lack of faith in the value and strengths of our own disciplines. 11 But what if…? What if we need not be as humble as many of us have been? What if this ineradicable propensity to self-dwarfing is actually unjustified? What if the humanities, who know how to deconstruct the grand narratives of economic gain and unlimited growth, have simply not written back loudly and proudly enough? What if we do not have to reinvent ourselves and our field, our tools for research, and our teaching methods? What if we have the relevant skills and competencies and only need to rewrite the metanarrative? As one not of crisis and loss but of plenty and repair? 12 While critical reflection and self-reflexivity are a virtue that others might emulate, in the case of literary and cultural studies, it seems an exercise that leads us scholars to downplay what we have to offer and even fail to recognise our unique contribution to knowledge, to humanity, and to our shared future: “Our tendency to reflect on our work - the theories, the methods, the artworks - has devolved into a strained bleating about our ‘relevance’ and ‘value’” (Serpell 2024: n.pag.). What’s more, such anxious murmurs and swansongs can leave us despondent, a state which rarely translates into positive action but rather into the acquiescence to injustice: This is testament to a form of anxiety that does not bode well for our future, and it is this state of alarm that we need to jettison so that we can continue to be of central importance to society, not just to survive but to flourish and thrive. This volume sets a counterpoint to the inferiority complex, the disciplinary inclination to self-dwarfing, the timidity and despondency that have prevailed for too long in literary and cultural studies, and the humanities at large, one might add. The contributions assembled here attest to the mobilising potential of the critical research questions literary and cultural studies are asking. Located in English and American Studies, comparative literature, postcolonial, queer, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 19 and affect theory, economic and ecocriticism, psychology and related fields, our contributors share a strong interest in literary texts: Most chapters deal with literary texts, predominantly the novel, and use a wide range of the approaches and tools literary studies has to offer. This exemplifies the vibrancy of “what traditionally has been one of the central branches of the humanities: the study of literature” or “poetics” (Perloff 2004: 5), an art far from being, as Eagleton predicted some ten years go, “dead on its feet” or “sinking without a trace” (2013: ix). A confident appreciation of our epistemic prowess and key competencies are in order. Among them is the recognition that the engagement with literature and the arts in a university context and beyond should not only stress the ‘uses’ of literature but also that reading - and especially the ability to read complex literary texts - is anything but a trivial pursuit: “The first step, then, would be to teach the student that reading, whether of a legal brief or the newspaper or even of an Internet ad, takes training” (Perloff 2004: 16-17; original emphasis). This entails alleviating ourselves - and our students - of the false assumption that “there is no vocabulary to master, that anyone can - and does - read” (ibid.). Reading as art and skill means more than applying the tools of critique, more than excavating, uncovering, deconstructing the (presumed) hidden politics and ideologies of a (literary) text. In line with Rita Felski, we argue that there is a need to include a form and language of attachment in teaching and study since “ways of knowing cannot be completely cut off from ways of feeling” (2024: 8-9). Several contributions look towards forms of attunement and ask how humans and art are entangled in networks of attachment. It might well be that this aspect is central to securing our professional futures and to putting the gravediggers of the humanities out of business. As Perloff predicts, poetics “will come back into favor for the simple reason that, try as one may, one cannot eliminate the sheer jouissance or pleasure of the text” (2004: 17). Literacy regarding genre and form must equally be a cardinal aspect in teaching, as it is key to a professional - and to a joyful - engagement with literature. As some of the contributions show, form and genre also often have strong political implications: Christine Schwanecke, for instance, explores the “epic structures” of Shakespeare’s Pericles, which she identifies as a “narrative play” and as a case of “genre hybridity” and explores the political dimensions of genre preferences. Other contributors look at how home dis/ comfort is depicted in flash fiction and the novel (see Stella Butter), how climate change is narrated in prose and performed in poetry (see Hannah Klaubert; Jan Rupp), and how digital forms of communication enter more traditional forms of narrative fiction and are thus being novelised, to speak 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 20 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning with Bakhtin (1981) (see Heidi Liedke; Anna-Lena Eick). Formalism is therefore no “dirty word” or “smokescreen” that forecloses an enrapturing engagement with aesthetics and their cultural work (Perloff 2004: 9). The following clustering of the contributions is based on the shared concerns of the individual chapters, which reflect the productive conjunctures that characterise the humanities, and literary and cultural studies in particular, in the third decade of the twenty-first century. However, some concerns and develop‐ ments transcend these clusters and can be found across our arrangements, e.g. the effects of digital and technological developments on cultural production, circulation, and reception (the role of social media, e.g. Goodreads, in the contributions by Vera Nünning and Natalya Bekhta, for their effects on literary form see Anna-Lena Eick’s contribution), as well as the formal and thematic grappling with planetary thinking (see Liza Bauer; Butter; Rupp; and Klaubert). A continuing trend of expanding the notion of literature to include popular genre fiction is reflected in the variety of texts analysed by the contributors: from sick-lit to Manippean satire to autofiction, from ecopoetry to pandemic fiction to fictions of work, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Sally Rooney. Centring the core strengths of the arts and humanities does not mean stepping into disciplinary solipsism: All contributions engage with interand transdisciplinary cross-fertilization and are testament to the transversality and affirmation that poetics, to stay with Perloff ’s parlance, does a lot for other fields of inquiry. What the collection reveals is a strong and vigorous activity that centres the literary text and poetics in different forms of cultural and social practice. 3 New Conjunctures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies Hope, Value, and Narrative Form Although there are quite a few new conjunctures and directions in literary and cultural studies, developed and inspired by many different approaches and responding to a wide array of cultural concerns, the work of some scholars has arguably had particularly far-reaching influence on the developments in our fields. For instance, Rita Felski’s work on the Limits of Critique (2015), inspired, among other things, by Bruno Latour’s pointed question “Why has Critique Run out of Steam? ” (2004), has had ripple effects all throughout literary and cultural studies as she examined the hermeneutics of suspicion which underlie the practice 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 21 13 See also the introduction and contributions to Anker, E.S. and Felski, R. (eds) Critique and Postcritique (2017). 14 See also Yves Citton’s call for a “PLURALIST UNDERSTANDING OF READING, recognizing the complementary (rather than rival) nature of close reading, distant hyperreading and machine reading” (2017: 148; original emphasis). 15 In A Manifesto for Literary Studies, Marjorie Garber “remind[s] us of the specificity of what it means to ask literary questions, and the pleasure of thinking through and with literature” (2003: 13). of “critique” (2). 13 In her most recent volume, Love, etc., co-edited with Camilla Schwartz, Felski even speaks of a paradigm shift which brings “love and loveadjacent words like generosity, hope, reparation, and attachment to the fore in literary studies, especially in reflections on how to read” (Felski 2024: 3; original emphasis). This paradigm shift is particularly palpable in the contributions of the first cluster in this volume: Heidi Liedke, for example, grapples with the renewed interest in “the ubiquitous ways of reading” (Anker and Felski 2017: 1) - close, distant, suspicious, but also surface and reparative reading 14 - and the forms of attachment these reading strategies afford. 15 Liedke proposes a new term - elpilogy - to fill a research gap in the study of “specific kinds of writing and fiction as a formal expression of hope and hoping as a motor for the chosen texts” (Liedke 36). She employs a queer reparative surface reading to attend to the “hopeful and ethical potential of textual affordance” (36). Liedke’s reading is exemplary of a loving practice, i.e. “an attentive yet realistic gaze, a clear-eyed acknowledgement of the distinctiveness of ” (Felski 2024: 12) narrative form. Editor Magdalena Pfalzgraf considers the value of the postcolonial as de‐ nomination of a field and as a conceptual frame for the study of Anglophone literatures and cultures. She reflects on the roots and causes for the field’s current legitimation crisis, particularly after 7 October 2023, and its conceptual sprawl, while arguing that there is a need to re-direct the focus away from critique, deconstruction, and activism and to place greater emphasis on literary studies and poetics. In postcolonial studies in particular, there is a persistent tendency to neglect modes of reading and analysis which go beyond literature’s role of interrogating and exposing power structures (see also Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis’ contribution). Editor Ansgar Nünning probes the value of the laboratory as a metaphor and travelling concept for the exploration of, and the engagement with, forms of the good life in literature and culture. He argues that “in addition to having anticipatory quality or even prophetic potential, fictional narratives can serve as a laboratory in which new experiences and possible trajectories can be simulated, mentally preparing readers for various kinds of crises, developments, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 22 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning and scenarios” (101). By surveying the field of research on the cultural work of the “laboratory of literature,” Nünning charts future research trajectories on the cultural narratives of the ‘good life’ on a warming planet. Diachronic Perspectives: Historicization across Fields and Genres Christine Schwanecke’s contribution brings into sharp relief the entanglements between genre theory, literary studies, and politics. She addresses specific works which had been excluded on the grounds of their unusual position in the matrix of genre conventions. Her case study is therefore one of genre hybridity: Shakespeare’s Pericles, merges drama, narration, and contains a “rich variety of epic structures” (122). As a consequence, this ‘narrative play’ has been marginalised in literary criticism because it has been seen to ‘violate’ or fail to conform to generic norms and ‘laws.’ Genre literacy, Schwanecke argues, and a critical awareness of how these politics of genre and canonisation work, are essential for making literary studies “fit for the future” (108). Her concern goes beyond critique: tracing the consequences of the close relationship between genre theory and genre politics, she develops a perspective of genre criticism as a “problem-solving paradigm” (108). Turning towards historical cases, Schwanecke argues, can not only lead us to rediscover previously marginalised works but also hone our tolerance towards the ambiguous and sensitise our perception towards contemporary and emerging forms of genre hybridity. In the twenty-first century, autofictional modes of storytelling seem to be all the rage - with novels by Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård ranking among the top of bestseller lists. Autofiction appears to be a narrative form and mode wedded to our time. Shedding light on the eighteenth-century roots of the presumably very contemporary phenomenon, Alexandra Effe’s chapter “engenders new readings of texts not previously considered for their autofictional dimension” (131) and thus historicizes the current boom. She identifies the eighteenth century as a period of transformation, which included genre hybridity and uncertainty, and the emergence of metafictional as well as autofictional gestures for marketing reasons. By zooming in on the earliest work of autofiction in the English language - Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella (1714), Effe mobilises and “proposes to extend autofiction as term and concept diachronically, which […] brings new insights into the emergence and development of autofictional modes, and into the socio-historical and literary contexts in which we find them” (130). In a similar vein, Marion Gymnich’s contribution analyses canonical English texts through the lens of the newly developed concept of Strong Asymmetri‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 23 16 On the eudaimonic turn, see Nünning and Nünning: “Literaturwissenschaft und der ‘eudaimonic turn’” (2010). cal Dependencies (or SAD), which is central to the interdisciplinary field of Dependency and Slavery Studies. This young field is strongly historically oriented and expands as well as complements existing research paradigms in slavery studies, in particular by critically revising the binary distinction between freedom and dependency. Probing the place of literary studies in this emerging interdisciplinary field, Gymnich turns to canonical English texts, including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, to analyse three different literary phenomena through the lens of SAD: “(i) direct references to (transatlantic) slavery in literary texts, (ii) instances where slavery is used metaphorically or as analogy, and (iii) direct references to other types of asymmetrical dependency, including borderline cases” (153). Gymnich shows how productive it can be to ‘test’ new concepts developed through interdisciplinary, historically oriented research on fictional literature, which has a lot to gain from this new direction in dependency studies and, in turn, emerges as a fruitful ground for applying new concepts. SAD is thus shown to be a helpful tool for teasing out hitherto unexplored nuances in the ways dependency is represented in canonical literary texts and beyond. Cognition, Affect, and the Eudaimonic Turn The third cluster of contributions reflects developments ensuing after the affective turn in the social sciences and humanities: salutogenic approaches to literature (see also Liedke) 16 as well as cognitive and psychological approaches to reading literature and, particularly, literary fiction. In her contribution to this volume, Vera Nünning examines Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall (2009) in light of what she sees as a much-needed interdisciplinary inquiry into narrative strategies that aim to make a story more persuasive, an inquiry situated at the intersection of psychology, cognitive, and (post)classical narra‐ tology. Nünning argues that the recognition of the persuasiveness of fictional stories opens up new directions of research into the literary conventions, their combinatorial potential, and generic specificities that heighten persuasiveness as well as their historical and cultural variability. More firmly rooted in the Medical Humanities, Deborah de Muijnck zooms in on the affective and cognitive effects of narratives on readers’ wellbeing in her reading of a popular subgenre of Young Adult fiction: sick-lit. She focuses on the narrative strategies of relativisation to achieve emotional balance when confronted with distressing situations via notions such as embodiment and experientiality. The contribution makes a strong case for the need of cognitive 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 24 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning studies on the reception and processing of narratives - fiction and non-fiction by both young and adult readers - and for a broadening of research in salutogenic narrative theory. Stella Butter is similarly interested in consolation, albeit in a different form: Her examination of literary representations of the dis/ comforts of home in pandemic fiction is particularly illuminating regarding how literature orders our perception of crises. The home becomes a linchpin of microand macrolevels: It is impacted by large-scale crises and is itself a key factor in the generation of the crisis dynamics of Western modernity. Like de Muijnck and Liedke, Butter emphasises the positive, comforting qualities of reading and writing as forms of “dis/ comforting homemaking” and community building. Butter’s contribution furthermore raises the question of forms of (in)consolability in an age riven by crises of various scales (pandemic, climate, housing, energy, etc.) as these crises have worked to undo some “idea(l)s of home” or, at least, put pressure on the imaginaries of home. In her engagement with what she calls aesthetic home comfort studies, Butter sheds light on “how art engages with specific configurations of ‘home dis/ comfort’ and the way art itself can serve as a form of dis/ comforting homemaking, especially in crisis times. Such a focus foregrounds the cultural value and functions of literature and art in modernity” (176). More-than-Human Matters of Concern Extending the vocabulary of love and care beyond the human individual, “the polis - the scale of collective life” (Levine 2023: xi; original emphasis) comes into sharp relief here. This collectivity, however, is not predominantly thought of in anthropocentric terms but more inclusively understood to encompass the planetary. Taking their impetus from the nonhuman turn (Grusin 2015a), which shifts the focus towards “animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies” (Grusin 2015b: 1), the chapters in this cluster attend to the narrative representation, affect dimensions, and political implications of such more-than-human collectivities. Working on the intersection of two emergent subfields of the environmental humanities, namely econarratology and the nuclear humanities, Hannah Klaubert follows Levine’s (2015) emphasis on forms that order, shape, and arrange human and nonhuman life. Klaubert thus probes the affordances of narrative and its capacity to capture environmental processes and events that are hard to grasp in human everyday experience. Her reading of Robert Macfarlane’s prose poem Ness in light of Orford Ness’ nuclear history elaborates on the function of scale in an econarratological theory of character. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 25 In line with Levine’s search for “social forms that could sustain collective life with some degree of fairness and mutual care” (2023: xiii) and echoing Felski’s insistence on attachment, Liza Bauer emphasises an urgent recalibration of human-animal relationships towards more animaland planet-friendly variants through literary fiction (esp. science and speculative fiction). She contends that literary animal studies offer a focus on literary texts that actively challenges anthropocentric perspectives in fictional storyworlds, which has an impact on human-animal relationships. This line of inquiry opens up the possibility to “examine (1) how these textual animals relate to the ‘real’ world in terms of the sociopolitical, -cultural, material, and historical contexts from which they emerge, and (2) how the living creatures themselves get entangled with the semiotic, discursive processes of human meaning-making that, once again, impact humans’ perception of them” (250). Yet again defying easy clustering, editor Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis’ contri‐ bution probes the methodological impasses of a still predominant hermeneutics of suspicion in a subfield of the Energy Humanities, namely petroculture studies. Dipping in and out of close and surface reading, Tabouratzidis examines contemporary Anglophone petrofictions in light of postcritique’s affordances to dismantle the false dichotomy of art’s singularity and sociability. World, Globe, Planet? World Literary Dynamics A process described as the transnationalisation of the literary - in terms of production, circulation, and reception - has fostered a renewed interest in world literature, a concept discussed by Jan Rupp and troubled by Natalya Bekhta. While Jan Rupp takes an ecocritical approach (see also Klaubert in this volume) and enquires into the planetary ramifications of anthropogenic climate change and its effects (including its representations, aesthetic experimentation, and critical inquiry) on art and literature, Natalya Bekhta questions the inclusivity of world literature and related theory. Rupp’s contribution aligns with a critical engagement in Anglophone literary studies and the environmental humanities more broadly, which question the dominance of Western literary practices and epistemologies and advocates for a reorientation towards “long-standing but so far often neglected non-western creative traditions and bodies of thought in the Global South” (312). Rupp thus aims to recentre other conceptions of envi‐ ronmental imaginaries of the Global South which “are conducive to projecting environmental memory at a planetary scale” (313). Particularly insightful is his bridging of econarratology and world literature studies through a reading of performance ecopoetry and Anthropocene fictions from the Caribbean. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 26 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning Natalya Bekhta productively troubles and expands world literature concep‐ tions beyond the Anglo-centredness of this volume by asking: What is the place of literature of the former so-called Second World in contemporary world literary theories, especially in cases where the model of the Anglophone centre and peripheries is reaching its limits? She thus probes the limits of world literature as a theoretical concept (and reading strategy) in a world of “combined and uneven development” (WReC 2015) and asks: What makes literatures from Eastern Europe aesthetically and historically distinct? What sets them apart, if read through the lens of world literary theory? Bekhta’s chapter lays the groundwork for a larger “project of reconstruction of the former ‘Second World’ as a world-literary region” (332f.). A second major concern, related to this, is the status of the novel, which Bekhta identifies as the genre around which most world literary theories are organised. Reminding scholars that “we first need to admit to such a possibility - that the novel is not the sole genre of narrative fiction that has a world-literary significance today” (332; emphasis added), she traces genres in contemporary (world) literature that resist novelisation. Transnationalisation and Forms of Mobility, Work, and the Digital Literary transnationalism is particularly pertinent in the last cluster, in which Anna-Lena Eick extends the purview of the Anglophone focus of this volume to contemporary German-language literature and their translation into Eng‐ lish. Eick’s contribution proposes a productive triangulation of three postphenomena - postcolonial, postmigrant, and postdigital - which has not been sufficiently theorised yet. She therefore zooms in on the intersection of “digitalisation and transnational issues of cultural belonging and identity” (376). Both Anna-Lena Eick and Carolin Gebauer focus on forms of mobility in literature, although from very different perspectives. While Eick focuses on the transgenerational dimensions of the postmigrant society, Gebauer’s understanding of mobility is not related to migration (or indeed physical movement). In her chapter, she brings together mobility studies and narratology in her advocacy for narrative mobility studies, a new theoretical and analytical framework which adds a strong narratological component to the flourishing field of literary mobility studies. Even though the mobility turn in the social sciences has had a strong impact on the arts and humanities, what is still missing, Gebauer argues, is a solid theorisation of mobility in literature from a narratological angle. Indeed, literary and narrative mobility studies are currently practiced, but not sufficiently theorised; it yet lacks a distinct conceptual grammar and vocabulary. This is the topical and ambitious task that Gebauer sets out to tackle. In this chapter, she uses formalism, cultural narratology, and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 The Undead Arts and Humanities 27 cognitive approaches to show how mobility can be analysed on the level of story and discourse. Thereby, she shows that, while mobility studies is very interested in the question of narrative, narratology has, in turn, 1) much to add to our understanding of how narratives of mobility work, 2) the ability to contribute critical vocabulary to mobility studies, and that 3) a focus on mobility can enrich our understanding of movement and narrative form. This cluster concludes with a contribution which links back to our initial concerns relating to uncertainty and value, and which also touches on the question of the value of our scholarly work. Elizabeth Kovach’s chapter is concerned with the question of the meaning and value of work in our ‘brave new world’. Mapping the vibrant field of new economic criticism in light of sociological approaches to literature, Kovach directs our attention to the janusfacedness of the flexibilisation of work by taking a look at the US-American context and literary fiction from the mid-nineteenth century via the 1930s to the early 2000s. Kovach argues that literary ways of imagining, contesting, or codifying the meaning and value of work can help us rethink both historical and contemporary meanings and values surrounding work. This includes taking into consideration a spectrum of work ethics and experiences - from total identification with to alienation from work - but that also includes those for whom work has historically never been a reliable source of ‘income, rights, and belonging’, i.e. historically contingent forms of precarity. Kovach’s contribution takes the idea of whose work counts, and the worth of labour to a metafictional and metadiscursive plane. This includes the act of writing fiction but also invites reflections on the status of scholarly writing as labour: “Wherever current trends will lead, literary fiction and scholarship will continue to illuminate and negotiate the process, including the meaning and value of their own work” (422). 4 Conclusion The new conjunctures and directions sketched out above and delineated in greater detail in the chapters that follow do not, of course, reflect the arts and humanities and their transformations in their entirety. They are, however, testament to the versatility of the arts and humanities in the twenty-first century, and a forceful counter to the swansong of mourning and decline holding our field in its grip. The rapid disciplinary diversification our fields are undergoing is part of the uncertainty widely experienced; however, this sense of uncertainty is an aspect of the field’s liveliness, and it can inspire affirmative speculative endeavours carrying our disciplines into the future. Such future trajectories may include the medical humanities, the energy humanities, the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 28 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning blue and arboreal humanities, memory studies, word and music studies, digital humanities as well as games studies. Looking back to the beginning of this introduction, we should like to conclude by emphasising that it is high time to become aware of the indices by which we measure the worth, value, and uses of the art works we engage with, and of our own scholarship. 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