Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Johns Hopkins University, Freie Universität Berlin, Macalester College Our expectations of a “large form” are not the same as of a small form: depending on the size of the construction, each detail, each stylistic device, has a different function, a different force, and a different load is laid upon it. (Tynyanov 32) To say a lot with a few words, “mit wenig Worten viel sag[en]”: such is the art of brevity, explains Julius Wilhelm Zincgref in the preface to his collection of proverbs, the Apophthegmata teutsch from 1626 (Zincgref 7). 1 “A lot” with “few,” much with little: this is the essential paradox that the present volume proposes to explore. When words are reduced to their minimum and the salient qualities of an utterance or a text become its shortness and rapidity, this does not imply, Zincgref insists, that a small form like the proverb results from shortness of time. On the contrary, like “gemstones” ( Edelgestein ), proverbs require ages for their formation; they are the product of a “langwierige prob und erfahrung” (10), of a long period of trial and experience in which the false and the superfluous have been painstakingly eliminated. It is because “life is short, while art and experience are long and grueling [lang und weitläufig]” (10—11) that short forms are needed - they render it possible, within one span of life, to assimilate what can otherwise only be attained in a period vastly greater than any one life� At the same time, their shortness does not mean per se that they can be digested more rapidly than longer texts - perhaps even on the contrary. Put differently, the shorter the form, the more time may be consumed by its gestation and its reception� Short is what results from an inverse relation to long� Taking its cue from this early modern reflection on the nature of forms of brevity, this volume approaches short forms from both a new and an old perspective. New because it understands literary shortness not, as is often the case, as a particularly modern phenomenon, but rather as a text form that has existed for as long as writing itself and that fulfills different functions at different times. Old because the volume aims at elucidating what happens when brevity is not only associated with swiftness and velocity, momentariness and presence, but also or at the same time with slowness and history, processuality and intensity. 94 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Zincgref ’s explanation of the proverb is but one of several such configurations of short with long that are explored in the essays that follow� Our volume contributes in multiple ways to a large field of current research on short or small forms� Limiting ourselves to recent collected volumes within the field of German, we should note Einfache Prosaformen der Moderne (Borgstedt, Wübben 2009), Kleine anthropologische Prosaformen der Goethezeit (Košenina 2011), Kurz & Knapp: Zur Mediengeschichte kleiner Formen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Gamper 2017), and more recently Barock en miniature - kleine literarische Formen in Barock und Moderne (Müller, Ritter, Selbig 2021). The DFG-Graduiertenkolleg 2190 on “Literatur- und Wissensgeschichte kleiner Formen” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (since 2017) as well as past and current research initiatives in Germany and other countries further attest to the level of interest in small and short forms� 2 While earlier approaches tended to focus on the “Selbständigkeit der Kleinsttexte,” die sich “isolieren lassen” (Haug 3), more recent contributions tend to focus either on the different functions of small forms, or on what is often called “format” and which includes the medial and material aspects involved in publication, collecting, and distribution. Other contributions that include considerations of small forms of writing such as Kulturen des Kleinen (Autsch et al� 2014) or Verkleinerung ( Jäger et al. 2021) explore processes of “Komprimierung und Konkretion” (Autsch et al. 10) or the “Operationen der Verkleinerung” through which diverse aesthetic, epistemic, and pragmatic goals are achieved ( Jäger et al. 2). The essays in this volume engage with the more recent of these approaches to short forms while stressing a key aspect of the textual phenomenon in question. “Short,” as we use the term, should not be understood as an attribute of mere quantity, as though it would be possible to qualify texts as short on the basis of a material threshold, a certain number of words or pages� 3 Aside from the arbitrariness of any such set limit, a quantitative determination fails to account for the complexity of determining any text’s size. Here, the attempt is made to grasp shortness not as a quantity but as an often paradoxical relation or as a configuration of short and long� Short Genres, Short Forms . - To be sure, while eschewing a strictly quantitative standard may avoid the arbitrariness of any set limit, it does not in itself solve the problem of determining what texts qualify as “short.” One strategy has been to focus on genres - the aphorism, the anecdote, the exemplum - whose very definition entails shortness as a seemingly essential attribute. While this helps to delineate the object of study, it makes the study of short forms into a subfield of genre studies and misses the opportunity to focus on the functions of shortness itself, rather than of those genres that tend to be short vis-à-vis others. The essays in this volume, while they often engage with the theory of genres, do not Introduction 95 rely on it. Instead, the endeavor is to find ways of approaching and describing shortness, its effects and functions, for itself, without assuming that the question of what constitutes “short” has been settled by genre categories� Surprisingly, it is precisely within the field of genre theory that a conceptual basis for such an approach can be gleaned� A case in point is the work of Yury Tynyanov, who focuses directly on the question of how a text’s length figures into genre theory. A novel or a poema, Tynyanov insists in “The Literary Fact” (1924), are, when it comes to the question of their evolution, clearly characterized by their “largeness�” What constitutes a genre over the breaks and discontinuities of its protean history are not specific constitutive generic qualities but seemingly coincidental characteristics, such as length: It then becomes obvious that a static definition of a genre, one which would cover all its manifestations, is impossible: the genre dislocates itself; we see before us the broken line, not a straight line, of its evolution - and this evolution takes place precisely at the expense of the “fundamental” features of the genre: of the epic as narrative, of the lyric as the art of the emotions, etc. The sufficient and necessary condition for the unity of a genre from epoch to epoch are the “secondary” features such as the size of the construction� (Tynyanov 32) Tynyanov’s shift in focus from the purported fundamental features of the genres to the seemingly outward or superficial question of length deessentializes genre while allowing for a new perspective on what Tynyanov calls the “literary fact�” Tynyanov means to question the idea that something like a history of literature or literary genres could be written at all. Instead, what can be observed are changing configurations among textual elements. For example, what was at one time considered a quotidian mode of writing (such as the letter) can at some point in history become literature or part of the literary system� The center and the periphery of what is considered to be literary are in constant flux: At a period when a genre is disintegrating, it shifts from the centre to the periphery, and a new phenomenon floats in to take its place in the centre, coming up from among the trivia, out of the backyards and low haunts of literature. (Tynyanov 33) Now, what is remarkable in this approach is that forms of writing that seem small and trivial in one epoch can shift into large forms at another time, and vice versa. Hence, the relationships between short and long, minor and major, trivial and literary become or could become more relevant in this approach than the outcome itself. Viewed this way, there is no more need to speak of genres that are per se or essentially small, and of others that are large. Rather, there are shifts and fluctuations at work in history that make it more relevant to focus on the relationships themselves than on preconceived or allegedly static forms� 96 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn We can observe a similar conceptual reorientation in another theoretical source whose potential for the study of short forms has yet to be exploited, namely Susanne K. Langer’s Feeling and Form (1953)� Langer advances the idea that the epic, for example, might be considered as a “hodgepodge of literary creations” (304) in which all kinds of different artistic devices can be employed at different moments for different purposes. If the epic, a long form, is a conglomeration of other, shorter forms, then long and short enter into a relationship that is not simply quantitative, but rather functional or constitutive. At the same time, Langer proposes that this relationship can be historicized. It is not enough to say that the epic contains such varied elements as “lyric verses,” “romantic quest,” “ballads,” “praises of the gods,” and “riddles and proverbs”; one must also account for the historical processes in which these different “poetic practices” were discovered and used to produce different literary forms: “Each separate means of poetic creation could be exploited and gave rise to a genre of smaller scope but more organized form” (Langer 305)� This historical hypothesis is all the more noteworthy as it gives us a useful and far-reaching mode of observing and describing short forms� Instead of considering particular genres of brevity as ready-made forms, we are asking with Langer for practices or “devices for creating forms” (280) that can serve a particular purpose at one time in one context, but acquire other functions in other environments, while these themselves are also constantly changing (281). For example, certain poetic techniques that had their specific functions in the context of an epic can gain independence from that context, in the process emerging as a “more organized form” of what they had been initially� They can appear as a text type or mode of writing of “smaller scope,” exploiting their former functions and at the same time acquiring new ones. What is already suggested in Tynyanov gains a more tangible profile in Langer: length and shortness of texts are not only interdependent traits, but they are also related to potentially qualitative shifts of forms that depend on their level of organization, their place in both their sociocultural and their textual environment� This at least is a lesson one can take from Tynyanov and Langer, and one that is at the core of this volume’s approach to the question of short forms. Short in Long. - This shift from short genres to the ways in which shorter and longer elements enter into dynamic relationships that themselves generate texts and text forms resituates the study of short forms in fundamental ways. For one, the focus moves from quantity itself to the processes that take place within a quantitative frame. Techniques of abbreviation or ellipsis; of embedding and encompassing; of redeployment; of fragmenting and remaindering - to mention just a few of the processes that figure prominently in the essays collected Introduction 97 here - all play out within this dimension of quantity as relation rather than as a stable feature or characteristic� Rodolphe Gasché has delineated a notion of minimal things as what marks a limit beyond which quantity no longer obtains, as “the point where the relations with a quantity’s others […] manifest themselves” (Gasché 6). Similarly, in the essays collected here, the focus on the short frequently serves to problematize the very notion of quantity, to show, for example, the various ways in which texts can foil any attempt to determine their length - to show how quantity is not a stable attribute when applied to texts. Second, as has been recently noted, any study of short texts must account for the simple fact that they seldom if ever appear singularly but typically within the frame of long texts, such as magazines of case studies, compilations of aphorisms, or anthologies of short stories. Short, in this regard, appears as a function of how a long text (or format) is perceived as consisting of discrete elements - Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher , for example, as a catalog of small texts rather than as an organic whole, Rahel Varnhagen’s Rahel: Ein Buch des Andenkens für ihre Freunde as an aggregation not only of letters but also of a variety of brief and aphoristic statements rather than a structured collection that orders its elements according to an overarching principle. Even if, in these two cases, this seems more than evident, it is equally clear that the individual “short” elements contained within the larger whole are not without relation to one another - that viewing them in isolation, while always possible and frequently advisable, is a decision made by the reader, making “short” a function of the reception as much if not more than of the text’s actual constitution. Conversely, if short texts typically appear within long ones, the opposite is also true: long texts can be read as composed of short ones� 4 When Karl Philipp Moritz isolates the letter of 10 May from the rest of Goethe’s Werther and reads it as a “poetische[s] Gemählde” (142), he treats this excerpt as a microformat; the same has been done with the short essays in Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften . Separable episodes, short chapters, vignettes, diary entries, glosses, and quotations figure prominently in novels from Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre to Arno Schmidt’s ZETTEL’S TRAUM , and all of these “segments” of long forms offer themselves to treatment as short forms. Here again, the distinction between short and long hinges not on any determination of length, which presupposes set units, than on something else, in this case: the principles of composition and segmentation that allow the components of long formats to be seen as separate units. These include practices of compilation, anthologization, and serialization� Form and Affordance � - Short texts? Short genres? Short formats? How exactly should one name what is at the focus of the essays collected here? If what this 98 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn volume addresses are not exactly texts or text elements, not any kind of entity that one could isolate and describe for itself, but rather relations, text-generative processes and interactions that play out between short and long, then we need a robust conceptual framework that will allow us to think relation independently of any prior determination of its terms, of the entities that enter into it. The terminology too must fit these needs. “Form” suggested itself in view of a strain of 20th-century thought, particularly in the theory and philosophy of perception, in which “form” is used to designate something of an irreducibly relational nature. We are thinking here first of the work of the Gestalt theorists, whose initial and essential tenet was that perception bears from the very start on articulated wholes, the complex but primary ensembles for which they used the term Gestalt or form� 5 The movement shares a lineage with phenomenology; Max Wertheimer, one of its primary founders, was profoundly influenced by philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf, like Husserl a disciple of Franz Brentano (Ash 17—102; King and Wertheimer 73—75). The later reception of Gestalt theory by French phenomenology drew out the consequences for a fundamental rethinking of form� If the primary data of consciousness were not individual sensations, but relations or wholes, then there was no longer any need to explain the process by which these individual data come together to constitute thoughts or judgments as the result of a separate act of forming or ordering� The hylomorphic model that since Aristotle had grasped form as the opposing partner of matter no longer needed to be relied on in order to explain the process of individuation or of becoming� As Merleau-Ponty was already pointing out in his very earliest writings on the philosophy of perception, what these thinkers called “Gestalt” is not like a form imposing itself upon a heterogeneous matter; there is no matter without form; there are only organisations, more or less stable, more or less articulated. […] In general, it must be said that primitive perception bears rather on relations than on isolated terms - visible , not conceived relations. (Merleau-Ponty 13—14) Merleau-Ponty’s student Georges Simondon, writing in the 1960s, drew on advances in a number of other sciences to develop conceptual tools that could escape the form/ material or form/ content binarisms� The concept of field , for example, can help to understand how form is not reducible to entity: the bodies in a gravitational field are not simply subject to its laws, not passive matter on which form is imposed from without, but are themselves, in their interaction, constitutive of the very field in which they are located (Simondon, L’individuation 546). Drawing on chemistry and the physics of crystallization, Simondon adds to the concept of field those of “metastability” and “supersaturation”: Introduction 99 In order to think individuation, we must consider being not as substance or matter or form, but as a tense, supersaturated system above the level of unity, as not merely consisting in itself […]. (Simondon, Individuation 4) As crystals can form in a solution when a substance which has been dissolved into it surpasses a certain concentration, putting the solution into what is called a “metastable” state, so might we think the process of becoming that Aristotle had tried to explain by means of the dualism of form and matter� In such a supersaturated, metastable, pre-individual state, neither unity nor identity applies. By thinking what had always been called “matter” or “substance” not as an inert mass, nor as what strives toward form in a process of mutual attraction, but as a metastable state, Simondon hopes to arrive at a new and powerful conceptual tool for understanding the emergence of form - and to do so on both the psychological and the social level: It seems to me that what is most in need of explanation in the psycho-social domain is what happens when one is dealing with metastable states: it is the emergence of form [prise de forme] accomplished in a metastable field that creates configurations. (Simondon, Individuation 4) Simondon’s inquiry into formation or morphogenesis thus allows us, first, to think relation prior to or independent of any distinction between form and matter, form and substance, genre and exemplar, prior to any kind of entity; and second, to put the operations of thought, of what occurs on the level of the intellect or psyche, on the same level as moral, social, political, as well as “material” phenomena� Similarly useful for the need to prioritize relationality, lastly, is the concept of affordance that we have included in our title. It, too, can be traced to the work of the Gestalt theorists� The term was coined by the psychologist George Gibson to describe the complementarity of the perceiving animal and its environment in the framework of an “ecological psychology.” An affordance is what the environment “affords,” provides or furnishes, to the animal. Not a quality or attribute of an object, nor a (cognitive) interpretation of an object by a subject, an affordance is something that “points two ways, to the environment and the observer” (Gibson 132) - a relation that is irreducible to either of its elements� It thus cuts across the dualities of subject and object, substance and attribute, physical and psychological, nature and culture, as Gibson himself emphasized (see especially 125—26). The term was later popularized in design theory (Mace xxvi; Norman 9—12); the literary scholar Caroline Levine, in a highly influential study (2015), put it at the center of her work on forms (6—11; we are indebted to this book for first drawing our attention to the concept). Since then, “affordance” has been 100 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn adapted for use in literary studies (Cave, Davidsen) and in rhetoric and writing studies (Khost). It should be pointed out that the more radical implications of Gibson’s concept do not always figure in later adaptations, where it is sometimes flattened to mean simply the various contingent uses to which an object is put by a subject - thus reinstating the very subject/ object, physical/ psychological dualisms it had been designed to escape. An affordance is not what a subject does with an object; rather, it is a relation that is as constitutive of the subject engaged in the object’s “use” as it is of the object itself� Gibson himself had already pointed out that what he calls “environment” includes cultural artifacts, and that images, pictures, and writing provide affordances of staggering complexity (129). Our use of “affordance” exploits the ecological dimensions of Gibson’s use of the term. Not only are what we call short forms always encountered within a larger frame, but this framing itself is instrumental to what they are. Put differently, short forms have an impact on their environments - their textual and material surroundings, their social and political engagements - but also vice versa; they are what they are by virtue of what surrounds them, of their environs. The essays collected here do not isolate their object from its milieu, nor do they treat its milieu simply for the purposes of contextualization. Rather, the object at hand is graspable only as a relation; as an affordance, the relation is primary, antecedent to its terms. Below Genre . - Discussions of form in literary scholarship frequently assume a semi-equivalence of form and genre; at the very least, genre is consistently seen as a kind of form, perhaps the most salient one as regards literature. However, if one wants to exploit the potential of a focus on form for moving beyond dichotomies of form and material or form and theme, one would do well to distinguish more systematically between form and genre. Paradoxically, it was André Jolles who provided perhaps one of the most effective means of doing this in a book commonly seen as classic in the study of genre� Based on lectures Jolles gave at the University of Leipzig in 1927-28, Jolles’s Simple Forms identifies a catalog of nine specific forms - legend, Sage , myth, riddle, proverb, case, memorabile , fairy tale, joke - many of which bear the name of literary genres. But what Jolles had in mind with his “simple forms” were not in fact genres, but something situated below genre, on an intermediate level between the literary elements of language (syntax, style, rhetorical figure, etc.) and the consummated literary work. Jolles refers here to what we might call a different aggregate state - forms explained not by stylistics, nor by rhetoric, nor by poetics, perhaps indeed not even as a matter of “writing”; forms which, even though they are artistic, still do not become a work of art. ( Jolles 8) Introduction 101 The essential insight is that the medium or material in which authors do their work is not simply language, not just words, figures, stylistic devices, etc., but rather something that is already complex, “a different aggregate state.” That the word Jolles uses for these complex building blocks between grammar and work - Gestalt - is the same that the Gestalt psychologists put at the center of their theory of perception is not mere coincidence. In both cases, what is envisioned is an elemental complexity, an articulated aggregate or whole, a relation that cannot be reduced to single elements, be they linguistic units (words, morphemes, phonemes, phones) or individual sense sensations. A Gestalt is thus like an articulated whole; but, as Jolles applies the term to his simple forms, it is nevertheless below the level of the finished whole, the literary work that exists in or exemplifies a certain genre. The simple forms, as Eva Geulen puts it, are “Formen, die noch keine Formen sind” (Axer et al. 332) 6 ; or, in Peter J. Schwartz’s formulation, “structuring principles operative in language before their ‘actualization’ in specific legends, sagas, fairy tales, and so on, or as components of more complex narrative types” (xxi; see also Martyn)� Jolles’s study is exemplary for the way in which form - and short or small forms in particular - can be observed in its emergence and as a generative principle, prior to or rather outside of what is graspable as genre� 7 To be sure, while Jolles’s nine simple forms were clearly not genres, his intent was nevertheless to establish an exhaustive system of such forms by naming and defining them. This would seem to sacrifice one of the main potentials his innovation opened up, namely to counter the deeply ingrained tendency in literary studies to define forms and genres. It is just such a tendency that, we believe, has hindered our ability to gain a clear understanding of the affording nature of short forms. Canonizing some forms but not others, genre definitions have determined the history of literary forms since antiquity, and especially those picked out of the multitude of short forms. Such definitions describe a particular genre in its features often by distinguishing it from others, and hence install discursive use values by ascribing a certain form-semantic meaning to a genre� What’s meant to create analytic or writerly tools can counterintuitively come to outweigh the actual particularities, behaviors, or other specific phenomenalities of the short form in question. A prime example is the Aesopic fable� While Aristotle is usually credited for having accepted the Aesopic fable into the canon of literary genres and for making use of its exemplary value in his Rhetoric , he is also the one who introduced and spread the term logoi , i.e., “tales,” as a designation for them. In the centuries that followed, this act of definition effectively suppressed a whole tradition of pre-Aristotelian storytelling of Aesopic and other similar stories, fables, and tales that had not been defined clearly. Literary scholars and classicists, 102 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn however, have attempted to recover the prehistories of the fable genre and were able to retrieve an older notion for the Aesopic fable, a non-defined quasi-genre simply called ainos in various texts, translatable only as “small story”: a brief narrative told not just to inform, entertain, or communicate the story itself but specifically to elicit an active response from the listener(s). Ainos is hence not merely a genre capable of being decoupled from its situative existence, such as setting, context, listeners, speaker etc.; rather, as ainos the story is seen as always already part of a larger interactive and dynamically changing event or happening. Aristotle’s definition of the story’s use value in speeches, on the one hand, allows for the transfer of the idea of the story to meta-contexts, for example its systematic use in pedagogy, its occasional use in speeches, or as social entertainment. On the other hand, however, the genre definition forever overwrites a vague idea shaped by practice with a concept defined by a rationale� The dynamism of the fable’s lived embeddedness in telling and acting is lost and can only be revived against the weight of its long conceptual history (Locke; Nagy; Blumenberg). This rudimentary sketch of the fate of the fable illustrates the condition of practically all short forms� What was originally a brief speech act that developed its quality while being acted out is recast, when defined as genres, into more clearly comprehensible, intellectually processable formations, lacking many implied functions and mute respective affordances. Our interest in this issue is to counter this loss of the thick descriptions short forms demand in the process of their emergence by reassessing those qualities that have passively or actively been left out of their genre definitions. This suggests the need to look for short forms not only underneath existing genres, but also outside of any specific genre systematization in general. If the relationality and the containment of short forms should come into view, one has to look for short forms in their pre-genre state. Not yet defined aspects and undefinable phenomenalities that have escaped literary scholars in their drive to ordering frequently remain below the thresholds of their “generity” or Gattungshaftigkeit � This is not surprising because short forms are especially active and functional in places, situations, and contexts that cannot be defined or described� We can very well assume a multitude of short forms in use in daily practices everywhere that have neither been identified nor described by literary scholars. Rather, this invisibility against conceptualization is essential to the nature of short forms. They emerge, exist, and disappear before a literary scholar may capture them “in actu.” As a 2013 volume has shown, genres should be understood as concentrations of specific contextual or other forms of knowledge, and in consequence may exist wherever knowledge can be shaped into poetical, literary, or other semiotic formations (Bies et al.). This applies all the Introduction 103 more to short forms, which are constantly emerging anew to suit specific and contingent occasions. At this proto-stage of genre formation, vignettes, shorthand expressions, occasional poetic devices, or similar short forms are already fulfilling their function and recur independently of any conceptual recognition. This dynamism of the “short form” shows itself perhaps most saliently when one remains attentive to these not-yet-genres� An example of such a barely recognized or described short form could be the vignettes drafted by anthropologists in their field books, whose particularity lies in the tension between the real-time intensity of their realistic descriptions and their potentialist prose that must anticipate future use for research� Another example might be the category of place-specific regional toponyms, that is, dialectal notions for natural phenomena unique to the dialect’s regions, such as the Gaelic “peat glossary” of the Outer Hebridean Islands described in Robert Macfarlane’s 2016 book Landmarks . Neither strictly genre, nor strictly format, these and many other examples demonstrate that short forms first and foremost dwell below genres by fulfilling functions deeply rooted within quotidian life and its constant application of poetico-linguistic formations to different uses. Moving away from understanding short forms either as literary genres or as media-theoretical formats renders sensible “the range of potential actions and uses latent in [them],” (Levine, “Narrative Networks” 517) that is, makes sensible their affordances. While the papers collected here approach the topic of short forms from a variety of perspectives and each with its own specific research aim, they all share a common concern for short forms in their emergence and relationality� Forms are not observed as stable entities, but in their processes of formation; they are of interest insofar as they transform and inform� The papers are loosely organized into four sections designed to allow for cross-historical connections and resonances� These are not arranged according to historical chronology; on the contrary, each section brings together papers focused on widely different epochs or individually engaged in reading texts across centuries� In the first section, “Openings,” processes of formation come into play in various figurations of openness. Gabriel Trop’s “Epigrammatic Paradoxicality” focuses on epigrams of the baroque poet Angelus Silesius. While the epigram, particularly in a religious context, is commonly associated with a certain fixity, in Silesius, as Trop shows, the form becomes elastic. Trop locates the key to the functioning of Silesius’s epigrams in the way the first-order surface of the text succeeds in blocking any kind of secondor third-order recuperation which would harness the paradoxes to a set dogma� “What comes to light is not an aesthetics of reason, but an aesthetics of the paradox” - understood as “a specific form of attunement, a state of suspension between ‘correct belief ’ (orthodoxy) 104 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn and ‘divergent belief ’ (heterodoxy).” The result are variously structured “zones of indifference” that are impossible to contain and thus fundamentally open, or “an emergent property extending out from a text, […] transforming the reader.” Short forms are shown here in their uncontainable effects, breaking the very boundaries that epigrams are meant to mark� In “Mayröcker’s Drama of Association,” Florian Klinger explores another way in which a short text, Mayröcker’s poem “My Mother with the Open Arms,” resists containment and the closure of its mode of address� Where a conventional reading of this poem would identify its thematic content (maternal love; filial piety and its failures; the loss of a mother) in order to then relate this content to the poem’s form (the series of discrete scenes of encounter; symmetry; repetition; the “homology of its stanzas”), here, we are shown that these “two articulations are two sides of the same act”: that what occurs between mother and child (the content of the poem) and what occurs between the poem and the reader (who sees its “form”) are mutually dependent� The “action form” that the poem operates is uncontainable to the point that its very openness remains an open question; in ending with this question, the article could be said to instantiate the very structure its reading of the poem points to. Closing this section, Jasper Schagerl’s “Case and Circumstance” endeavors to demonstrate how, circa 1700, a new and historically concrete form emerged: the circumstantial case� This adds a conjectural aspect to the casus , of which Jolles, in Simple Forms , had perceived only the normative aspect� Cases are “transformed into ecologies of events, to be unfolded in their complexity,” and hence require weighing and judging as new practices of knowledge. In this process, the very application of the norm to the case leads paradoxically to an opening of the norm, as the judging of the case necessarily requires paying attention to its circumstances. In order to make the cases narratable, Thomasius develops a new, circumstantial style of storytelling which takes account of the diversity of “operational fields and forms of knowledge.” The two articles in the second section, “Traveling Forms,” both examine ways in which a short form can reemerge in another age or context, taking on new functions and acquiring new capabilities. In “Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism,” Florian Fuchs contrasts the use of the proverb in Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 1642 The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs with Gottfried Keller’s use of the same form in the Seldwyla novellas. In Harsdörffer, proverbs are exploited for the project of establishing German as a literary language: with their rootedness in the vernacular, they serve to warrant the genuineness and specificity of German. But in the process, their transformation into “high” literature vitiates the very qualities for which they are prized, relegating them to the lower regions of unrefined speech from which they had been only temporarily summoned. In Keller’s novellas too, prov- Introduction 105 erbs gesture toward preor extraliterary reality as residues of a pre-industrial, bygone world� But it is not some kind of folkloristic rootedness that interests Keller in the proverb, but rather its affordances: the purely structural or formalistic capabilities and the lifeworld effects it can produce. From the original vessels of language and common life, proverbs now become a device for the production of Keller’s “formulaic realism.” David Martyn’s “Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia ” examines what happens when a short form, the anecdote, reemerges under conditions that would seem least conducive to its use: in the age of what Adorno calls “damaged life�” For Adorno, as is well known, the ability to have experiences - the very stuff of anecdotes - has been lost to reification and false consciousness. As Martyn shows, Adorno finds a way out of this impasse by making use not of actual anecdotes, but rather of textual elements, such as descriptive details and truncated narratives, that can be seen as the remnants of what might, in another time or in another context, have taken the form of an anecdote. The remnants of the anecdote, a genre that has lost its footing in social reality, are shown to be the form that best fits the decimation of experience. The third section, “The Long and the Short of It,” brings three papers together that explore different and paradoxical ways in which the quantity or length of short forms escapes any simple determination� In an extended analysis of two aphoristic sentences by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jan Mieszkowski’s “Dashing Expectations” pursues the paradoxical logic underlying the very notion of the short form to its shortest extreme - the dash� In Mieskowski’s probing reading, the use of this infamously unruly punctuation mark manifests an abyssal play of expectation and surprise, of fulfilment and disappointment that confounds any simple notion of “shortness” or indeed any attempt to plausibly determine the length of any text� A dash can either say nothing or, as a mark pointing to what has not been said, can stand in for what surpasses what any text, however large, could ever say. The dash is at one and the same time the ultimate short form and the ultimate long form, “so extensive that it literally overwrites all other characters.” In this, it reveals a potential that may be a near ubiquitous characteristic of literary texts: each sentence would have the power “to go rogue” as it “eclipses the surrounding material by threatening to say more in one or two lines than will be imparted by the rest of the work�” The ways in which short and long forms can assume their places in a wide variety of relational constellations is also a focus of Erica Weitzman’s “Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis�” The article explores the dynamics of a specific kind of shortening or abbreviation, namely the “gloss” or parodistic summary of weighty works of literature in two authors circa 1900, the language skeptic Fritz Mauthner and Robert Walser. On 106 Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn the one hand, the gloss can amplify the status of the “long form” as its other, and it can do so, surprisingly, precisely by profaning or even demeaning the work it abridges. For by casting miniaturization as by nature parodistic, Mauthner’s glosses tacitly affirm “the transcendent status of great literature and its distance from ordinary life�” While Mauthner’s abridgements thus solidify the association of the trivial with the comic, Walser’s glosses upset this simple equation and in the process the hierarchies that normally obtain between “small” and “great” forms. The last contribution to this third section, Vanessa Barrera’s “Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures,” approaches the relationality of quantity from yet another angle, namely that of time. Focusing on Kafka’s odd time management - using the night hours, rather than the free afternoons his position at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungsanstalt afforded him; he regularly got off work at “2 oder 2⅓” - Barrera inquires whether the very limitations that seem to leave no time to do what one most wants to aren’t in fact the best possible condition for that very pursuit. The unique fecundity of stolen time depends on the very mechanisms that it challenges: Kafka needs the tiresome work at the office, which seems to prevent him from pursuing his career, to pursue his career. Drawing on Nietzsche and Adorno to help explain this temporal structure, Barrera reads Kafka’s short text “Die Prüfung” as revealing the workings of an alternative temporality, a time that cannot be clocked according to the measure of what otherwise occupies our lives� The last section, “Short in Long,” demonstrates what the study of short forms can gain from an examination of how they function as components of long texts� In “Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung ,” Jodok Trösch examines the intricate ways in which a long satirical work incorporates into its prose excerpts from popular songs and other elements that are in verse� In a meticulous examination of Geschichtklitterung ’s composite composition, Trösch shows how the verse of the short forms is seamlessly woven into the prose of the encompassing work, altering the nature both of the component elements and of the prose into which they are integrated. Here, short forms are not simply “elements” that are combined to make up a long form� Hidden in the prose, the verse and rhyme of the popular songs and short poetic forms take on an entirely new function: no longer attributes of poetry alone, they now serve to throw the entire distinction between poetry and prose into disarray� Arne Höcker’s “‘Minutendinger’: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle ,” finally, explores the complex relationships that a certain writing praxis, that of the internet diary, entertain with a literary form, the novel. The momentary, short, rapid, and seemingly formless praxis of Goetz’s daily jottings - ranging from fragmented poetological reflections to descriptions of quotidian routines to shopping lists - would seem to be the antithesis of the quintessential long form, Introduction 107 the novel. But in Höcker’s reading, diary entry and novel, short and long form reveal a tight and paradoxical reciprocal dependence� Höcker’s article opens up new perspectives on the novel as the genre that raises formlessness to the level of its own formal principle, thus vitiating any simple opposition between form and its other. Goetz’s novel is no simple compilation of diary entries, the small forms are not parts that combine into a large whole; rather, the practice of the small form is constitutive of the novel as a form itself� Both papers in this final section provide evidence for two of the central concerns of the volume: first, that short forms and the long text encompassing them are not simply altered by their mutual interaction, but are themselves constituted by their relationality; and secondly, that there is no simple opposition between short and long form� Notes 1 Quoted from Druck A , 1626. Translation here as elsewhere by editors. 2 We are indebted to the collegial exchanges with members of the mentioned Graduiertenkolleg� 3 As is often done in research on microfiction - a designation sometimes seen as applying to texts of at most one page - that has recently seen an impressive number of contributions� See Ette 2� 4 See Tynyanov� 5 See Koffka 542. For a useful general overview of the Gestalt psychologists, see Watson and Evans, Ch. 23. 6 Quoted from the section of this article attributed to Eva Geulen� 7 This potential of Jolles’s conception should be seen alongside others that have been in the focus of recent scholarship� On the temporality of Jolles’s simple forms and its implications for concepts of history outside of linear chronology, see Axer as well as Axer, Geulen, and Heimes. Axer draws out the specificity of the simple forms’ temporality in the context of other concepts of form in coeval literary and cultural theory� Works Cited Ash, Mitchell G. 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