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Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 39 New Conjunctures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 39 Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature General Editors Tobias Döring · Ansgar Nünning Donald E. Pease · Johannes Voelz 39 New Conjunctures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning All rights including the rights of publication, distribution and sales, as well as the right to translation, are reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording, taping, or information and retrieval systems - without written permission of the publisher. © 2025 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, D-72070 Tübingen www.narr.de · eMail: info@narr.de Elanders Waiblingen GmbH ISBN 978-3-381-14441-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-381-14442-6 (ePDF) ISBN 978-3-381-14443-3 (ePub) ISSN 0723-0338 Editors Tobias Döring , LMU München, Department für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Schellingstr. 3, 80799 München, Germany Ansgar Nünning , Universität Gießen, Institut für Anglistik, Otto-Behaghel-Straße 10, 35394 Gießen, Germany Donald E. Pease , English Department, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Johannes Voelz , Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Institut für England- & Amerikastudien, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60629 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Advisory Board Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh), Catherine Belsey † (University of Wales), Marshall Brown (University of Washington), Ronald Shusterman (Université Jean Monnet), Werner Sollors (Harvard University), Arne Zettersten (University of Copenhagen) 9 13 35 55 81 107 129 151 173 Contents Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning The Undead Arts and Humanities. Against the Swansong of Mourning and Decline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hope, Value, and Narrative Form Heidi Lucja Liedke Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction . . . . . . . . . . Magdalena Pfalzgraf Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies . . . . . Ansgar Nünning Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life. The Potential of a Scientific Metaphor and the Value of Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Diachronic Perspectives: Historicization across Fields and Genres Christine Schwanecke Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama: Epic Structures in Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607/ 08) . . . Alexandra Effe Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom . . Marion Gymnich Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature through the Lens of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cognition, Affect, and the Eudaimonic Turn Stella Butter Home-Comfort Studies. The Dis/ Comforts of Home in Contemporary British and American Pandemic Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 223 245 271 287 311 331 351 375 403 Vera Nünning Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet. The Persuasiveness of Fictional Stories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Deborah de Muijnck Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction. Establishing Cognitive and Affective Balance in Contemporary Sick-Lit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . More-than-Human Matters of Concern Liza Bauer Asking Animal Questions. Literary Animal Studies and the Polycrisis . . . . Hannah Klaubert Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism . . . Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies . World, Globe, Planet? World Literary Dynamics Jan Rupp Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Natalya Bekhta Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’. A Conceptual Challenge for the Current Theories of World Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Transnationalisation and Forms of Mobility, Work, and the Digital Carolin Gebauer Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anna-Lena Eick Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth Kovach “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents 425 431 List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contents 7 Acknowledgements This edited volume emerged from a lecture series entitled “New Conjunctures and Directions in Literary and Cultural Studies”, held in the summer of 2022 at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP). Founded in 2002, it is one of the first structured PhD programmes in Germany and the first to apply the model of a graduate school to the arts and humanities, a field where the German Individualpromotion had then been the norm. We would therefore like to thank the contributors to this volume, many of whom had presented their research in the keynote lecture series. This volume is furthermore a product of one characteristic of twenty-first century research: collaboration. We therefore thank Elizabeth Kovach, Silvia Casazza, and David E. Susa for organising the anniversary lecture series and for their invaluable support in the early stages of this volume. A particular thanks goes to To Uyen Nguyen for her substantial contribution to the editing process. We further like to thank Kathrin Heyng at Narr for her patience and guidance. Saarbrücken and Giessen, July 2025 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning Introduction 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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Berlin/ Boston: De Gruyter. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0001 32 Magdalena Pfalzgraf, Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis, and Ansgar Nünning Hope, Value, and Narrative Form Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction Heidi Lucja Liedke 1 Introduction According to the essayist and writer Joan Didion, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” (this is the title of a collection of non-fiction essays from 2006); for Aristotle, who uses the etymologically complex expression elpis - “a strange Greek word” (Kantos 2020: 417) - hope is an attitude towards the future; hope is proactive and comes close to a (realistic) imagining of a possible outcome not yet there (see also Grethlein 2024 who uses ‘hope’ and ‘Zuversicht’, in English possibly best translated as ‘outlook’, in a nearly synonymous fashion). In Ali Smith’s Autumn, one of the main protagonists, Daniel Gluck, who at the beginning of the narrative is a hundred years old, explains: “And whoever makes up the story makes up the world. […] So always try to welcome people into the home of your story” (Smith 2017: 119). To tell stories and to hope are inextricably related (creative) processes, I argue; both are practices, modes, and attitudes that characterise homo sapiens and distinguishes this species from other beings; both allow the narrating and/ or hoping individual to posit a slightly removed stance towards the here and now, to imagine worlds and to create a future. The Covid-19 pandemic has reminded us once more that societies without stories suffer. The internet, newspapers, and opinion pieces were overflowing with lists of things that would provide hope during lockdown - crucially, stories that are told in literary texts or on the dramatic stage were represented in all of those collections. In psychology and in the therapeutic context there is the subdiscipline of hope studies and hopeology, or hope theory. Matthew W. Gallagher’s and Shane J. Lopez’ Oxford Handbook of Hope (2017) is devoted to a “comprehensive overview of current knowledge regarding the science and practice of hope” but solely takes into account philosophical and psychological perspectives and questions surrounding mental health. In philosophy, there are numerous studies on hope in antiquity, for instance in the works of Aristotle and Aquinas (see 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Nussbaum 1986; Gravlee 2000; Caston/ Kaster 2016; Bobier 2017). In 2020, an edited collection was published on Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope (van den Heuvel), which sets out to provide an interdisciplinary over‐ view on the current research done on the concept of hope, yet interdisciplinarity in this case consists of perspectives from philosophy, theology, psychology, economics, sociology, health studies, ecology, and development studies and does not include literary studies. Adam Potkay’s 2022 monograph Hope. A Literary History turns to the topic in chapters resembling spotlights, beginning with antiquity and ending with Modernism. In a related manner, the edited collection The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive Change (Assmann et al. 2023) presents multiple perspectives on the role narrative has played for individuals and communities but in its insistence on ‘change’ seems to subscribe to a rather linear unilateral understanding of progress. What is missing from the research presented here is a thorough and critical investigation of depictions of hope and hoping in literary texts. In particular, I am interested in an analysis of contemporary fiction that is also informed by a narratological and pragmatic impetus to conceptualise specific kinds of writing and fiction as a formal expression of hope and hoping as a motor for the chosen texts. To provide a clear distinction from the terminology used in other disciplines, I suggest the term elpilogy to define this new subdiscipline and address this research gap. With this contribution, I want to suggest the necessity for this field and open up a space to examine the topic of hope, on a content level, but also on a narratological, pragmatic, and semantic level, as part of literary and cultural studies. For this reason, this chapter suggests the need for a new approach to literary texts that is focused on the hopeful and ethical potential of textual affordance. By privileging that which is directly seen over the latent, hidden, or underlying, this approach positions itself vis-à-vis several strands of thought which have been part of different ‘turns’ in the last thirty years: a) it is grounded in queer theory, in particular the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2002) and her thoughts on reparative reading and on José Esteban Muñoz’s (2019) concept of hope and queer utopia; b) it connects an interest in reparative reading to Stephen Best’s and Sharon Marcus’s ‘surface reading’ (2009) as well as to Rita Felski’s ideas concerning the limits of critique (2015) and the importance of understanding reading and interpreting literature as forging a relation to it (ibid. 2020). The two exemplary novels I have chosen for this contribution illustrate how hope as form works by opening up surfaces of possibility. In the case of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021) it is the epistolary form that, while harking back to the eighteenth century, opens up a meshwork 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 36 Heidi Lucja Liedke of possibilities and hope for the two protagonists of the novel to position themselves with regard to the questions of how to lead lives that are ethically responsible and personally satisfying. Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016), similarly, relies on the interpersonal exchange of two main characters. This exchange does not happen via letters but through visits and memories when Elisabeth visits the much older Daniel Gluck, who is in a care facility. The novel mainly consists of flashbacks that are rendered in David’s dreams and Elisabeth’s recollections of her childhood and her conversations with Daniel. In Autumn, it is the fragmentary which suggests an unfinishedness of the stories that are told. While the two exemplary novels provide glimpses of how hope can be found and how it figures in texts, this contribution also touches on an existing debate especially surrounding the status of reading in the digital age (see Rubery and Price 2020; Benesch 2021; Griem 2021). It makes the case for hope as a vital component of the post-critique debate raised some twenty years ago by scholars such as Bruno Latour (2004) and Rita Felski (2008; 2015), who in turn built on Michael Polanyi (1958) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2002), but also Susan Sontag (1966). A main reason, it seems, that there is hardly any research on hope in literary and cultural studies is what Muñoz has referred to as the vulnerability of the concept to be pilloried for its “naïveté, impracticality, or lack of rigor” (Muñoz 2019: 10). What better way to counter an accusation than to use the skills of a literary scholar? If naïveté refers to foolishness, lack of judgment and experience, a hopeful mode that excavates what is visible and confronts it to find directions for future actions can hardly be called naive. Crucially, accusations of a lack of rigor are precisely the kinds of doubts put forward by representatives of Freudo-Marxist symptomatic, suspicious, or resistant forms of reading that would never allow a text to be read without overcoming multiple obstacles. Yet there lies the second myopia: a hopeful stance towards texts or relationships does not romanticise obstacles but actually confronts them directly rather than evading them by recurring to the hidden or invisible. The following two sections will place my considerations within the relevant scholarly context and in particular turn to Ernst Bloch and José Esteban Muñoz to then provide some preliminary examples of making visible forms of hopes in contemporary fiction in the third and fourth section of the contribution. 2 (Re)turning, (Re)surfacing As Vera and Ansgar Nünning have summarised succinctly, the last years have seen many ‘turns’ in the humanities, not all of which may have indeed turned out to be as programmatic as they first seemed to be (2020). Doris Bachmann-Medick 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 37 identifies seven distinct cultural turns, among them the interpretative turn and the cultural turn (see 2020: 54). Among even more recent turns, the eudaimonic turn stands out as one that, more emphatically than the other turns, leaves the immediate sphere of textuality and literary studies behind and thinks about the responsibility of humanities scholarship as a whole to highlight the importance (to speak of ‘benefits’ would only be to succumb to neoliberal discursive logic) of interdisciplinary collaborations. ‘Interdisciplinarity’ is indeed a term that has acquired a rather bad reputation and lost its actual meaning in being reduced to a buzzword required of any successful grant application. This is unfortunate, as the idea itself is complex: As a scholar who has worked in several interdisciplinary networks, such as Centres for Advanced Studies, multi-disciplinary humanities departments and collaborative research centres, I am well aware of the joys of exchanging thoughts with fellow researchers of different backgrounds. However, when it comes to specific outcomes of such interdisciplinary collaborations, in my experience the conversations with colleagues from related disciplines usually - for better or worse - end up in footnotes. They may encourage one to phrase one’s thoughts in a more precise manner, certainly, as one sometimes tends to employ shortcuts that assume the reader is familiar with a given reference. Through interdisciplinary conversations, I believe, one’s own scholarship is forced to leave its comfort zone, avoid lazy truisms, and hone one’s own standpoint. Yet, there is also a value in refocusing one’s attention on one’s own subject at hand, for instance, the study of literary texts, which is under constant threats and attacks of being outsourced at many universities around the world. This value, I would argue, lies in honing a scholar’s field in concentrated description and a reflection on what language has the potential to portend - a skill necessary now more than ever in times of AI where especially students of literature seem to lose their awareness for how human expression is more nuanced and intricate than statements produced without any footing. The discipline of literary studies has always-already needed to justify its position - in contrast to other disciplines such as classicism and history. This is reflected, for instance, in the lateness of English being accepted as an independent course of study at Oxbridge (Katz 2022: 13). I therefore agree with Ansgar and Vera Nünning that the term ‘eudaimonic turn’ and the idea behind it may be too unspecific or perhaps even too far-fetched to signal a feasible perspective. Further, I want to shift the focus from their interest in ‘forms of good life’ as they can be fostered by literature to asking instead how literary texts - as models of different forms of life - in their constructedness and use of language can become springboards to provide connection points for readers and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 38 Heidi Lucja Liedke a space that goes beyond the immediate diegesis. In this sense, I continue the calls expressed by scholars such as Stephen Best, Sharon Marcus, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Rita Felski that I see as being closely interrelated in their impetus to bring to the surface the role of surfaces and through this revalue their meaning and deconstruct the dichotomy of surface(s) as ‘shallow’ or ‘meaningless’ versus depth(s) as ‘complex’ and ‘meaningful’. This dichotomy has been reinforced in the course of the second half of the twentieth century with the rise of literary theories grounded in psychoanalysis and Marxism that would focus on the latent and hidden; Paul Ricœur aptly compared Freudian quests for the hidden meaning in the unconscious with the interpretative hunt of the literary reader to decode symbolic meaning, which was termed a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (in Best and Marcus 2009: 5). In 1981, Frederic Jameson emphatically described interpretation as “unmasking” (in ibid.: 5), thus further cementing the role of the textual surface as a mask and distortion that obscures ‘something else’. Sedgwick, in reply to that, conceptualised reparative forms of reading that resist political pessimism and despair; they resist the urge to conclude that there is no point in loving, in caring for others, and in wanting more. To be engaged means to position oneself as a reparative reader - a reader who refuses to accept the seemingly knowing, anxious, ‘paranoid’ certainty that no unthinkable horrific event will ever take her by surprise. What follows from this is that for a reader who is thus positioned it is necessary and constitutive to experience surprises, some of them terrible, others positive. In 2024 a renewed interest in the ‘thing’ - that which is perceptible, visible, and evident: the textual surface - is called for. There are multiple reasons for that but I want to only mention three that seem to be most pertinent: first, the aesthetics of social media are primarily propelled forward by surfaces, but of a very misleading kind; media such as TikTok and Instagram work qua the power of surfaces but only in a way that potentially misinforms or provides shortcuts to information; second, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought about a renewed need for community and togetherness and, third, in 2025 more so than for a long time after the end of the Cold War, the world is in a state of wars and anxieties, not unlike what Bruno Latour - written under the impression of the terrorist attacks in the World Trade Center in 2001 - has described as an atmosphere of Wars. So many wars. Wars outside and wars inside. Cultural wars, science wars, and wars against terrorism. Wars against poverty and wars against the poor. Wars against ignorance and wars out of ignorance. My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 39 More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? (2004: 225) Latour’s article is an intervention of a self-critical kind as he also questions the premises of his own profession. Arguably, for humanities scholars it is especially difficult to differentiate between their ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ selves as they mostly work and think outside of a nine-to-five regime. To ask the questions Latour asks, therefore, is not only to ask what kind of a scholar one is, but also what kind of an attitude one wants to take toward the world. Latour’s diagnosis is acutely relevant twenty years after the publication of his article. The now is characterised by an alarming amount of hidden, contradictory, and potentially fake news. Literature can provide a counter-space to that, especially when it is approached carefully and attentively. The surface of the literary text, when regarded as consisting of an “intricate verbal structure” (Best and Marcus 2009: 10) and embraced as “an affective and ethical stance” (ibid.) can project an attitude and relationality towards others and the world which can provide hope. In demarcating my understanding of hope and hoping, I want to turn to Ernst Bloch in particular but also Muñoz’s reading of him, which is informed by queer theory. 3 “The most powerful telescope”: Hope and Attachment In Das Prinzip Hoffnung (The Principle of Hope), Ernst Bloch provides a treatise on hope that takes on a perspective that is primarily grounded in Marxist theory but also affect theory. For Bloch, [t]he emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them, cannot know nearly enough of what it is that makes them inwardly aimed, of what may be allied to them outwardly. The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. (Bloch 1996: 3) In other words, hope can awaken unexplored capacities in a person which do not stay immobile but actually constitute a movement forward. Fear, as Bloch points out, can also be anticipatory, but hope is taken “as a directing act of a cognitive kind” (Bloch 1996: 12). Consequently, the “imagination and the thoughts of future intention described in this way are utopian, this again not in a narrow sense of the word which only defines what is bad […], but rather in fact in the newly tenable sense of the forward dream, of anticipation in general” (Bloch 1996: 12). Here, the sense of a direction beyond the momentary, a movement to a - primarily temporal - beyond is crucial. Crucially, as if to counter any claims 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 40 Heidi Lucja Liedke that such hopeful thinking may be akin to having one’s ‘head in the clouds’ Bloch stresses that the contents of this most immediate nearness still ferment entirely in the darkness of the lived moment as the real word-knot, world-riddle. Utopian consciousness wants to look far into the distance, but ultimately only in order to penetrate the darkness so near it of the just lived moment, in which everything that is both drives and is hidden from itself. In other words: we need the most powerful telescope, that of polished utopian consciousness, in order to penetrate precisely the nearest nearness. (Bloch 1996: 12) In Bloch’s thinking, hope is still functional and grounded in the present, only leaving it momentarily in order to come back with an attitude that metaphorically resembles a telescope. Hope is “astonished contemplation” - and, as such, could as well be used to describe the main characteristic of a reader of literature and a literary scholar. Isn’t it curiosity, restlessness, and the will to expand one’s capacities that motivates these kinds of readers? Similarly, optimism, as Lauren Berlant describes it, is “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept or scene” (2011: 1-2). Both Bloch and Berlant describe hope and optimism, respectively, as emotions and attachments that are supposed to compensate for a lack and the sense of loss and deferred arrival (as in a state of not-having-arrived); both scholars use the semantic fields of force, movement, and directionality. In the two case studies discussed below, this ‘force’ manifests itself primarily in the form of (playful) dialogue or in the special form of exchanged letters which are both dialogic but in the moment of their creation come closer to a soliloquy. Bloch uses two other specifications which are useful in unpacking the ways in which hope for him is not elusive: First, he differentiates between abstract hope, which would be similar to wishing or wishful thinking, and concrete or educated hope, which is “a mode of hoping that is cognizant of exactly what obstacles present themselves in the face of obstacles that so often feel insurmountable” (Muñoz 2019: 10). When faced with obstacles, disappointments are necessarily part of the equation: Political and historical situations turn out to be disappointing, lovers let one down. It is, however, out of that friction that hope thrives. Acts of imagination and of anticipation need disappointments and moments of astonishment. In his Cruising Utopia, Muñoz engages with Bloch in order to theorise his understanding of queerness, which, for him “is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing […] Queerness 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 41 is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (2019: 1). It is noteworthy that Muñoz uses Bloch as one of his main trajectories even though, as he acknowledges, it is “a risky move because it has been rumoured that Bloch did not hold very progressive opinions on issues of gender and sexuality” (2019: 2). Rumours create suspicion create rejection - it seems apt that Muñoz then decides to use Bloch’s theories as an opening in queer thought as well as if to pick up on the idealist impetus and reappropriate the framework for his own means. To reiterate: What Muñoz primarily picks up on is the anticipatory orientation and movement of hope, its embracing of complexity and obstacles (rather than banal optimism and daydreaming, which can potentially be unthinking and lack a proactive outlook towards a situation in the immediate present or near future), and the intersection of concrete utopias and educated hope, the latter being the realm of “historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential” (2019: 3). Muñoz is one of the few to assertively (dare to) utter hope as an attitude within the queer existence - as mentioned, such positions are often rejected, as queerness, as he himself acknowledges “is not yet here” (1); as long as queerness is still a target of hatred, othering, and marginalisation, it indeed takes a lot of hope to even exist. Yet looking at the potential of this despiteness there is something to be learned from these discussions of hope and queerness also for the study of literature: Is it not also a bold act to read stories despite their being relatively uneconomical, both in terms of usually not having a direct practical purpose and representing a rather impractical form of getting a ‘message’ across? Should literature not precisely be the space to practice and rehearse expressing concrete utopias, engaging with different literary forms as playgrounds for hopeful attachment towards a nearness not yet near? Hauling this concept into the realm of literary studies from a queer perspec‐ tive, Bloch’s thoughts can be applied to the potentiality literary texts can afford. The term affordance itself has gained renewed traction through Caroline Levine’s Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, where she begins her argument by extracting the common definition of the term ‘form’ as it has been used in both the social and aesthetic realm to denote “an arrangement of elements - an ordering, patterning, or shaping” (2015: 3). In cataloguing how form can be both constraining, travelling, and involved in political work (when literary forms, in specific historical contexts, make certain kinds of expression possible, for instance), Levine points to how form can be understood as a link between the aesthetic and the sociocultural, or the fixed and the unfinished. In order to grasp these contradictions inherent in the functionality of form, she uses the term ‘affordance’, which in design theory describes “the potential uses 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 42 Heidi Lucja Liedke or actions latent in materials and designs” (2015: 6) - potential uses that can often be contradictory or unexpected (cotton, for instance, affords both softness and sturdiness). Turning to literature specifically, Levine writes that “[e]ach form can only do so much”, yet encourages readers and scholars to “ask instead what potentialities lie latent - though not always obvious - in aesthetic and social arrangements” (6-7). What I do find useful in Levine’s argumentation is her rebuttal of Marxist rejections of literary and aesthetic form as epiphenomenal. Such a rejection is limiting as it does not sufficiently acknowledge that reality, or in Hayden White’s words, “social formations” (in Levine 2015: 14), are also organised by forms. Where Levine loses her potentiality is in her dwelling so much on the constraints of individual forms. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus are more hopeful in this regard. They have coined the term ‘surface reading’ (2009) in order to dismantle the dichotomy between textual surfaces as being deceptive and in need of being torn away in order to reveal something that is ‘true’. Written out of a similar historical urgency to that of Latour, Best and Marcus redirect scholars’ and readers’ attention to the surface as that “what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (2009: 9, original emphasis). They then define different characteristics of the surface, two of which are particularly salient in connection with my considerations on hope as form: First, they speak of the task of the reader to “embrace […] the surface as an affective and ethical stance” (10) by which they mean a kind of attachment to texts that accepts and enjoys (? ) them rather than using them as a means to achieve something else, especially perhaps perfect one’s own mastery (as a particularly skilful reader, for instance). Chiming in with Susan Sontag, they also think of this stance as an “erotics of art” that resembles an attending more than (dominating) mastery. Second, they highlight the freedom of attention that can come into being if a reader attends to a text’s surface. Such an attention “assumes that texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves” (11) - it can even be anti-capitalist, as, in a nod to New Criticism and modernist literature, the “accent on immersion in texts (without paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value)” (16) allows for an “immersion in texts [which] frees us from the apathy and instrumentality of capitalism by allowing us to bathe in the artwork’s disinterested purposelessness” (14). This attentiveness can indeed take on the form of “a kind of freedom” (16). The case studies in the following sections illustrate in what ways form in the two selected novels does indeed constitute forms of hope and hoping that are always-already reflecting on obstacles and on how they can be expressed despite being seemingly naïve, ordinary, or “unnatural” (Smith 2016: 83). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 43 4 Invulnerable to the Presence of a Beautiful World The Irish writer Sally Rooney polarises readers. As Merve Emre has summarised so astutely, Rooney’s novels have been widely praised but at the same time criticised for their moral simplicity, their idle politics, their sexual naiveté, and their banal neuroses; for the slight touch of stupidity that attends their language of type, whether moral (good/ bad), political (liberal/ Marxist), economic (working-class/ middle-class), psychological (normal/ traumatized), or sexual (straight/ queer). (2024: n.p.) Rooney, indeed, plays with these types in all of her novels published until now, her debut Conversations with Friends (2017), her second novel Normal People (2018) and her third work Beautiful World, Where Are You? (2021). Her first two novels are primarily coming-of-age-novels and focus on student life, (romantic) relationships, and trauma. Arguably, in Beautiful World, the characters, although in their early thirties, are still in the process of coming of age. However, they reflect more on their position within the world and how to relate to it rather than being engaged in significant events. Scholars such as Catherine Gallagher and Lisa Zunshine, respectively, speak about the novel genre as consisting of individuals who are “imaginary concoctions” (Gallagher 2005: 62) and that reading novels is keeping track of the characters’ “unreality”, of remembering “that literary characters are not real people at all” (Zunshine 2006: 17). For Gallagher, referents for character types are “the thing-in-the-world” (2005: 62) - always more, however, than ‘just a thing’. As Emre comments, characters can be shape-shifters, and they are always in contact with their referents. Depending on their position in the novel or on what the reader (wants to) see(s), through character types, the novel can be either bound to the world or freed from it (2024: n. p.). The characters in Rooney’s novel Beautiful World seem to be aware of the fact that they are constructions; Eileen and Alice also seem aware that they are extensions of their creator, Rooney. As the novel goes on, the reader develops an understanding for, and perhaps even attachment to the characters, but not as individuals - rather, in their relationality to others. This is also mirrored in the enacting of distance when the two friends can only be intimate with one another (as friends) in emails they write while they are many kilometres apart. Echoing the common motif of estrangement in Irish literature, they are out of touch with their lives. They are also, as is so often the case with Rooney’s characters, Marxists, who struggle with the fact that they are benefiting from capitalism (at least in the case of Alice). Alice, a well-known and rich novelist, prefers the anonymity of Tinder and meeting a man, Felix, who has no idea who 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 44 Heidi Lucja Liedke she is. He works in a warehouse and is not interested in literature. Eileen, once a brilliant student, now has a rather unsatisfying job at a literary magazine and considers herself working-class. She is in an on-off-romance with a man called Simon, who is engaged to another woman. Eileen and Alice have been friends since the first year of their studies of English and former roommates, engaged in a triangular friendship with Simon, who would visit them regularly, “standing with his back against the radiator, arguing with Alice about God [Simon is devoutly Catholic], and cheerfully criticizing their poor housekeeping skills” (2021: 30). The plot is related in the uneven-numbered chapters, and readers are in‐ troduced to both female protagonists first via heterodiegetic narration and external focalisation as “A woman sat in a hotel bar, watching the door” (3) in chapter 1 and “At twenty past twelve on a Wednesday afternoon, a woman sat behind a desk in a shared office in Dublin city centre, scrolling through a text document” (19) in chapter 3. As each of the six chapters devoted to each of the characters’ storylines could, theoretically, stand on its own, it is telling that these first sentences do not provide any names - no names, no agency. Those first sentences achieve three things: they keep us at bay, at a distance; they anticipate different positionalities in terms of social status of the two women, different positions within the net of capitalist employment [sitting in a hotel bar vs. sharing an office]; conversely, they imply a certain comparability of a ‘female existence’ and, more specifically, address the question of the role of women in Irish fiction. In the novel, it is the epistolary form that, while harking back to the eighteenth century, opens up a meshwork of possibilities for the two protagonists to position themselves with regard to the questions of how to lead lives that are ethically responsible and personally satisfying. Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have recently argued that ‘epistolarity’ as a feature of novels and short stories seems to have been re-emerging since the late twentieth century (2018). They distinguish between “epistolary fiction” as “narrative literature which includes epistolary modes that propel the plot and are essential for the structural denotation of meaning” (2018: 16) and epistolary modes (ranging from letters to digital forms of communication) that are “integrated into the narrative” (ibid.). Contextualising the epistolary and thinking about reasons for its continuous popularity, Löschnigg and Schuh also point to Linda Kauffman’s 1992 study on the epistolary in modern fiction where she claims that the “very looseness of its [the epistolary mode’s] conventions has made it resilient, adaptable, and relevant in diverse historical epochs” (xiv). Notably, this characterisation in its exact form also can be used to refer to the essay, also usefully described as a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 45 mode, and its versatility and adaptability throughout the ages (see, for instance, Aldrich 2016). In differentiation from Löschnigg’s and Schuh’s rather dichotomous classi‐ fication of the epistolary, Beautiful World, Where Are You? presents a third category of uses of the epistolary: The emails do not quite propel the plot, but they are also not quite merely integrated into the narrative. They are also not set apart graphically from the rest of the text. They do indeed represent essayistic monologues uttered by Eileen and Alice that hover slightly above the narrative and function like meta-commentaries rather than actual plot devices. They are meta-narrative devices, constantly reflecting on the limitations and possibilities of fiction itself; they are also meta-authorial devices in that Rooney, too, may insert herself via the character of Alice, the over-aware and occasionally insecure successful young writer. In their distance from the text, however, they constitute textual spaces of hope and possibility: What the characters cannot or do not want to say as characters-in-the-plot they can express as characters-removed-from-the plot. They constitute, therefore, a force that enables the characters to move out of themselves, and try out moving towards different ideas, different considerations of their relationality toward others. As mentioned, the dialogic form and the soliloquy are the frames the characters use in which to ‘play out’ these thought processes. The passages themselves have a different tonality than the rest of the narrative. Such a temporary removal within the diegesis, that is both marked temporally (the letters both look back and to some extent fill the gaps between the plot-centred chapters) and spatially (they are separate chapters) creates intra-diegetic spaces of possibility, in that - similar to the essay - thoughts and worries can be ‘tried out’. Throughout the novel, the even-numbered chapters provide different per‐ spectives on the uneven-numbered chapters and expand the glimpses one gets of the main characters. While Alice, in chapter 1, seems nondescript and closed-off while on her first date with Felix, chapter 2 begins with Alice’s expression of worries and self-doubt: “You should know that our correspondence is my way of holding on to life, taking notes on it, and thereby preserving something of my - otherwise almost worthless, or even entirely worthless - existence of this rapidly degenerating planet…” (2021: 15). This is hyperbole, certainly, and Alice also includes this preamble to make her friend Eileen feel guilty for not writing back sooner; at the same time, however, the emails are just that: a communication by letters, co-responses. Deriving from medieval Latin correspondentia, the term denotes “congruity, harmony, agreement” (OED). This harmony cannot be interrupted by the plot, which is why chapter 4 then can directly pick up with chapter 2 and Alice’s guilt on being dependent 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 46 Heidi Lucja Liedke on a convenience store and the lifestyle it represents, from the relying on plastic-bottles and pre-packaged lunches. It then seems irrelevant that chapter 3 provides an introduction to Eileen’s childhood and youth, her parents and her complicated relationship with Simon - in chapter 4, instead, Eileen posits - as if also aware of this incongruity and break in the narrative - that the “present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content” (2021: 39). As this structure continues throughout Beautiful World, the characters emerge as characters who do not primarily act but write and read. It is telling, perhaps, that Rooney has spoken about the centrality of emails also in her own life as a means to converse with her own friends and how “the voice that I have when I’m writing emails feels like my voice” (in Nolan 2017: n.p.). It is for that reason that despite the necessary scepticism regarding the reliability of letters (or emails) since the inception of the epistolary novel in the eighteenth century, the letters seem ‘truer’ than the plot chapters. This is because in them, they rehearse how to apprehend people and situations, how to apprehend what it means to be a flawed human being - and to still hope for a chance to catch a glimpse of the beauty in the world, for instance in the shape of long-standing friendships. Through the letters, the characters allow themselves to be vulnerable, to express the obstacles they are facing, especially concerning a mismatch between their ethical outlook on life and their actions, but also to come to terms with their hopes and worries. Letters, as is typical for epistolary fiction, are, of course, also performative, presenting crumbs leading the way towards how the characters want to be seen. But crucially, they are also like backstage passes, tickets granting a view of the characters’ vulnerability. I agree with Emre, who argues that reading the novel is “like looking at a row of letters through lenses of an incrementally stronger resolution” (2024: n.p.), especially since in chapter 25, the friends finally reunite, when Eileen and Simon visit Alice and Felix and stay with them for a few days. The remaining six chapters of the novel seem to rush somewhat towards tentative, admittedly heteronormative, new phases in the characters’ lives - engagement, starting a family, leading a committed relationship. After having exchanged emails for a long time, when they meet on the platform, they embrace, “unspeaking … for a second, two seconds, three” (Rooney 2021: 250). In this moment, words do not matter, nor does the mundane banality of the busy train station; in this moment, they are unaware, or something more than unaware - … [they are] somehow invulnerable to, untouched by, vulgarity and ugliness, glancing for a moment into something deeper, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 47 something concealed beneath the surface of life, not unreality but a hidden reality: the presence at all times, in all places, of a beautiful world. (250) As if echoing the concerns of surface reading, this is an appeal to look closer beneath the immediate surface (as in distortions, lies people tell each other, pretences) to see that everywhere, potentially, there is hope for something like a virtuous life, one in which one’s own vulgarity and ugliness (for this is what the characters in the novel grapple with) does not constitute an obstacle. There is hope, yet while being able to express it needs to be practiced in/ with words, it is this embrace that captures it best - Bloch’s “most powerful telescope”. Hope can be found in everyday scenes such as eating breakfast together “with clouds of steam from the kettle, clattering of plates and cups, sunlight billowing through the back window” (259), it can be found in watching their respective partners get acquainted with one another, talking to another “their shadows cast behind them on the sand, dappled blue” (266), it can be found when Felix answers Alice’s question whether she loves him with “Jesus, God, yes” (274). Eileen is the one to end the novel in an email to Alice; looking ahead to what awaits her as she writes about her pregnancy, she seems aware of the effect such a collection of scenes as presented in the final chapters might have on (symptomatic? ) readers. Her answer, pre-emptively countering accusations of naïveté, is: “And I want that - to prove that the most ordinary thing about human beings is not violence or greed but love and care. To prove it to whom, I wonder. Myself, maybe” (337). Crucially, violence and greed as characteristic for the world in which Eileen and the others live and the people they encounter, as obstacles they face, are pushed aside and reassigned a hopeful value: if only to themselves. 5 “Language is Like Poppies” - On Reading as a Constancy Ali Smith’s Autumn, the first novel in her Seasonal Quartet, is likewise structured around a friendship that is glued together by stories the characters tell each other and by mutual acts of hopeful imagination. Dubbed the first Brexit novel by Sarah Lyall (2017) and others, Laura Schmitz-Justen sums up the doubts regarding the importance of the topic in the novel by pointing to how the term Brexit is not even mentioned until Spring, the third novel (see 2022: 318; see also Crown 2016; Wally 2018: 77; Tönnies and Henneböhl 2019: 181). At the same time, descriptions such as the following are very context-specific, setting the stage for an atmosphere of doom and disinformation. The term Brexit is that-which-must-not-be-named because it does not have to be named, as it is on everyone’s mind in the summer of 2016: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 48 Heidi Lucja Liedke All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic. All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they’d done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing. All across the country, people looked up Google: what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish passport applications. […] All across the country, nobody spoke about it. All across the country, nobody spoke about anything else. (2016: 59-60, original emphasis) The anaphoric sentence structure draws attention to the omnipresent worries on people’s minds in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum; the whole three-page chapter is structured in that manner. The passage is a reference to the first sentence of the novel (which reads: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That’s the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it’s in their nature”, 3), which is in turn a reference to the opening of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and furthermore evokes Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). Two novels, written one hundred years apart, one about the time of the French Revolution, one about the violent impact of colonialism in Igboland (today’s south-eastern Nigeria) in the late nineteenth century, constitute two foundational pillars, and serve as reminders of the cruelties humans have inflicted on one another from the beginning of time, in modernity in an even more rapid succession, as “That’s the thing about things.” Autumn, I argue, disrupts this repetitiveness and thing-ness of history manifesting itself in the present by recurring to a mode that is not focused on thing-ness but on hope. Centred on the intergenerational friendship of Elisabeth Demand and Daniel Gluck, who meet as next-door neighbours, the novel in particular puts forward the potential of interpersonal attachment and hope as a mode that enables people to expand their own capacities in Berlant’s understanding of a ‘force’. The novel also depicts acts of hope as forms of attention that allow the bearer of the gaze to see beyond the thing-ness of the here and now. More abstractly, this is enacted by numerous references to reading and the role of the imagination and, more specifically, to the ongoing impact of the pop artist Pauline Boty on Daniel as he looks back on his life and thinks about what brought him joy. During one of their first encounters, when Elisabeth is eleven and Daniel around eighty, they strike up a conversation which is immediately concerned with play and puns: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 49 Hello, he said. What you reading? Elisabeth showed him her empty hands. Does it look like I’m reading anything? she said. Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant. A constant what? Elisabeth said. A constant constancy, Daniel said. […] Words don’t get grown, Elisabeth said. They do, Daniel said. Words aren’t plants, Elisabeth said. Words are themselves organisms, Daniel said. Oregano-isms, Elisabeth said. Herbal and verbal, Daniel said. Language is like poppies. It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about. (2016: 68-69) When everything is potentially a story, it seems apt to never allow oneself to stop reading. Daniel’s definition of words as organisms connects with notions of surface and reparative reading: Rather than digging to the roots of the plant, attention needs to be given to that which is visible. Later on, the two play a game together that is called “I tell you the first line of a story”. Here Daniel’s and Elisabeth’s views on what can and cannot be made up clash: There is no point in making up a world, Elisabeth said, when there’s already a real world. There’s just the world, and there’s the truth about the world. You mean, there’s the truth, and there’s the made-up version of it that we get told about the world, Daniel said. No. The world exists. Stories are made up, Elisabeth said. […] And whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story. That’s my suggestion. (2016: 119) This is an echo of Eileen’s wish to prove to herself that it can be an ethical project to manifest love and care as the most ordinary features of human life. It also connects back to the ways in which literature can be approached and reading can be practised, namely as an attitude of hope. When Elisabeth’s mother hears about how her daughter and the elderly neighbour spend their time - for instance, when he tells her “about a woman whose body is made up of pictures instead of body. It’s perfectly clear” (82) - the mother’s initial reaction is to call this “Unnatural. Unhealthy” (83). So the pair of friends face the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 50 Heidi Lucja Liedke obstacle of a friendship that is ‘forbidden’; Daniel throughout his life grapples with the obstacles his losses (of his sister, of his health) create. Daniel uses his imagination to recall those collages by Pauline Boty that have lingered on with him - when studying art history, Elisabeth later writes her dissertation on Boty and argues that “art like this examines and makes possible a reassessment of the outer appearances of things by transforming them into something other than themselves” (226). Since Boty’s collages have been lost for a long time, her artwork could not realise this potential, but only constituted renewed loss and “a process of renewed fragmentation” (Schmitz-Justen 2022: 325). Yet Daniel, through his imagination and his ability to verbalise his recollections of the paintings, has contributed to Boty’s becoming visible in another form: in Elisabeth’s attachment to her art in her dissertation. These are hopeful acts of connection that create counterworlds and counternarratives that always have one purpose: encourage people to focus on that which is visible and prevent it from being overlooked, erased, or forgotten. This is what Daniel’s sister has expressed to him in a letter (there it is again, the meta-narrative device used to deliver the necessary commentary): It’s a question of how we regard our situation … how we look and see where we are, and how we choose, if we can, when we are seeing, undeceivedly, not to despair and, at the same time, how best to act. Hope is exactly that, that’s all it is, a matter of how we deal with the negative acts towards human beings by other human beings in the world … and that most important of all we’re here for a mere blink of the eyes, that’s all. (189-190, original emphasis) That’s all it is. 6 Preliminary Conclusion It is all, but it also isn’t all. Hope does not need to be dismissed as representing a banal form of optimism - hope, as this chapter suggests, is everywhere and can be put to a creative mode in contemporary fiction. While hope as a mode and attitude connects with forms of reading such as reparative and surface reading, it can be found in contemporary fiction both as a topic that the characters grapple with but especially also on a formal level, when the texts themselves are bound together by structures that offer additional, telescopic views into their characters’ minds and allow them to express their uncertainties and worries. These structures are necessarily expressed within those spaces in the narratives that I have referred to as constituting the ‘not quite’: not quite belonging to the plot but at the same time creating opportunities for the characters to relate 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 Hope As Form: Writing Hope in Twenty-First Century Fiction 51 themselves - to their dialogical partners and to themselves. Hope can also be found when the constitutive elements of literature - language and words - are played with to create less rigid forms of relating to the world. Elpilogy, then, can be the study of hoping as a relationality towards the stories one creates (also to oneself) and towards others. It is hardly surprising that such modes can gain new traction in a political and social environment that confronts the individual with an increasing number of obstacles. Crucially, however, without this awareness of obstacles, hope would not be possible. 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Ohio: The Ohio State University Press. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0002 54 Heidi Lucja Liedke Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies Magdalena Pfalzgraf 1 Introduction In this chapter, I will sketch some current points of friction in the study of Anglophone postcolonial literatures. While some are specific to this field, I argue that postcolonial studies shares matters of concern which have been identified with a larger “Crisis in the Humanities” (Perloff 2004) that has defined the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and more precisely, the study of (English) literature. These are, among other things, a crisis of legitimacy, which, as argued in this volume’s introduction, does not solely originate from external factors but also arises from within the field itself. In the case of postcolonial studies, these are very specifically connected to the field’s relation to its moment of origin - literary studies - and its contemporary development and public perception. This chapter is written at a specific point in the field’s history, when postcolonialism is no longer merely an academic field of inquiry unknown and irrelevant outside of the academe, but increasingly discussed as a political force in society, in particular in relation to the surge in antisemitic rhetoric and violence following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Taking this critical moment as a starting point, the present chapter enquires into how, as a subfield of English literary studies, postcolonial studies could become susceptible to and associated with such goals and standpoints. One of the problems identified is that the rather sweeping umbrella term ‘postcolonial’ and the resulting disciplinary uncertainty have enabled a shift in focus from scholarship to worldview, ideology, and activism. The other is the distance to literary studies, which was once the core of postcolonial studies but has been relegated to the background in the course of an increasing ambition to become politically effective. A further concern is the primacy of critique, which is directly related to this dilemma: One of the problems is that for Anglophone literature emerging outside of Europe or North America, the analytical framework is automatically postcolonialism. However, postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 studies is perceived not merely as an academic discipline and mode of inquiry but as inherently intertwined with a political standpoint and agenda. This includes expectations regarding the field’s analytical tools, teaching styles, and political standpoint. Moreover, it comes with expectations on how one approaches and teaches literary texts: namely, always with a primary interest in uncovering - and dismantling - power structures and lingering imperial legacies. In short, we are thoroughly attuned to critique and ‘suspicious reading’. My argument, following on from that, is that much of postcolonial studies’ practice, steeped in deconstruction and ideological critique, enforces a mimetic and utilitarian perspective on ‘textual work’, which includes the neglect of literary reception as aesthetic experience and of the literary text’s poietic potential, not to mention its capacity for expressing universal aspects of the human experience. I also argue that this development has gone even further, to the point where the hermeneutics of suspicion, originally intended as a mode of critical reading applied to the literary text, is now performed by the text itself, and that readers adopt a gesture of alignment and allyship, positioning themselves alongside the text against a common adversary. Building on arguments by Latour (2004), Perloff (2004), and Felski (2015; 2020), and in a post-critique spirit, this chapter identifies a persistent tendency in postcolonial studies to neglect literary studies as well as the positive uses of literature which go beyond its role of interrogating and exposing power structures. Affection, pleasure, and the question of the literary - what makes a literary text different from another form of expression - is too often an overlooked dimension in this field. In following this line of thought I am also aligning myself with Nünning, Nünning, and Scherr (2021), who ask “why literature is still worth bothering with in the 21 st century, and how literary studies could be reconfigured in ways that would enhance its chances of coping with its current legitimation crisis and securing a blossoming future” (4). They join the voices of those who argue that the prevalent mode of critique in the humanities needs to be expanded and “complemented by a problemsolving paradigm as one of the main purposes of research and teaching” (5) to reinvigorate the field’s relevance for a twenty-first century world. The need to put the question of value on the agenda is all the more urgent in the study and teaching of the so-called Postcolonial Literatures in English, where the value of literature and the question why reading literature is important and valuable - what makes literature meaningful - has too long been sidelined in favour of what Felski calls, borrowing from Ricœur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (2015). In our field, literature is frequently seen as a discursive construct ‘like any other’ - that interrogates, critiques, exposes or is complicit with ideologies and power 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 56 Magdalena Pfalzgraf structures from which it emerges. In their “zeal to unmask the hidden ideologies of these and related novels, critics seem to have forgotten what brought them to Ulysses or Heart of Darkness in the first place - namely, the uniqueness of these novels as works of art” (Perloff 2004: 12). 2 A Disciplinary Impasse and the Umbrella-Term Problem: Postcolonial Studies as a Field Locked in Perpetual Crisis Since the 2000s, postcolonial studies has been shaped by two contradictory dynamics. Once a marginal phenomenon and niche interest, it has become one of the core disciplines of English studies, at least in Western Europe and the United States, where hardly any BA program today is without a postcolonial studies component. Furthermore, postcolonial concepts and concerns have proven particularly prone to ‘travelling’ across disciplinary borders and are part of the critical vocabulary beyond English studies and even beyond the humanities. This “amazing institutional success story” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22) is, however, accompanied by internal uncertainty and a sense of discomfort: “From at least the late 2000s onwards, postcolonial studies has moved into a phase of disciplinary revisionism - a wider trend towards introspection, selfreflexivity and self-transformation”, which “can be taken as a sign of uneasiness, discontent or possibly even crisis” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22). Criticism of postcolonial studies from within the field is nothing new, and postcolonialism’s revisionist navel-gazing has arguably become a genre of its own. Few other fields engage in comparable forms of self-critical metadiscourse; in fact, an emphatic distance from ‘the postcolonial’ has almost become good form among those who practice it. In his review of Spivak’s A Critique of Post- Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Terry Eagleton famously wrote: There must exist somewhere a secret handbook for post-colonial critics, the first rule of which reads: ‘Begin by rejecting the whole notion of post-colonialism.’ It is remarkable how hard it is to find an unabashed enthusiast for the concept among those who promote it. The idea of the post-colonial has taken such a battering from post-colonial theorists that to use the word unreservedly of oneself would be rather like calling oneself Fatso, or confessing to a furtive interest in coprophilia. (1999: n.p.) Eagleton’s diagnosis has continued to resonate throughout the first quarter of the new millennium alongside the consistent intra-field disputes regarding the label’s value: Postcolonialism has been pronounced ‘dead’ and ‘over’ as many times as it has been endorsed; affirmation and reflections of the ‘quo vadis’ and ‘whither, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 57 1 See e.g. Yaeger’s “The End of Postcolonial Theory? ” (2007) and Young’s famous affirmation of the field’s values and endurance “Postcolonial Remains” (2012). 2 See the following discussions in leading German quality newspapers across the political spectrum: Malinowski S. (2024) ‘Der Holocaust ist überall. Postkolonialer Antisemitismus’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung https: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuillet on/ debatten/ der-antisemitismus-hat-im-antikolonialismus-geschichte-19428640.html; Nur-Cheema, S. and Mendel, M. (2020) ‘Leerstelle Antisemitismus’, TAZ. https: / / taz.de/ P ostkoloniale-Theoretiker/ ! 5678482/ ; Wertmann, J. (2023). ‘Eine Theorie unter Anklage’. Die Zeit. https: / / www.zeit.de/ kultur/ 2023-11/ postkolonialismus-antisemitismus-gaza -israel-theorie; Heinze, R. (2024). Der Spiegel. ‘Postkolonialismus unter Druck’ ht tps: / / www.spiegel.de/ geschichte/ debatte-um-israel-postkolonialismus-ist-nicht-per-se -antisemitisch-a-bead427a-6c5c-4b2d-a108-26927894edd7. See also Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s online essay collection: https: / / www.kas.de/ de/ web/ geschichtsbewusst/ post‐ kolonialismus. postcolonial studies’ (or should it be ‘wither’? ) variety have been reliably followed by swansong and resurrection as the “aspiring morticians of the postcolonial” (Young 2012: 19) were assailed by defenders. 1 Perhaps this is simply ‘what we do’. After all, “it seems hard to identify a point in time in which postcolonialism was not, in fact, heavily contested and in some sort of crisis” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22), and there is perhaps an argument to be made that, in light of the immense heterogeneity of the field, discord and introspection are a consolidating factor. However, as the first quarter of the new millennium is coming to an end, there is new cause for crisis, for which “uneasiness and discontent” mentioned by Schulze-Engler are too weak. While before, our academic disputes and selfreflections, our turf wars and Schulstreits were taking place within the field and did not play any role outside the academe, postcolonial studies are now publicly discussed, and the call for revision is driven by serious external criticism. Since the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on Israel, postcolonialism has entered public parlance, and attention has been drawn to connections between antisemitic violence, support for Hamas, and decolonial activism that uses postcolonial thought and critique to justify this. Perhaps postcolonial critique is one of the rare cases where an intellectual tradition and a branch of academic teaching faces a serious legitimisation crisis in the very moment when it gains visibility beyond its scholarly community, when it enters mainstream discourse and is perceived as politically relevant. 2 What is notably different from the previous ‘postcolonial crises’ is that this time, the self-critical metadiscourse and introspection that has characterised the field for so long is absent. To my knowledge, there is no prominent reflection from within the field concerning the responsibility postcolonial studies takes for the recent surges in antidemocratic and radical ideology and violence. The important and uncomfortable questions have instead been asked in feuilleton sections and opinion pages and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 58 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 3 Noteworthy is that in a context where many encourage confronting one’s own implication (see Rothberg 2019) and privileges especially regarding the histories and legacies of colonialism, such reflection is (largely) missing from current (meta)discourse within the field (one example is the ‘check your privilege’ discourse, which insists that individuals should critically examine how they, both on a personal level and as members of an ethnic group, nation, or gender, benefit from enduring colonial injustices and hence sustain them). by scholars from outside the field and critical towards it - Ingo Elbe’s recent Antisemitismus und postkoloniale Theorie: Der »progressive« Angriff auf Israel, Judentum und Holocausterinnerung (2024), for instance, offers an extensive discussion of how postcolonial theory is used in demonisation discourses against Israel, to justify antisemitism, undermine the singularity of the Holocaust, and to equate Zionism with ‘white settler colonialism’ and Western hegemony. For a field so attuned to self-criticism and introspection, this silence is strange. 3 Does this mean that antisemitism, trivialisation of violence and its justification as an act of decolonisation, and even the bizarre portrayal of the Hamas attack as an act of anticolonial resistance - views which have been expressed on our own campuses and by our own students - have nothing to do with postcolonial studies and teaching? I do not think so. I agree with Christoph Hesse that the loud and embarrassed silence following 7 October has been at least partly connected to the fact that “this massacre of Israelis has quickly been proven incompatible with the latest postcolonial master narrative” (2024: 67-68). Referencing Horkheimer and Adorno, he continues, People who otherwise claim the highest level of social sensitivity exhibit an equal degree of ‘bourgeois coldness’ when it comes to Jewish suffering. […] They downplay or deny Jewish suffering and blame the victims in order to redescribe the perpetrators as the true victims. Unperturbed by Hamas officials openly declaring that their goal is to destroy Israel and to rid the entire world (not only the Middle East) of Jews, their sympathetic supporters […] in the West put things the other way round. (2024: 67-68) Does this then mean that our field is morally bankrupt, that downplaying (or even sympathising with) terrorism that frames itself as anti-Western are considered good form for a postcolonial scholar, and that engagement with postcolonial theory inevitably leads to this attitude? Of course not. Wolfgang Stender, who has engaged this question in a highly nuanced manner, comes to the following conclusion: There exists, as the anti-Israeli protests following 7 October 2023 amply demonstrate, antisemitism in the postcolonial-antiracist guise. It continues the ‘honorable antisem‐ itism’ of which Jean Améry spoke with regard to the anti-imperialist left of the 1960s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 59 4 The German original reads: “Unbestreitbar gibt es, wie die antiisraelischen Proteste nach dem 7. Oktober 2023 zur Genüge zeigen, Antisemitismus im postkolonialantirassistischen Kostüm. Er setzt den ‘ehrbaren Antisemitismus’, von dem Jean Améry mit Blick auf die antiimperialistische Linke der 1960er Jahre sprach, unter den veränderten politischen Bedingungen des 21. Jahrhunderts fort. Judenhass kann eine postkoloniale Form annehmen, aber die postkoloniale Form bringt nicht notwendig den Judenhass hervor” (2024: 479). 5 I am referring in the German context to two prominent postcolonial scholars who shared on their social media profiles, respectively, the slogan “free Palestine from German guilt” and Chicago Black Lives Matter’s pro-Palestinian meme which depicts a parachuting terrorist waving a Palestinian flag and reads “I stand with Palestine”, and hence seems to celebrate the Hamas attack. This scholar defended this Black Lives Matter meme by writing that Black Lives Matter is “a decolonial movement”. Such standpoints and gestures represent a strand within the field that equates postcolonial studies with taking a one-sided stance against Israel and support for the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS)-movement, and that is far more openly vocal outside of Germany. This strand is represented, for instance, by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Claire Chambers, who criticised Amitav Gosh and Margaret Atwood for accepting the Dan David prize at Tel Aviv University (“What has happened to [Amitav Gosh’s] anti-colonial and postcolonial credentials? ”) and lashed out at both novelists in a rather harsh manner: “Of course it would be a mistake to expect writers to attain to higher moral standards or to display more political intelligence than anyone else. […] [W]hen writers who sell books on the basis of their opposition to oppression visit [Israel], the resultant hypocrisy is quite nauseating” (2010: n.p.). under the altered political conditions of the 21st century. Hatred of Jews can take on a postcolonial form, but the postcolonial form does not necessarily produce hatred of Jews. (2024: 479; my translation) 4 Nonetheless, even if one ignores occasional excesses and concedes that they by now means represent postcolonial studies as a whole, 5 I find it impossible not to feel appalled by the fact that the field I have been working in has a gravitational pull for such perspectives and that many postcolonial frameworks have been seamlessly integrated into them and helped their proliferation. How has it come to this, and where do we go from here? The context for the present reflections is, after all, a volume which sets itself the task of charting current trends and concerns in literary and cultural studies, with the gaze directed towards the future: What do we offer twenty-first-century realities, how can we maintain our relevance, and what futures, in turn, can be imagined for our scholarly practice? In the context of this chapter, these questions need to be focussed on English literary studies: What is the value of the postcolonial, both as denomination of a field and as a conceptual frame for the study of Anglophone literatures and cultures? In the following, I aim to examine a few key aspects of why and how postcolonial studies, a discipline originally rooted in literary scholarship, developed in such a way 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 60 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 6 See also Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis’ contribution to this volume, whom I thank for pointing me in this direction. 7 See Pfalzgraf and Teichler 2024: 4-5. 8 At least in Germany, the reasons for this are probably more structural and institutional than conceptual, since departments are usually called “English and American Studies”, reflecting a tradition of treating English/ British and American studies as separate areas within the larger Anglophone philological discipline (in which Irish literature is often covered by the ‘Kernanglistik’). Postcolonial Studies is most often part of Anglistik, and there are very few specialised ‘postcolonial’ chairs. Recently, the division of philological subdisciplines is becoming more difficult, as English is on the rise as a literary language in regions and nations not connected to the British imperial past (see the growing body of Arab literature in English, or the work of the Kurdish writer Kae Bahar). In this context, the recent development of World Anglophone studies as a conceptual and institutional frame is gaining more importance (see Anastasijevic et al. 2024; Malreddy and Schulze-Engler 2024). that it became susceptible to and associated with radical, anti-democratic political positions and forms of activism that have little to do with academic inquiry and scholarship. I borrow the term impasse 6 to examine how the field’s preoccupation with critique has led to a disciplinary and imaginative deadlock. The second part of this chapter introduces the notion of reading for alignment and reading for allyship, which, I argue, represent a further development of the primacy of critique and deconstruction within postcolonial frameworks. Most points of critique of postcolonial studies are probably well-known, 7 so I will focus on two which are directly relevant to this question of future trajectories: One can be described as the umbrella-term problem, while the second concerns the field’s preoccupation with the past. 2.1 Disciplinary Uncertainty and the Umbrella-Term Problem Let us start with the first problem, namely postcolonialism’s disciplinary and conceptual sprawl, which also includes the field’s fragmentation. In regard to what is studied, it has frequently been criticised that postcolonial studies as an umbrella term is too broad, capturing literatures and cultures from India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean and their diasporas. Given the vast disparity of these contexts (and their internal heterogeneities and divisions), it seems increasingly implausible that the shared past of the British Empire should provide a common frame of reference and justify study and teaching under the same umbrella (see also Pfalzgraf and Teichler 2024: 4-5). A discrepancy is also that the literatures of Ireland and the USA are generally not considered postcolonial - but Indigenous Australian, Canadian First Nations, and Native American literatures often are. 8 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 61 The how of research is even more difficult to define. There are a few foundational concepts: hybridity, the Third Space, Orientalism, subalternity, the centre-margin model and the related writing-back paradigm, and, a little less prominently: contrapuntal reading. There are a few names that are easily recognised as postcolonial: Bhabha, Said, Spivak, and, a little less prominently: Young, Huggan, Ashcroft, Tiffin. However, postcolonial studies has produced no Theoriegebäude, no methodology or analytical framework that clearly defines research as postcolonial in the way we can recognise a formalist approach. Instead, the field has borrowed from other theoretical traditions, in particular poststructuralist critique, discourse analysis, and deconstruction (which are so prevalent that they are often identified with postcolonial scholarship). Postcolonial studies is hence a very heterogenous field of academic practitioners who share a critical perspective on the historical intertwinement of colonial power and culture and on imperial legacies and neo-colonial tendencies in the present. Some scholars see this disciplinary indeterminacy as a root cause for the protracted period of self-doubt and unease in the twenty-first century: One of the reasons for the discontent and disenchantment that seem to surface in so many current self-reflexive postcolonial debates arguably lies in the fact that postcolonialism today means too many things to too many people and that there is little agreement on what the ‘postcolonial’ actually stands for. While some people believe that postcolonialism is primarily a mode of reading texts or discourse analysis, others think that it is about the study of a so-called postcolonial world, while yet others are convinced that it is (or ought to be) a form of political activism. (Schulze- Engler 2015: 20) Can this conceptual openness also be a strength? Perhaps the lack of consensus of what we should teach and study under the label ‘postcolonial’ and how we do it is not a problem, and the intuitive understanding of what makes scholarship postcolonial should not be dismissed. In The Event of Literature (2012), Terry Eagleton considers Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances in his approach to the question of what is literature: A “tangled web of affinities” (2012: 20) rather than a fixed set of shared features allows us to identify people as members of a family - and pieces of writing as literature. It may be difficult to pinpoint to definite features as necessary conditions, but we know what literature is - and we know what postcolonialism is - when we see it. Here, “indeterminacy” is not “where things come unstuck”, but “what makes things work” (Eagleton 2012: 29). Eagleton formulates an intriguing and mobilising idea: “Is a field without an exact boundary not a field at all? And isn’t conceptual fuzziness sometimes exactly what we require? ” (2012: 29). Just 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 62 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 9 McLeod, for instance, points to the enabling and mobilising potential of this openness: “There is no singular postcolonialism. But […] ‘postcolonialism’ can be articulated in different ways as an enabling concept”, that can “help us with our beginnings” (2000: 2-3). as there is no “exact definition of literature” (32), there is no exact definition for the postcolonial - and this is very likely a main reason for the success and firm institutional anchoring of postcolonial critique and its easy ‘travelling’ across disciplinary boundaries mentioned earlier in this chapter. 9 However, as Eagleton also insists, family resemblance means the opposite of opening the gates to the arbitrary and all-encompassing: “Anything-goes-ism” is “objectionable” (33). While the immense adaptability of ‘the postcolonial’ and the field’s heterogeneity are a strength which allow the encompassing of a wide range of research under its umbrella, we are perhaps at a point of ‘anythinggoes-ism’, where lack of disciplinary clarity and the intuitive understanding becomes a problem. The academic field has been expanded so extensively as to include ecocriticism, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, critical race theory, the critique of global capitalism. Increasingly, ‘postcolonial’ is equated with decolonial approaches and decolonisation - not as historical development, but as a conceptual perspective and political activism in the present. This lack of a sharply defined intellectual enquiry, and the dilution of concepts and goals has opened the door wide to a weight shift from scholarship to worldview, from a pursuit of knowledge toward ideology and activism. This goes hand in glove with a vague and lazy anti-Westernism, an ahistorical idealisation of anticolonial resistance movements, trivialisation and even glorification of acts of alleged ‘anti-colonial’ violence, as well as partisan thinking and antiintellectualism. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? ” tweeted Najma Sharif on 7 October, “Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers”. 2.2 How Postcolonial Studies Lost Poetics: A Shift from Literary Studies to the Primacy of Critique A further development relevant in this situation is that the field has moved further away from one where (Anglophone) literature occupies the central place to one where a critical perspective has gained primacy. Roughly speaking, the disciplinary concern and self-understanding has shifted from the object of study (postcolonial literature) to the perspective (postcolonialism as a critical framework). It is not the case, of course, that literary studies no longer matters, but English-language literature is no longer the central and primary focus of a field which has become so diversified. This is remarkable, since it was really 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 63 10 This doyen academic outlet has recently been renamed Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. Among the reasons given for the change of title is “in keeping with the liberal humanist tradition in which it was anchored, Commonwealth literary studies read for shared, so-called universal experiences rather than for inequality, cultural difference, and the violence of colonial extractivism. We see in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today an occasion for the journal to reaffirm its commitment to the study of literature’s ability to shape, recast, and negotiate the complexities of imperial and postimperial imaginaries” (https: / / journals.sagepub.com/ home/ jcl). literature, more specifically, the interest in the study of Anglophone literature, that stood at the beginning of the field’s formation. The historical root of postcolonial studies is, of course, the expansion of the English language under imperialism and the emergence of Anglophone literature in (former) colonies. A genealogy of postcolonial studies hence always has the Empire as a starting point and usually names two predecessors of the field: 1) the study of ‘Commonwealth literature’ and 2) the analysis or critique of colonial discourse (see also McLeod 2000). Commonwealth literature emerged in the 1950s as a term used by scholars for Anglophone writing emerging from the newly independent countries that formerly belonged to the British Empire and were part of what is now the Commonwealth of Nations. It flourished as a field of enquiry amid the wave of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century (the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, for instance, was founded in 1966). 10 Characteristic to this early field was a scholarly perspective heavily indebted to the values of liberal humanism and universalism. Critics treated these ‘new English literatures’ as part of English literature, assuming that they “dealt fundamentally with the same preoccupations with the human condition as did Jane Austen or George Eliot” (McLeod 2000: 15). They were hence interested in the literal “common wealth” (McLeod 2000: 14, original emphasis) these younger texts shared with the traditional English canon: Many critics were primarily preoccupied with identifying a common goal shared among writers from many different nations that went beyond more ‘local’ affairs. Just as the idea of a Commonwealth of Nations suggested a diverse community with a common set of concerns, Commonwealth literature - whether produced in India, Australia or the Caribbean - was assumed to reach across national borders and deal with universal concerns. Commonwealth literature certainly dealt with national and cultural issues, but the best writing possessed the mysterious power to transcend them too. (McLeod 2000: 13) It is no surprise that ‘Commonwealth literature’ has been accused of being Eurocentric and is often seen today with some embarrassment “as a somewhat antediluvian phase of academic activity characterized by political naivety and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 64 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 11 Some of the field’s early confusions appear driven by a zeal for bureaucratic precision and seem mildly amusing today: “In its early years, ‘Commonwealth literature’ was quite literally equated with the literature of the member countries of the Common‐ wealth, which soon produced acute embarrassments - for example, when South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961 (or Pakistan in 1972), and prompted The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to add an “Appendix” to its annual regional bibliographies” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 5). theoretical unsophistication” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 4). 11 However, these early scholars deserve the utmost credit for taking the idea of universalism seriously and opening departments, curricula, and scholarship up to newer and emergent literatures in English, which they saw as equally valuable and important as the established canon. Their approach to these texts was also less characterised by crude Eurocentrism and superiority than they are accused of today. Schulze- Engler reminds us of some of the merits of this founding period of our field, arguing that “the practice of ‘Commonwealth literature studies’ often rested on a genuine interest in newly emerging life-worlds that had come into existence in the aftermath of colonialism and in the role of English-language literatures in exploring” them. He also stresses the “principle of dialogicity” guiding intense exchange between academics and writers “who often shared an acute sense of critical participation in momentous literary, cultural, and social changes in an increasingly globalized world” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 4-5). The second pillar on which postcolonial studies rests is the analysis and theory of colonial discourse, i.e. the critique of how imperialist ideology shaped Western scholarship, literature, art, culture, and how colonialism as a concrete practice of taking control of people, territory, and resources also involved colonising the minds of the subjects. Of particular interest were the ways in which literary “representation and modes of perception” (McLeod 2000: 17) have been used as means of oppression. Those who pioneered this interest, in particular Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, brought poststructuralist modes of critique to the study of Anglophone literature, did away with some of the more naïve celebratory gestures of Commonwealth literature, and questioned the practice of reading new English-language writing through the lens of the English canon. While Commonwealth literature studies had been seen as unpolitical, the focus was now directed to a literary text’s political implications and (inadvertent) complicities with reigning and past imperial ideologies. Critique, deconstruction, and discourse analysis emerged as central methods and paradigms. The zeal to interrogate power structures also allowed scholars to extend the scope to older canonical English texts, revealing how imperial ideology and the colonial experiences constitute an 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 65 easily overlooked but important presence. These scholars sounded in the transition from Commonwealth literature to postcolonial studies, which came to full fruition in the 1980s and largely relegated the other predecessor of the field to obscurity: Note how the scholars mentioned above have achieved celebrity status beyond English studies and are probably known to most firstyear students. It is much more difficult to name one influential ‘Commonwealth literature’ scholar. I conclude this section by pointing to selected voices which illustrate the shift from English-language literature as the central focus of postcolonial studies to a more conceptual approach where critique and political outlook come to play an increasingly dominant role. In their famous study The Empire Writes Back (1989), Ashcroft et al. use the term post-colonial to cover all cultures affected by British imperialism; their interest was very specifically in literatures in English that emerged of these places and cultures, and in the question of what these writers did with English: We use the term ‘post-colonial’ […] to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. […] So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere. ([1989] 1991: 2) For Ashcroft et al. the term ‘post-colonial’ does not simply denote a class or canon of literatures, they also use it to describe a particular type of perspective taken by both the literary works and the critic: These literatures are defined by their shared experience of British colonisation and by their assertion of difference to the former colonial power, captured by the famous and enduring centre-margin model and the related writing-back paradigm: What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumption of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. ([1989] 1991: 2) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 66 Magdalena Pfalzgraf The notion of critique is central to the concept of ‘post-colonial’ as defined by Ashcroft et al. Nonetheless, the English language and literature are still the foundation from which they develop their notion of ‘post-colonial’. Robert Young, by contrast, is exemplary for a disciplinary strand that accentuates acti‐ vism. According to Young, the aim of postcolonial scholarship is to interrogate histories of oppression in order to help us understand and - fight - present inequalities: ‘Postcolonialism’ is not just a disciplinary field, nor is it a theory which has or has not come to an end. Rather, its objectives have always involved a wide-ranging political project - to reconstruct Western formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below. The postcolonial has always been concerned with interrogating the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice, with addressing the fact that, and the reasons why, millions of people in this world still live without things that most of those in the West take for granted. Clean water, for example. (2012: 20) ‘Postcolonial’ is here completely disjointed from literature and the role of English as a global medium of literary expression. ‘Postcolonial’ thus ceases to be connected to literary studies and becomes primarily a political term, directed at social realities with the intent of changing them. Thus, it is made at once more precise - as it is turned into a political project and given a clear agenda - and more arbitrary, as it is stretched to include any form of inequality and injustice in the contemporary world. The inevitable effect is that the concerns of literature and philology pale and seem trivial compared to such lofty goals. This very broad understanding, in which the postcolonial is primarily a critical perspective, a political standpoint, and activist agenda has prevailed and become dominant. Note how, for instance, Bartels et al. propose a similarly comprehensive understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as ‘moving against and beyond’ Eurocentric ways of seeing the world. Here, ‘postcolonial’ is a political attitude and an epistemological framework, with ‘post’ meaning ‘beyond’ colonialism and a colonial perception: In our reading, the ‘post’ in postcolonial marks a critical perspective and forms of ideological positioning which are ‘post’ colonial, by way of challenging, critiquing, refracting, subverting, or offering alternatives to colonial trajectories of ordering the world. In simplified terms, postcolonial literatures ‘move beyond’ a Eurocentric perspective on the planet shaped by colonialism and its legacies. (2019: 2-3) There are strengths to this viewpoint: It allows Bartles et al. to include older texts such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) into a postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 67 framework although it precedes the end of the British Empire by two centuries. But their approach also has a double bind, as it is based on the idea of a bifurcated world. According to their reasoning, there are only two perspectives: a postcolonial one and a colonial or Eurocentric one. Hence, everything that is not postcolonial is automatically colonial. This also implies that literatures and other forms of cultural expression from former colonies always share an anti-colonial, anti-Western, non-Eurocentric outlook, which is, of course, not the case. 2.3 Locked in Critique and Imagining the Future: Postcolonialism’s Disciplinary Chronotope It was, of course, important to shift the focus to power structures and critically analyse the role of language and literature in the construction of Empire and its discourses. However, this focus became so successful that it has ultimately rendered marginal all other views on literature. It ushered in what Felski (2015) called, with reference to Ricoeur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as the prevalent mode of reading literature. Felski sees the arts and humanities in general as suffering from this spirit. However, critique and suspicious reading are particularly dominant in postcolonial studies, where the “postcolonial scholar” becomes a “sleuth” who is “intent on excavating the anxieties of empire” (2015: 99), and where often “‘criticality’ is hailed as the sole metric of literary value” (2015: 16). The centrality of critique in postcolonial studies has also led to the devalua‐ tion of our core practice as literary scholars - “poetics” (Perloff 2004: 5) - and of literature itself. Perloff, anticipating Felski’s intervention by more than ten years, argued that the politicised and critical humanities take the literary text to “be no different in kind from other social or cultural practices” and discuss it primarily “for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society” (Perloff 2004: 9). In this climate, “formalism becomes a dirty word, a smokescreen for ignoring the ideology and political ethos of a given work” (2004: 9). What has taken hold is a surprisingly mimetic perspective and a utilitarian understanding of ‘textual work’, which led to the neglect of literary reception as aesthetic experience and of the literary text’s poietic potential, not to mention its capacity for expressing universal aspects of the human experience. This has consequences for the contemporary legitimation crisis discussed in this volume’s introduction. The prevalent postcolonial view on literature can unin‐ tentionally pour water onto the mill of the current threat to arts and humanities under an academic neoliberal regime of utility (‘Ist das Literatur? Das kann 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 68 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 12 For a discussion of the notion of impasse, see also Anna Tabouratzidis’ contribution to this volume. weg.’). Perloff has, twenty years back, alerted scholars of the consequences of this practice: It is, I would argue, the contemporary fear of the pleasures of representation and recognition - the pleasures of the fictive, the what might happen - and its subordi‐ nation to the what has happened - the historical/ cultural - that has trivialized the status of literary study in the contemporary academy and shrunk the corresponding departments. Indeed, the neo-Puritan notion that literature and the other arts must be somehow “useful,” and only useful, that the Ciceronian triad - docere, movere, delectare - should renounce its third element (“delight”) and even the original meaning of its second element, so that to move means only to move readers to some kind of specific action, has produced a climate in which it has become increasingly difficult to justify the study of English or Comparative Literature at all. (2004: 17) Within postcolonial studies, this state of being locked in critique results in what could be termed ‘postcolonialism’s disciplinary chronotope’: a sense of impasse which concerns the imagination and disciplinary identity and has a temporal dimension. 12 It affects the core of the field’s logic and its vision of the future. If postcolonial studies sees its role primarily as outside of literary studies, and even outside of the ‘ivory tower’, then it faces a challenge when it comes to imagining its own value in the future. The field’s political ambition is steeped in a rhetoric of liberation which refers back to the colonial past and its enduring effects in the present. This backward-looking orientation means that postcolonial thought often frames the present as a continuation of colonial structures. There is hence a marked circularity inherent to many postcolonial approaches, in particular where they link with decolonial approaches and appear as radical critique of lingering legacies of colonialism and set on dismantling them. There is a fixation on the colonial moment both as the field’s point of departure and its raison d’être, which results in an ongoing preoccupation with the colonial past, locking former coloniser and colonised in opposition. The idea of a world and future after colonialism is postcolonialism’s declared goal, but remains deferred. Hanna Teichler and I identify this as the “central paradox” (2024: 4) of postcolonialism’s politico-cultural programme: Postcolonialism’s political agenda aims at a decentred view of literature, politics, art; however, these cornerstones of postcolonial criticism are built on the belief that the West still constitutes the centre against which the postcolonial periphery defines itself. (Teichler and Pfalzgraf 2024: 4-5) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 69 This is perhaps not just a central paradox, but an existential dilemma for postcolonial scholars: When the goals of this literary policy have been achieved, the field will have made itself superfluous. In other words, if we see our intel‐ lectual contribution and conceptual value primarily in exposing and dismantling colonial legacies, achieving decolonisation will also mean laying the axe on our own field’s foundation. And if we treat literature as texts like any other, when we treat the notion of the literary as inconsequential because “the only real justification for literary study is the concession that poems and novels can do ‘cultural work’” (Perloff 2004: 9) - and political work - then as scholars of literature, we risk making ourselves also superfluous. 3 From the Hermeneutics of Suspicion to Reading for Alignment and Allyship Felski (2015; 2020) has repeatedly argued that the hegemony of critique has narrowed literary scholars’ affective modes (2015: 3), has created a dogma of ‘againstness’ (2015: 129; 198), and, if stripped of its spirited language and purportedly high-minded goals, is simply small-hearted and mean. When we scholars become inspectors and sleuths, she argues, we are largely passing negative judgement and are all too adept at documenting the insufficiencies of meanings, values, and norms; like tenacious bloodhounds, we sniff out coercion, collusion, or exclusion at every turn. The result can be a regrettable arrogance of intellect, where the smartest thing you can do is to see through the deep-seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of others. (2015: 16-17) Felski echoes a sentiment central to Bruno Latour’s famous intervention (2004), which seems as valid today as it was twenty years ago: “What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their useful‐ ness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique? ” (229-230). To Latour’s diagnosis that ‘critique has run out of steam’, she adds a further concern, namely that critique has become lazy and boring because literature itself has long picked up on the critical spirit. While earlier postcolonial scholars needed to dig deep to unearth a text’s buried power structures or colonial entanglements (think of Said’s counterpuntal reading of canonical novels, or Eagleton’s famous reading of Heathcliff as Irish), us contemporary postcolonial scholars can simply skim these notions off the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 70 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 13 In his essay from 2004, Latour formulates this concern: “Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have. I have always fancied that what took great effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail” (230). 14 A transcript of her text, from which I am taking these quotes, is available at: https: / / sing jupost.com/ danger-single-story-chimamanda-adichie-transcript/ (Accessed: 19 August 2024). text’s surface with our metaphorical critical ladle. 13 Hence, we do “not need to be suspicious of the text […] because it [is] already doing the work of suspicion for us. Critic and work [are] bound together in an alliance of mutual mistrust” (Felski 2015: 16). By now, the postcolonial penchant for critique has turned into a reading practice that I call reading for alignment, and in its more extreme forms: reading for allyship. This text-reader relationship subsumes the grievances expressed above: an expectation that literature should do cultural work and serve a political purpose, an expectation of mimetic representation of extratextual realities and identities, as well as an offer of alignment. It is also often expected that the text take a definitive political and moral position and identify an opposition, so that the reader can join the text in its metaphorical trench and face the common adversary. And, in the Western academe, this mechanism works well by appealing to the readership’s belief in their own complicity or even identity with the adversary and by eliciting feelings of guilt and shame (‘Check your privilege! ’). In the following, I would like to turn to two examples by way of illustration: “The Danger of A Single Story” (2009), a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the play AlterNatives (2000[1999]) by Drew Hayden Taylor. Adichie’s much-circulated TED Talk, in which she considers the danger of stereotypes (‘single stories’) and the role of literature in perpetuating or dismantling them, includes a personal story. A child-prodigy of sorts, she recalls having written stories at the age of seven, which reflected her reading fare: “And what I read were British and American children’s books” (n.p.). She does not mention authors or titles but describes the selection of children’s literature she was exposed to as a narrow one, which, in turn, limited her range of expression and imagination: “I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out” (2009: n.p.). 14 This anecdote is amusing and related in an ironic tone and with a smile. Yet, Adichie’s smile is really a raised eyebrow, and her talk is a stern rebuke, for she quickly makes it clear that her concern is no light matter: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 71 15 Adichie touches on a central concern of contemporary discourse on literature, not just so-called postcolonial literature, and not just children’s literature: that what we read is potentially harmful and dangerous, and that readers are impressionable, vulnerable absorbers of literature, wide-eyed and defenceless at the authority of the text. There is certainly the message that reading can be harmful, unless stories feature characters who look and live exactly how and where their readers do. In How to Read Literature, Eagleton devotes a chapter to the question of value and puts under scrutiny the claim “that the finest poems, plays and novels are those which recreate the world around us with incomparable truth and immediacy” (2013: 181). It takes no more than a small exercise in witty rhetoric to reveal how dubious this notion is: “On this theory, the only good literary texts are realist ones. Everything from the Odyssey and the Gothic novel to expressionist drama and science fiction would have to be written off as inferior. Lifelikeness, however, is a ridiculously inadequate yardstick for measuring literary value. Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Milton’s Satan and Dickens’s Fagin are fascinating precisely because we are unlikely to encounter them in Walmart’s” (2013: 181). He further reminds us that realist and realistic are not the same thing, just as being true to life does not necessarily mean being true to everyday appearances (2013: 182); a literary text may faithfully represent a familiar world without convincing us or enabling us to suspend our disbelief, whereas we can recognise a sense of self and shared humanity in texts depicting worlds far removed from what we personally know. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. (2009: n.p.) It was only when she discovered literature by Nigerians such as Chinua Achebe, but also by other African writers, that her horizons broadened and she felt invited to recognise herself in and identify with the protagonists and the stories she read: I realized that people like me, girls with skin the colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. (2009: n.p.) 15 I am not disputing the validity of Adichie’s concern, argument, or personal experience. Her view on literature, however, is exemplary for a postcolonial one which sees literature primarily as an instrument that can be used for good or for ill: “Stories matter. […] Stories have been used to dispossess and to 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 72 Magdalena Pfalzgraf malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity” (n.p.), and which, furthermore, is focussed on literature’s mimetic function. It also exemplifies an approach grounded in moral admonition, yet one which is primarily directed at an audience already sympathetic to the message and does not need to be convinced - after all, who else would choose to watch this TED Talk? It is Adichie’s programmatic aim to speak and write against the dangers of a single story: Being gullible to a single story leads to Othering, so the argument: “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are not true”, she argues, but that “they are not the only story” (n.p.). However, her argument only works by building another single story, one in which the audience can both recognise themselves and align themselves against in allyship with Adichie. Adichie first self-critically recalls how she had once believed in a single story and, as a result, harboured prejudice against her family’s ‘houseboy’ and his family. She then goes on to describe her arrival at an American campus, when her roommate “was shocked” (n.p.) by her: She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. [Laughter] She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals. (n.p.) We do not know whether this actually happened or whether it is fictional. Yet, as a story, it is true enough, for the type this roommate represents is real and endures as a stereotype (and single story) of the gullible, bigoted Westerner. We never learn what became of the roommate, as she has served her purpose in Adichie’s story. Her identity, her national, ethnic, regional, or class background are not revealed by Adichie, but these aspects do not matter, for she appears vividly before our eyes, and we have all met her before, in different texts and stories. In Adichie’s anecdote, she is most probably a white, middle-class American girl, possibly suburban, mid- Western, complete with all the ignorance and prejudice these girls come with, and who is now confronted with her own ethnocentric biases by the Nigerian author- 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 73 to-be, who, in postcolonial fashion, turns the tables on existing power structures and writes back to the presumed centre occupied by this girl. Audiences to this TED Talk are invited to see themselves in this girl, to feel exposed, and if this anecdote is drawing laughter, it is laughter to create distance, for who would want to be associated with such as stupid girl? If we speculate for a moment about this girl’s future, we can imagine a range of stereotypes and single stories that fit well into the scene set by Adichie. Perhaps the roommate has grown up to become a so-called ‘Karen’, a social media stock type seen as bigoted, entitled, often racist and hence shamed by more enlightened users. Or we might have encountered her in one of the texts we read in a postcolonial seminar at university, for instance, in the character of Colleen Birk in Drew Hayden Taylor’s play alterNatives, a humorous Kammerspiel about identity, authenticity, cultural appropriation, genre, and the (im)possibility of friendship and love between white and First Nations Canadians (at least on equal terms). Colleen is a well-meaning but ultimately patronising English professor in a Canadian liberal arts university who specialises in First Nations literatures and cultures. Colleen is Jewish, middle class, and attempts to include more Canadian indigenous writing into the syllabus and makes an effort at learning an indigenous language (Ojibwe). Her limitations are soon exposed, however: She dates Angel, a young, aspiring writer with a First Nations background who wishes to write science fiction. Claiming that she is concerned about Angel’s professional future and wants “him to be taken seriously by the literary establishment” (66), she denigrates his genre of choice, thereby revealing not only her ethnocentric bias but also her professional shortcomings: A literature professor who dismisses science fiction, after all, lays open her elitism and outdated and incomplete understanding of literature, which reflects poorly on her literary knowledge and expertise: What a waste. […] It’s like writing comic books. […] Write about the Native commun‐ ity. […] You could create the great Canadian aboriginal novel, but instead you want to squander it away on this silly genre [science fiction]. […]. You can be a window through which the rest of Canada can see your community. (66) She is duly assailed by the other First Nations Canadians: “[L]et him write what the fuck he wants. I didn’t realize you were the literary police”, says one character. The other joins in: “So you, as a white university Native Lit professor, want our Angel, a Native writer to write specifically about Native people and the Native community. Sounds a bit like ghettoizing. Do you think Jewish people should only write about Jewish things? ” (67). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 74 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 16 See: https: / / www.drewhaydentaylor.com/ book/ alternatives/ , last accessed 06.02.2025. On Drew Hayden Taylor’s website, we read: Like all of Drew Hayden Taylor’s work, alterNatives manages to say things about ‘Whites and Indians’ that one is not supposed to talk about - it digs up the carefully buried, raw and pulsing nerve-endings of the unspeakable and exposes them to the hot bright lights of the stage. That he does so with a humour that the politically correct among his audiences continue to miss entirely beneath the sound and fury of their own self-righteous indignation is a measure of his immense talent as a dramatist. 16 The play contains hilarious moments, but it does not teach the implied audience anything they did not know before. It spells out the very basics of postcolonial critique taught in lecture halls and casts the catechism of critique into the drama form. It confirms what the critically minded want to hear and see, replacing one stereotype with another: The white college professor who denies science fiction its value as a genre is found out, reprimanded, and revealed as deluded in the play’s anagnorisis moment. Her attempt at mastering Ojibwe and at acquiring expertise in First Nations literature are portrayed as patronising and shallow, and duly deconstructed. Like Adichie’s roommate, she can only be exposed and ridiculed, but she can never learn. The play offers alignment to those already convinced of the message, it invites the allyship of those who are interested in the critical discourses it presents. Contrary to what the webpage suggests, there is no message or humour to be missed but, on the contrary, it is all spelled out. The humour of this play is entirely meant for the politically correct audienceas-allies, and very possibly shared. To the hermeneutics of suspicion comes the burning slap of shame. Adichie’s talk starts with the promise to add and expand, to shed light on multipolarities of complex realities, and on the power of stories to bring them to attention and together. But what she delivers is also a story of lack, where the failure to look beyond a single story can only be cured by adding another single story, where it cannot be overcome but only exposed, and where the only chance of overcoming it is by replacing one single story with another, which is built on shame: ‘There! ’. Value is created in making the Other look stupid and exposing their limitations. In many interventions of this kind there is a keenness to call out, to shame, a structural causticism that evokes Felski’s lament of the “regrettable arrogance of intellect” caused by the pervasive “mentality of critique” (2015: 16-17). Eagleton’s critique of Spivak in 1999 echoes: “Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 75 one’s position. It is the nearest a Post-Modernist can come to authenticity” (n.p.) - and here, the ‘post’ in postmodern really is the ‘post’ in postcolonial. A sense of exhaustion sets in: Twenty-six years on, is this really why we should read postcolonial literature, or any literature at all? 4 Conclusion Of course, it is not. I am convinced that there is not a single first-year student who takes up a course in English literature with the aim of dismantling the world’s injustices, to ‘refashion it from below’, turn the tables on the powersthat-be, liberate the wretched of the earth by … studying literature. This is meant less cynically than it may come across, for I am convinced that most scholars first decided on their path out of a sentiment and experience that I would rate much higher: that of love. Love of the literary text as a piece of art, love of reading as a unique aesthetic experience, love of language as a creative force, fascination with the endless possibilities of the human imagination and the boundless storyworlds it allows us to create. And then, on the journey from the first postcolonial seminar to scholarly career planning, the spirit of critique takes over. In light of contemporary global political and environmental threats, scholars might sometimes feel, as my co-editors and I write in the introduction, that they are fiddling while Rome burns. Or while the planet burns. The urge to prove that what we do has immediate political relevance is hence somehow understandable, but it is a choice that will lead to eroding our relevance, not strengthening it, and it is built on shaky grounds: “the question of the larger political payoff of critique is posed, if anything, even more poignantly in literary studies, where it is often far from evident how a postcolonial reading of Jane Austen published in an undersubscribed academic journal has much bearing on the global struggles to which it alludes” (Felski 2015: 143). So what are we to do with the ‘postcolonial’ label and its value for the study of English literatures and cultures in the future? Simply dropping it is not an option. As Eagleton insinuates (1999, n.p.), proclaiming one’s distance to ‘postcolonialism’ is no way out, as this gesture, ironically, doubles as a Postcolonial-Membership-ID. Furthermore, it is simply a fact that, by now, the field has become institutionalised under this denomination. But what if we do not look for new turns and directions, but return to some of the skills that are already there, that have been discredited and partly forgotten? I argue that the way out of our circular chronotope might lie in looking towards the past and rediscover and weld into our practice some of the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 76 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 17 Díaz ends The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by performing a subtle intertextual nod to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the famous “the horror! ”-exclamation, thereby writing back to a foundational text of Empire and a canonised work of English literature in order to deconstruct … Ah! There we go again! notions guiding the early phase of our field. Not discard politics altogether, but place more emphasis on the aesthetic, and most importantly, centre poetics. As postcolonial scholars, perhaps turning to literature might be our saving grace, because after picking up the spirit of critique, there are also postcolonial literary texts that appear to be tired of this gesture and critique critique - for instance, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, which seems to contain deliberate expressions of exasperation with postcolonial guilt, as when the Nigerian protagonist observes that “Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish” (2014: 65), or when a Nigerian character, a novelist who writes about romance in Paris is overlooked by African literature prize committees and African colleagues because he refuses to write “the same postcolonial crap the rest of them write” and loses patience with their “inane discussion” about “being marginalized and pigeonholed” (47). As postcolonial scholars, it is time to remember that we are philologists. We are one of two disciplines that carry the word ‘love’ in their denomination. Is that not beautiful? Let me conclude by borrowing the final lines of Junot Díaz’s famous novel: “The beauty! The beauty! ”. 17 Works Cited ADICHIE, C. (2009) ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. TedTalk (Ted Gobal). Available at: htt ps: / / www.ted.com/ talks/ chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story (Accessed: 4 August 2025). ASHCROFT, B., Griffiths, G., and Tiffin, H. ([1989] 1991) The Empire Writes Back. Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. ATTA, S. (2014) A Bit of Difference. London: Fourth Estate. BARTELS, A. et al. (2019) Postcolonial Literatures in English. An Introduction. Stuttgart: Metzler. CHAMBERS, C. and Yassin-Kassab, R. (11 May 2010) ‘Goshwood’s Mendacity.’ Pulse. Available at: pulsemedia.org. Last accessed: 1 May 2025. DÍAZ, J. ([2007] 2008) The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. London: Faber & Faber EAGLETON, T. (1995) Heathcliff and The Great Hunger Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso. EAGLETON, T. (1999) ‘In the Gaudy Supermarket’, London Review of Books 21.10 (1999): 3-6. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 77 EAGLETON, T. (2012) The Event of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. EAGLETON, T. (2013) How to Read Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press. ELBE, I. (2024) Antisemitismus und postkoloniale Theorie. Der ‘progressive’ Angriff auf Israel, Judentum und Holocausterinnerung. Berlin: Edition Tiamat. FELSKI, R. (2015) The Limits of Critique. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press. FELSKI, R. (2020) Hooked. Art and Attachment. Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press. HESSE, C. (2024) ‘White Skin, Black Mask: Portrait of the Self-Professed “Decolonizer”’, in Ritzer, I. (ed.) On the Critique of Identity. Berlin/ Heidelberg: J.B. Metzler, pp. 55-71. LATOUR, B. (2004) ‘Why has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30, pp.-225-248. MALREDDY, K.P. and Schulze-Engler, F. (eds) (2024) Mapping World Anglophone Studies: English in a World of Strangers. London: Routledge. MCLEOD, J. (2000) Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. NÜNNING, A., Nünning, V., and Scherr, A. (2020) ‘Passion, Pleasure, Problem-Solving and Purpose: Reinvigorating Literary Studies for the Twenty-First Century and Cop‐ ing with Challenges, Changing Contexts, Concerns and New Concepts’, in Nünning, A., Nünning, V., and Scherr, A. (eds) Literature and Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Cultural Concerns - Concepts - Case Studies. Trier: WVT, pp.-1-47. PERLOFF, M. (2004) Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. PFALZGRAF, M. and Teichler, H. (2024) ‘Introduction: The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature. The Mobilizing Potential of Transcultural World Literature’, in Pfalzgraf, M., Anastasijevic, S. and Teichler, H. (eds) The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions. London: Bloomsbury, pp.-1-31. SAID, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. SCHULZE- ENGLER, F. (2012) ‘The Commonwealth Legacy: Towards a De-centred Reading of World Literature’, in Ashcroft, B., Mendis, R., McGonegal, J., and Mukher‐ jee, A. (eds) Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century. Amsterdam/ New York: Rodopi, pp.-3-14. SCHULZE- ENGLER, F. (2015) ‘Once Were Internationalists? Postcolonialism, Disen‐ chanted Solidarity and the Right to Belong in a World of Globalized Modernity’, in Malreddy, P.K., Heidemann, B., Laursen, O.B., and Wilson, J. (eds) Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 19- 35. STENDER, W. (2024) ‘Wie antisemitisch ist postkoloniale Theorie? Analyse einer überhitzten Debatte’, GWP Gesellschaft. Wirtschaft. Politik, 73(4), pp.-470-480. TAYLOR, D.H. (2000[1999]) alterNatives. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Online version: Alexander Street Press. Available at: https: / / search.alexanderstreet.com/ preview/ w 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 78 Magdalena Pfalzgraf ork/ bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3606827 (Accessed: 4 August 2025). YAEGER, P. (2007) ‘Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani et al.’, PMLA, 122(3), pp.-633-651. YOUNG, R.J.C. (2012) ‘Postcolonial Remains’, New Literary History, 43(1), pp.-19-42. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 79 1 This essay is based on Nünning, A. (2021) ‘Literatur als Laboratorium für Formen guten Lebens: Potential einer wissenschaftlichen Metapher und Leistungsvermögen der Literatur’, Comparatio: Zeitschrift für vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft 13 (2), pp.-313-334. I would like to thank Louise Louw for translating the article. Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life The Potential of a Scientific Metaphor and the Value of Literature 1 Ansgar Nünning 1 Introducing ‘The Lab’ and the Goals of the Article While research students in the sciences can choose from a wide range of laboratory notebooks, academic publications on laboratories are few and far between. In one of the rare books that not only deals with the topic but is even entitled The Lab, David Edwards (2010: 3) observes that “Labs obviously come in various kinds - film labs, design labs, molecular biology labs.” Although the concept of the laboratory is usually associated with the natural sciences, Edwards focuses on a special kind of lab, viz. the “artscience lab” (ibid.: 8). This already shows that during the last two decades or so, the concept of the lab has travelled to other disciplines and domains, including e.g. architecture, design, and the arts. Edwards describes the artscience lab as a “kind of lab where creators and society meet through cultural exhibition, a new platform for innovation” (ibid.: 3-4). As this description and the subtitle of his book - Creativity and Culture - already indicate, laboratories are associated with the creative processes of discovery, experimentation, and innovation. This link between laboratories and creativity is also one of the reasons why the concept of the lab has become popular outside the realm of the sciences, as such recent usages of e.g. ‘ideas lab’ and ‘writing labs’ serve to testify. Labs are places where new ideas can be tried out and where a spirit of experimentation prevails, as the subtitle of a forthcoming book - The Lab: Experiments in Writing Across Genre (Davidson and Laplante 2025) - demonstrates. In the context of writing, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 2 I would, furthermore, like to thank my colleague and co-editor Anna Tabouratzidis for sharing her research on the topic of ‘literature as a laboratory’ and her careful reading of this contribution. however, experimentation pertains to experimenting with forms, genres, and style. Although literature has occasionally been called a ‘laboratory’, no sustained attempt has yet been made to explore the implications of this metaphorical usage of the term in the context of literary and cultural studies. The main goals of this article are to gauge the potential of the scientific metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life and to explicate the hypotheses about the functions that literary works can fulfil that are implied in this metaphor. Taking its cue from the notion of the laboratory as a “travelling concept” (Bal 2002), this chapter conceptualises literary works as “thought experiments” (Elgin 2007: 48) and as “experiments in life” (Eliot 1955: 216-217) which generate aesthetic experiences and new perspectives on the good life. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s notion of a “circle of mimesis” (1984: 71), I argue that aesthetic forms of literary configurations do not merely represent existing cultural models of the good life but rather serve to reflect upon and critique prevailing notions, while also generating alternative ideas and models of what a good life could look like. The value of literature, it is argued, resides in its capacity to broaden the range of possibilities of cultural models and to function as “valorization laboratories” (Citton 2017: 150) that can entail revalorizations of prevailing views of the good life. 2 Literary Works as Worldview Machines, Thought Experiments, and Experiments in Life At first glance, the hypothesis implied in the title of this article, that literature is to be understood as a laboratory for forms of life, may appear counterintuitive insofar as literature and laboratory belong to diametrically opposed domains. While literature, as part of the arts, makes use of aesthetic and linguistic techniques to create fictional worlds, laboratories are used to conduct scien‐ tific or technical experiments intended to generate empirically proven factual knowledge. Despite the obvious contrasts between the two concepts, it is no coincidence that the formulation of literature as a laboratory can be found in recent publications (see Struwe 2008; Rank 2014). 2 The term has, however, mostly been used as a mere metaphor in which the implications and heuristic potential of the laboratory are hardly the subject of reflection. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 82 Ansgar Nünning 3 If not indicated otherwise, all translations are by the author of this chapter. As will be shown in the following, the understanding of literature as a laboratory draws attention to one of the essential characteristics of literary works, which has likely always contributed significantly to their great and lasting fascination: their ability, with the help of language, to carry out literary thought experiments and experiments in life, as well as to conceptualise alternative views of the world and humanity alongside the various forms of life, values, and norms represented in them. Konstanze Fliedl has succinctly summed up this potential of literary works in her concept of “literature as a worldview machine” (2005: 134, my translation). 3 This metaphorical concept emphasises that literature by no means merely mimetically depicts or represents reality but rather creates models of life and the world. Furthermore, this concept emphasises that literary works do not only create a single worldview, but that literariness can be defined precisely by the fact “that it only knows worldviews in the plural” (ibid.). Moreover, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises both the experimental character and the poietic power of literature as well as its potential to test new forms of life. The laboratory, furthermore, matches the strength of those metaphors that classify literature as thought and life experiments that take place in the imagination, i.e. in the “laboratory of the mind” as “a venue in which reconfigurations can be contrasted, elaborated, and tested” (Elgin 2007: 47). The value of fictional works is based on their capacity to enable imaginative thought experiments. Such “[a] thought experiment is an imaginative exercise designed to determine what would happen if certain conditions were met” (ibid.). Thus, literary works resemble scientific experiments in that they use aesthetic means to conduct thought experiments and play out ‘what-if ’ scenarios. In contrast to philosophical thought experiments, literary works are usually experiments that probe various forms of human life and coexistence. Therefore, it seems obvious to conceptualise literature as aesthetic “experiments in life”, an understanding of literature that can be found in the works of George Eliot, arguably the most significant Victorian novelist. In a letter to Dr Joseph Frank Payne, dated 25 January 1876, Eliot characterises her writing in a way that gives clear insight into her understanding of literature as experiments in life: But my writing is simply a set of experiments in life - an endeavour to see what our thought and emotion may be capable of - what stores of motive, actual or hinted as possible, give promise of a better after which we may strive - what gains from past revelations and discipline we must strive to keep hold of as something more sure than shifting theory. I become more and more timid - with less daring to adopt any 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 83 4 The contributions in their volume impressively document and analyse the literary expressions of the knowledge-making technology used in scientific experiments since the end of the nineteenth century and how literature itself was conceptualised as a medium for conducting experiments. formula which does not get itself clothed for me in some human figure and individual experience, and perhaps that is a sign that if I help others to see at all it must be through that medium of art. (1955: 216-217) For Eliot, these literary experiments consist primarily of depicting individual experiences - thoughts, emotions, motifs, and memories - in the medium of language to explore possible forms of life. In addition to Eliot’s novels, many realistic, naturalistic, and experimental literary works since the end of the nineteenth century are characterised by experimental arrangements in that their characters are placed in situations and constellations in which their behaviour and the consequences of their actions can be examined under laboratory conditions, as it were. Literature thus not only thematises and reflects scientific experiments, but literature itself becomes the arena for experimentation through aesthetic and linguistic means (see the contributions in Bies and Gamper 2011). 4 Just as Peter Sloterdijk describes evolution as a “continuum of life-form-experi‐ ments” (2009: 188), the same could certainly be said of the archive and laboratory of literature. Drawing on the working definitions of literature as a worldview machine and as experiments of thought and life, the main aim of this article is to explicate and test the hypotheses implied in the metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life. To condense these hypotheses into a very abbreviated form: It is heuristically fruitful to conceptualise literature as a laboratory in which experiments in thought and life are conducted with the help of aesthetic and linguistic representational procedures. If literature is understood as “the artful linguistic representation of experi‐ ence” (Bieri 2011: 25-26), this seemingly simple definition would already reveal three respects in which the metaphorical designation of literature as a laboratory is both meaningful and valid. Firstly, literature is a linguistic rather than e.g. a scientific or visual laboratory in which new forms of thought and speech are tested, i.e. a “laboratory for words” (Bies and Gamper 2011). Secondly, the adjective ‘artful’ refers to the aesthetic ways in which the models of life sketched out in literary works are distinguished from other discourses by their artistic design and literary form. Thirdly, literature is a laboratory in which experiences can be represented and examined. It can therefore be assumed that readers’ aesthetic experiences in the laboratory of literature can shape and change their 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 84 Ansgar Nünning ideas of what constitutes forms of the good life. With the help of imagination, experiments in the laboratory of literature result not only in linguistic works of art, but also in new ideas about the various forms of human life and society. These metaphorical working definitions of literature do not, of course, say anything about whether a fictional text is affirmative, critical, or subversive of the hitherto existing forms of life or the socially prevailing discourses, values, and knowledge systems represented in a particular case. With regard to forms of a good life, these scientific metaphors foreground questions about the functional potential and value of literary texts. How do literary works represent both the prevailing and alternative forms of life in an epoch? Are these forms of life merely mimetically depicted or are they also the objects of analysis, reflection, and criticism? To what extent can literature probe and conceptualise new forms of a successful and good life? As the introductory remarks suggest, this contribution - an essay in the original sense of the word - pursues three main goals: As the hypothesis of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life in the title indicates, the first aim of this chapter is to explore the potential of the laboratory metaphor in literary studies and to explicate the hypotheses implied in it regarding the value of literature. Secondly, drawing on Mieke Bal’s meta-scientific metaphor of “travelling concepts” (Bal 2002; see also Nünning and Neumann 2012), an attempt will be made to conceptualise the relationship between the forms of life produced in literary thought experiments and experiments in life, and the socially prevailing forms of life by means of the travelling metaphorical concept of the laboratory. Thirdly, this article aims to shed light on the ways in which literary worldbuilding takes place and to analyse the functions of literature as a medium through which forms of the good life can be represented, reflected on, and critiqued. Following these initial considerations, the next section will examine the concept of the laboratory as a travelling concept and literary metaphor. Section 4 will go on to conceptualise literary representations of forms of the good life as either aesthetic ways of worldbuilding or as the appropriation, configuration, and reconfiguration of existing forms of life. Subsequently, several hypotheses on the functions of literature as a medium for the representation, reflection, and critique of forms of the good life will be formulated, all of which can be derived from the metaphor of literature as a laboratory for conducting aesthetic experiments in life (section 5). Finally, this essay will conclude with a brief discussion of the cultural relevance of literary research into forms of the good life and its contribution to literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century (section 6). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 85 3 The Laboratory as a Travelling Concept and a Metaphor for Literature Starting with the meta-scientific metaphor of ‘travelling concepts’, it is neces‐ sary to first briefly examine the complexity of transferring concepts as well as the risks and opportunities involved. By transferring the scientific concept of the ‘laboratory’ into literary studies, the potential of the metaphor in fostering our understanding of literature and the functions it can fulfil will be further illuminated (see Nünning 2011). Like other scientific concepts, the notion of the laboratory is highly bound to certain disciplinary contexts and has, through its position in the practice and culture of the natural sciences, already been predetermined. As in many cases of concept transfers across disciplinary boundaries, shifting the concept of the ‘laboratory’ from the natural sciences into literary studies involves a process of metaphorization as the term is used only figuratively in the context of literary works (see also Baumbach, Michaelis, and Nünning 2012). On the one hand, it remains clear that literature is not a physical location of scientific work and research. On the other hand, the metaphor can emphasise aspects and dimensions of literature that cannot be fully captured by other, more commonly used metaphors that, for example, describe literature as a ‘mirror of society’. Thus, the designation of literature as a ‘laboratory’ is a conceptual metaphor that links and projects two phenomena from fields and contexts that are not usually associated with one another: Through this metaphor, the location of biological, chemical, physical, or technical experiments is brought into alignment with literature. The metaphor of the laboratory can refer either to the societal sphere designated by the literary industry as its own social system or, according to a more textual-studies-based understanding of literary works, to a specific symbolic system that is characterised by certain aesthetic features that differ from texts in other social subsystems. Regardless of whether the metaphor of the laboratory refers to the social or symbolic systems of literature, it nevertheless transfers the connotations, denotations, and associations of the term ‘laboratory’ that are considered relevant to the field of literature. Similarly to other metaphors, the metaphor of the laboratory acts like a “double filter” (Peil 1990: 228; see also Hrushovski 1984: 18) in that it is only permeable to those features of the donor and recipient fields that are significant and fruitful for the present context. If we consider what an ideal and typical scientific laboratory consists of, it immediately becomes apparent that many of these elements are not present in literature and, therefore, clearly not relevant for the metaphorical use of the term in the context of literary studies: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 86 Ansgar Nünning 5 For more information on the approaches of “Laboratory Studies” and “Science and Technology Studies”, see Knorr-Cetina (1995). From a collection of instruments and apparatus in a workroom with tables and chairs, shelves of chemicals and glass jars, refrigerators and freezers full of carefully labelled samples and source materials […]. All source materials are specially produced and cultivated for the laboratory. Most of the substances and chemicals are pre-prepared; they have been isolated and purified and come from industries working specifically for science and from other laboratories. […] these substances are as much the product of human production as the measuring instruments or the scientific articles on the desks. Nature does not appear in the scientific laboratory unless one defines it from the outset as the product of scientific work. (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 23) 5 When considering the notion of the double filter as an established concept in metaphor theory, it is understandable why most of the components of an actual laboratory mentioned in the above quotation are not relevant to the context of literature: The filter is simply not permeable to it. Yet, at the same time, the metaphor draws attention to the similarities and correlations between the domains of the laboratory and literature that might have been invisible or overlooked without the metaphor. The conceptual object of the laboratory corresponds to a set of connotations, denotations, and associations that highlight important facets of literature that otherwise do not always receive the attention they deserve in literary studies. Some of the most important of these features, which are projected as metaphorical implications from the original domain onto the recipient field of literature, are mentioned and briefly analysed below. A particularly suitable introduction to this argument lies in a quotation from one of the few studies in which the metaphorical concept of the laboratory is used in the context of literature and aesthetic experience: The term ‘laboratory’ proves particularly apt here as it brings together three kinds of attitude which we tend to think of as incompatible with each other, but which are in fact typical of the artistic sphere […]. Even if their methods are not ‘scientific’ in the usual meaning of the term, our aesthetic experiences relate to an attitude of (collective) experimentation which corresponds closely with how we imagine the laboratory: a space that is temporarily isolated from the daily world becomes a place of investigation, where we test certain limits of what can be done, perceived, felt, discovered, thought or justified. To be more precise, artistic modernity has taught us to make our encounter with the work the occasion for an ‘experience’ (of cognitive dissonance). (Citton 2017: 151) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 87 6 Cf. e.g. Ricœur: “new genres have appeared, in particular the novel, that have turned literature into an immense laboratory for experiments in which, sooner or later, every received convention has been set aside” (1985 [1984]: 7). As already mentioned in the working definitions of literature presented in the first section, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises that literature is an independent institution or medium within which aesthetic experiments are carried out under specific conditions and using linguistic means. 6 Biological, chemical, or physical experiments are carried out under equally specific labo‐ ratory conditions in the natural sciences. Thought experiments in literature are similarly isolated from the daily world, exploring human life under laboratory conditions, albeit with aesthetic means. Literary experiments in life are charac‐ terised by the fact that they design possible worlds and juxtapose different forms of life, providing readers with aesthetic experiences and fostering an attitude of experimentation. Reception aesthetics and cognitive narratology have described the cognitive mechanisms by which recipients (re)construct the mental models of the world, possible worlds, or storyworlds (Herman 2002: 5) evoked by a literary text, combining textual information and the readers’ own inferences. More important than such cognitive processes for the question of forms of the good life, however, is the insight, accentuated by the metaphor of the laboratory, that literary works can also be understood as experimental arrangements through which different forms and models of life can be represented, contrasted, and tested. Like the experiments done in scientific labs, the experiments in life that we encounter in literary works also entail the “possibility of discovery” (Edwards 2010: 3): Literary works are not confined to merely representing already existing forms of life, they can also discover or generate alternative forms of life that do not yet exist. A second important parallel between the laboratory and literature is that both conduct experiments to generate something new which results in knowledge production. The renowned historian of science Peter Galison has called the laboratory a “‘knowledge-generation institution’” (quoted from Edwards 2010: 27). Although the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences is, of course, different from the kind of ‘life-knowledge’ that literature provides (see Ette 2004), it is hard to deny that literary works represent, generate, and convey important knowledge about forms of a good life. What is generated in the laboratory of literature, apart from aesthetic experiences, are above all new forms and possibilities of human life and coexistence. In order to characterise the products of literary knowledge generation, one could define literature, in the context of this volume, analogously as the artful linguistic representation of forms of human life and coexistence. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 88 Ansgar Nünning Thirdly, laboratories and literature are similar in that the respective products of science and literature are not only highly context-specific but are also internally structured or prefigured. In the case of scientific experiments, the “contextuality of knowledge construction” is particularly evident in the fact that the laboratory functions both as a “selection context” for many decisions and as a “context of discovery” (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 31, 28). Just as the “products of science are context-specific constructions marked by the situational specificity and the structures of interest from which they were generated” (ibid.: 25), the field of literature is also an independent social subsystem in which specific conventions prevail that do not apply in more pragmatic contexts. Foremost amongst these are the aesthetic and polyvalence convention, both of which regulate the production and reception of texts classified as literary (see Barsch 2013). While the aesthetic convention suspends all references to facts as well as to the criteria of true/ false and useful/ useless that are valid outside of art, the polyvalence convention implies an acceptance and appreciation of ambiguity, which is not considered a deficit in literary works, but rather a sign of quality. Due to the diametrically opposed conventions that apply in the scientific and literary fields, the respective products of knowledge that are produced in the laboratories of natural science and those of literature must, fourthly, be regarded as highly internally structured both by the institutions from which they emerge and by the process of their production (Knorr-Cetina 1991: 25). In contrast to the conventions of reproducibility, falsifiability, and verifiability of scientific experiments, literary experiments in life are distinctive precisely because of the fact that the forms of life produced are characterised by a high degree of aesthetic and linguistic individuality, innovation, creativity, ambiguity, and originality. A fifth analogy between the experiments in a scientific laboratory and in those testing the forms of life and society in literature is that, despite the differences between these respective contexts, they use similar formal strategies in what analytical philosopher Nelson Goodman calls “ways of worldmaking” (1992 [1978]). Similar to natural science experiments, literary experiments in thought and life select, exemplify, highlight, and manipulate those elements and phenomena that are considered particularly relevant and worthy of investigation: “Like an experiment, a work of fiction selects and isolates, manipulating circumstances so that particular properties, patterns, and connections, as well as disparities and irregularities are brought to the fore” (Elgin 2007: 49). For a reconstruction of literary experiments that draft forms of the good life, it is therefore indispensable that we analyse the aesthetic procedures of representation or cultural ways of worldmaking. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 89 Sixthly, the metaphorical concept of the laboratory emphasises that literary experiments in life, with their aesthetic and formal arrangements, have the capacity to play through different possibilities and test new concepts. In her anthropology of the natural sciences, science historian Karin Knorr-Cetina emphasises that “laboratory work seems to be dominated by attempts to determine what the case might be and what, in retrospect, should and could be done with regard to it” (1991: 212). Literary explorations of forms of the good life use aesthetic procedures to do something very similar. The metaphor of the laboratory thus emphasises that literary works continually go beyond a mere reproduction of existing forms of life by conjuring up, exploring, and testing alternative ways of living. Finally, the metaphor accentuates the future as the dominant dimension of time. This distinguishes it, for example, from the metaphor of the archive, which has brought literature to the fore as a medium of cultural memory and as a repository of past ideas about forms of life. However, this difference is relativised by the fact that literary works of past epochs, at the time of their publication, would also have functioned as contemporary media, social criticism, and as future-oriented laboratories for alternative forms of life. Nevertheless, these examples illustrate once again how loaded and presupposition-rich the respective metaphors are and how strictly they are to be understood as implicit literary theories. As these metaphorical implications might already have shown, the metaphor of the laboratory - like other key concepts - is characterised by the fact that it functions as an operative concept and that it is by no means merely a neutral, descriptive category, but that it has a clear “reality-defining” character (Bachmann-Medick 2007: 385). The productive and heuristic power of the metaphor of the laboratory is primarily based on the fact that, as an operative concept, it can shape our perception of phenomena and constitute the respective objects of investigation in the first place. Metaphors are characterised by the fact that they can, to a great extent, shape the perception of cultural phenomena and theories (see Nünning, Grabes, and Baumbach 2009). In contrast to the long-dominant metaphor of literature as a ‘mirror of society’, which implies and expresses a mimetic notion of literature and thus a mimetic literary theory, the metaphor of the laboratory emphasises the poietic, reality-constituting, and reality-producing power of literature. Although these explanations should already have shown that adapting the concept of the laboratory opens up new perspectives and opportunities for literary studies, such concept transfers are also linked to some risks. These risks include the inadmissible simplification or reduction of complexity, the loss of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 90 Ansgar Nünning theoretical consistency and terminological precision, as well as the danger that incommensurable concepts or incompatible theories may be brought together. Furthermore, when concepts cross disciplinary boundaries and scientific cul‐ tures, there is always a danger that they become mere commonplaces. As a result, concepts cannot only lose their heuristic and epistemological power, but the concept as a whole can also dissolve. These unavoidable risks are, however, more than outweighed by the oppor‐ tunities that the transfer of concepts can open up. The adoption of concepts from other disciplines or scientific cultures can prove to be a fruitful heuristic step in that it can draw attention to hitherto overlooked aspects of a phenomenon. As the example of the metaphorical understanding of literature as a laboratory has hopefully made clear, the productive potential of the metaphor is based primarily on the fact that the adaptation of the laboratory concept can lead not only to a revision of disciplinary assumptions, limitations, and questions, but also to the discovery of new phenomena and research questions as well as to reflection and debate. As Mieke Bal rightly points out: “concepts can trigger and facilitate reflection and debate on all levels of methodology” (Bal 2002: 29). Since the metaphorical concept of literature as a laboratory generates new questions, its transfer can contribute to disciplinary renewal and methodological innovation in literary studies. Implicit in the metaphor is the task of reconstruct‐ ing both the historical variability and the synchronic diversity of the forms of a good life that are designed in the laboratories of literary works from different periods and cultural circles. From the perspective of literary history, the question also arises as to whether the description of literature as a laboratory is a transhistorically valid hypothesis or rather a specifically modern quality of literature produced since the establishment of literature as a distinct domain in the eighteenth century. Linked to this is the question of whether the hypothesis can only claim validity for a notion of ‘autonomous’ literature or ‘highbrow’ literary fiction, or if it could also be used for genre fiction or popular literature. If one tries to weigh the opportunities and risks of transferring concepts, there is much to suggest that, in the case of the laboratory, this travelling concept can make a significant contribution to the future development of literary studies. Important clues as to the question of whether the transfer of a concept can be considered to be better or worse can be gleaned from Brian McHale’s take on the evaluation of literary histories: “‘better’ not in the sense of objectively truer (a criterion discredited by the constructivist approach), but in terms of such criteria as rightness of fit, validity of inference, internal consistency, appropriateness of scope, and above all productivity” (McHale 1992: 9). Additional criteria that the transfer of concepts should fulfil include e.g. plausibility, relevance, inter‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 91 subjective comprehensibility, problem-solving capacity, and a contribution to scientific innovation. Moreover, as Koepsell and Spoerhase (2008: 372) suggest, one should not only reject the merely eclectic, fashionable, and superficial adoption of concepts from other academic disciplines, but should also emphasise that assessing the legitimacy and usefulness of concept transfers ultimately depends on whether new questions and results - which would not have been possible without the import of the concept - can be achieved in the ‘receiving discipline’. 4 Literary Representations of Forms of the Good Life: Adoption, Configuration, and Refiguration of Forms of Life The metaphor of literature as a laboratory for forms of the good life brings three aspects into view that are of great importance for conceptualising the relationship between socially established forms of life and the representation or construction of such forms in the laboratories of literature. Firstly, the metaphor draws attention to the fact - forgotten by deconstruction and post-structuralism - that literature is not merely autonomous and self-reflexive, but that it also always refers and relates to the world. While these references are aesthetically mediated, they generate new forms of life alongside worldviews, value systems, and orders of knowledge (see Nünning 2009b). Secondly, this approach raises the equally long-neglected question of the literary forms of representation, configuration, interpretation, and critique of forms of life or, respectively, of the ways in which aesthetic-fictional worlds are created. Thirdly, the hypothesis that literature can be understood as a laboratory for forms of life draws attention to the functions of literature which, in the heyday of structuralism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism, played a subordinate role at best. Goodman’s phrase “ways of worldmaking” draws attention to the symbolic forms and procedures through which literature can both represent and generate forms of life, worldviews, and knowledge. Novels and other literary genres resemble laboratories in that they function as a medium for the generation of forms of human life (see Basseler, Hartley, and Nünning 2015). With specific literary means such as perspectivisation, narrative mediation, and relationships of correspondence and contrast, they can both represent and fictionalise the cultural knowledge, prevailing forms of life, and value systems of their time. In doing so, literary works have the capacity to generate alternative ideas of a successful and good life through literary reconfigurations. Wolfgang Iser provides a detailed description of the complex processes of world appropriation, representation, and interpretation: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 92 Ansgar Nünning the fictional text contains many identifiable fragments of reality, which are taken from the socio-cultural textual environment as well as from the literature that precedes the text. In this respect, therefore, a thoroughly recognisable reality returns in the fictional text, which is now considered to be intrinsically fabricated. (Iser 1993: 37) Iser’s functional differentiation between various fictionalising acts, with the help of which literary representations of forms of the good life can be described, provides further clues for a more precise definition of the outlined processes. Iser attempts to dissect this process on the basis of a poietic understanding of the literary text as a product of an act of looking at the world, which creates something that does not exist in the real world represented by the text. To this end, he distinguishes between three acts of fictionalisation, which he calls ‘selection’, ‘combination’, and ‘self-disclosure’, all three of which he characterises as different forms of border-crossing (Iser 1993: 24). If we look at the question of literary appropriations and representations of forms of life from a narratological perspective, it becomes clear that Iser’s model needs to be supplemented by the discursive procedures of literary mediation, narration, and perspectivisation: In addition to the questions of selection and combination, the discursive axis of the implicit and explicit construction of meaning through narrative forms of perspectivisation must also be taken into account. On the one hand, this includes the question of how the narrative mediation of the forms of life and the hierarchies of values outlined by a text are shaped. On the other hand, the configuration of focalisation, as well as the entirety of literary representational procedures, play an important role in describing the processes of appropriation, representation, interpretation, and construction of forms of life in literary works. What is meant by the hypothesis implied by the metaphor of the laboratory can briefly be outlined with the help of Paul Ricœur’s concept of a “circle of mimesis” (1984: 71), a three-dimensional model that can be used to conceptualise the relationship between the forms of life portrayed by literature and those that exist in the real world. Ricœur’s model consists of three stages, viz. prefiguration, configuration, and reconfiguration. Firstly, literature is both related to and shaped by a prior, extra-literary reality or lifeworld in which certain forms of life (see Jaeggi 2014) prevail and can be observed as a context of social practices (prefiguration): Literary works are created in the context of cultures in whose symbolic orders certain forms of life, values, and models of reality (actualised in social interaction, texts in the literary tradition, and media of other symbolic systems) already circulate. Secondly, literary texts can represent, compare, and contrast different world views, value systems, and ways of life (configuration): Both individual and collective ideas of a good life, as well as socially excluded, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 93 marginalised, and repressed forms of life can be depicted and analysed in the fictional space through specific aesthetic procedures. Thirdly, such literary representations or stagings of various forms of life and cultural values can have an effect and impact on the reality outside of literature (reconfiguration): Literature has been and is significantly involved in both reshaping and reflecting on forms of the good life, values, and knowledge. Literary studies oriented towards the concept of eudaimonia (see Pawelski and Moores 2014; Nünning and Nünning 2020b) focuses on both the repre‐ sentational and the constructional aspects of literature as an active medium for generating forms of the good life - and thus on the interfaces between prefiguration and configuration on the one hand, and between configuration and reconfiguration on the other. Firstly, such an approach asks how and with which processes forms of life and cultural knowledge are represented in literary texts. From this perspective, literature is conceived of as a medium for the representation of existing forms of life, value systems, and cultural knowledge. Secondly, when the interest of literary studies is directed towards the ways in which forms of life and worlds are aesthetically produced, literature emerges as a primary medium for the construction of forms of the good life and of literary counter-worlds. When examining the connection between configuration and refiguration, the functional-historical question of the value of literary works in their contemporary society and culture becomes paramount. What functions can literature fulfil in the generation, modelling, and transformation of ideas about forms of the good life and the cultural value systems implicit in them? 5 Literature as a Laboratory for Aesthetic Experiments in Life: Representation, Reflection, Critique and Construction of Forms of the Good Life If one understands literature as a laboratory for conducting aesthetic experi‐ ments in life, two dimensions of the relationship between literary works and non-literary forms of life come into view: Firstly, the relationship is concerned with the specific ability of literature to make use of aesthetic forms to thematise, stage, problematise, and criticise both the hegemonic forms of life and knowl‐ edge within particular cultural contexts. Secondly, the potential of literature as an aesthetic medium to actively construct new forms of the good life as well as new collective ideas, values, and norms that, in turn, shape alternative value systems. In short, literature is not only a medium of representation, reflection, and criticism, but also a medium for modelling and constructing new forms of life, world views, and hierarchies of values. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 94 Ansgar Nünning From a functional-historical point of view, novels, plays, poems, biographies, and other literary genres do not only represent historically and culturally prevailing ideas of the ‘good life’, but they also function as ethical laboratories for reflecting on norms, values, and the hierarchies of values. It is not without reason that Ricœur notes that one of the oldest functions of art is “that it constitutes an ethical laboratory where the artist pursues through the mode of fiction experimentation with values” (1984: 59). As the metaphor of literature as a laboratory emphasises, literary works open up a fictional space of exploration in which experiments with a plurality of individual perspectives and ways of life are designed and within which different values can be compared. Thus, through the explicit thematisation and literary staging of ethical questions, literature can function as a medium for representing and reflecting on forms of the good life. As a medium of cultural self-reflection (see Butter 2007), literature fulfils three further functions: It not only contributes to the “critique of forms of life” (sensu Jaeggi 2014), but it also probes alternative ways of living, generating new ideas regarding what constitutes a good life. In this respect, literature can function both as a “culture-critical metadiscourse” and “imaginative counter-discourse” (Zapf 2016: 95). The function of literature as a culture-critical metadiscourse is realised in the “representation of typical deficits, bias, blind spots, and contradic‐ tions of the dominant political, economic, ideological, or pragmatic-utilitarian systems of civilisational power” (Zapf 2002: 64). Furthermore, as an imaginative counter-discourse, literature has the potential to represent “what is marginal‐ ised, neglected, or suppressed in the cultural systems of reality” (ibid.) in the relative freedom of the fictional space. In addition, literary works can function as “reintegrative interdiscourse[s]” by “bringing together the marginalised and the cultural systems of reality” (ibid.: 66). In doing so, literature also generates knowledge about social and cultural aspects of human coexistence. Perhaps one of the most important functions that literary works - such as the great realist novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through their complex multiperspectivity - fulfil, is to sensitise readers to the complexity of the observational layers and the perspectival conditionality of our knowledge about forms of the good life. It is certainly no coincidence that the philosopher Michael Hampe (2009) does not discuss the eponymous Perfect Life in a discur‐ sive-expository manner. Instead, he develops a literary thought experiment and a frame narrative within which he embeds, and juxtaposes, four very different philosophical conceptions. Rather than argumentatively developing a particular conception of the pursuit of happiness, Hampe designs his own narrative world with an imaginative philosophical canon. In an epilogue, the author explains 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 95 why the formal juxtaposition of voices and perspectives is inextricably linked to the question of happiness and the good life: In this respect, the form of this book is related to one of the insights it seeks to pass on: that of Cavell, that the recognition of differences is the basic condition of happiness and that the inability to accept differences is the first step towards unhappiness. To be able to recognise, consider, and endure differences on issues that affect human life in a very ‘elementary’ way - albeit not for all of them! - is a form of peacefulness. (Hampe 2009: 274) When Hampe describes the literary procedure of multiperspectivity as “an appreciative showing of differences” he also illustrates in an exemplary way how closely literary forms or techniques of representation in the laboratory of literature are linked to questions of content about forms of the good life. We may speak of a semanticisation of literary forms in this context, since such representational procedures and formal structures function as independent carriers of meaning. In the concluding chapter, which bears the telling title “Polyphony”, the hitherto uncommented and unmediated contrasting of points of view are explored in conjunction with both Plato’s dialogues and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of polyphonic novelistic art (Hampe 2009: 265). The procedures of multiperspectivity and polyphony are characteristic both of literature and of Hampe’s description of his procedure as “an activity that is autotelic in the examination and description of all points of view, but that avoids adopting any particular one” (2009: 278). These procedures characterise in an exemplary way how important the consideration of literary forms is for an understanding of the forms of the good life as conceptualised in literature. In this way, the laboratory called ‘literature’ can also function as a self-re‐ flexive medium for generating metaknowledge about the limits, scope, and validity of different forms of the good life, as well as about the social and cultural relativity, contingency, and variability of knowledge of life and orders of knowl‐ edge. Even if he is primarily concerned with the reorientation of philosophy, Michael Hampe illustrates the questions that arise in such a formal-aesthetic and functional-historical approach to the forms of the good life through the literary representations and stagings of diverse perspectives and voices: “What is possible in this way of life or of thinking? What prices are paid for this to be possible? What is now excluded and what has become impossible in the long run? What can be changed? ” (2009: 277). The representation, reflection, critique, and construction of forms of the good life, thus, finally lead to the culturally controversial question of how we can and want to live in a future world with increasingly limited resources. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 96 Ansgar Nünning 6 How do We Want to Live? On the Cultural Relevance of Literary Research on Forms of the Good Life To briefly summarise the hypothesis implied in the metaphor of literature as a laboratory from a functional-historical point of view, literary works could not only be described as media for the construction of forms of the good life, but also as possible answers to the question posed by the philosopher Peter Bieri in the title of his book Wie wollen wir leben? (2011). Bieri, furthermore, gives a concise answer to the question of why literary works in particular are so insightful when it comes to possible forms of the good life: “What we read in literary texts opens up a spectrum of conceptual possibilities: We experience how diverse living human lives can be. We would not have thought of that before, and now the radius of our imagination has become larger” (Bieri 2011: 24). Literature thus expands the “sense of the possible, i.e. imagination, fantasy” (ibid.: 12). Especially with regard to the question of forms of the good life, literary works, perhaps like no other art form, sharpen that ‘sense of possibility’ through their depiction of the inherent plurality in ways of living. Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1978 [1930]) paraphrases this sentiment as follows: “Thus the sense of possibility could be defined as precisely the ability to see the good in everything and not to take what ‘is’ as more important than what ‘is not’” (Musil 1978: 16). Literature turns readers into a species that Musil aptly calls “possibility people” (ibid.: 16), who are, by nature, juxtaposed with what he calls “reality people” (ibid.: 17). The former neither simply accept the model of reality and socially prevailing forms of life as given, nor do they see it as a fact of life with no alternative. Instead, they question dominant ideas and imaginatively look for alternatives. Literature promotes the development of new possibilities and ideas that are “nothing but realities not yet born” (ibid.), and that literature, thereby, offer “a sense of possible reality” (ibid.) for alternative forms of the good life. The significance of the hypothesis and metaphor of literature as a laboratory for conceptions of identity (see Alber 2021) and for forms of the good life is based, in no small part, on the potential of literary works to cultivate such a sense of possibility in the reader. As these remarks on the literary representation, staging, and generation of forms of life have hopefully been able to show, the metaphor of literature as a laboratory draws attention both to the literary ways of generating forms of the good life and to the functional potential of literature to construct new ideas of what constitutes a successful life, while also disseminating the associated hierarchies of values throughout society. While the actual impact of certain literary works can only be clarified by empirical research into their reception and effects, the most urgent task for literary history and literary studies is 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 97 to reconstruct the genealogy of forms and ideas of the good life, which have often been forgotten. A fascinating array of different forms of life has been, and continues to be, constructed in literary laboratories from antiquity, throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern era to contemporary literature. Exploring this rich repository of forms of the good life that we find in the archive of literature does not require a “eudaimonic turn” (Pawelski and Moores 2014), but careful philological and narratological textual analyses as well as the contextualisation of these within cultural studies. As I have tried to show, the metaphor of literature as a laboratory lends such a project valuable impetus and generates new research questions. The cultural relevance of literary research into forms of the good life is, furthermore, based on its ability to contribute both to the recovery of intellectual complexity and to further reflection and debate on hierarchies of values. Since experiments in the laboratory of literature are characterised by a particular aesthetic, structural, and linguistic complexity, they are, on the one hand, excellently suited to “confronting readers with intellectual complexity” (Gumbrecht 2004: 115) and to opening up important facets of life knowledge. On the other hand, in a neo-liberal and late capitalist society oriented only towards digitalisation, efficiency, productivity, and quantifiable success parameters, cultural and life-science-oriented literary studies (Ette 2007; Nünning 2009a) can contribute to the reassessment of dominant value hierarchies by examining forms of the good life. In doing so, they can remind us of the usefulness of the otherwise seemingly useless (see Ordine 2013). Therefore, it seems meaningful to conceptualise literary works and the aesthetic experiences they facilitate as “valorization laboratories” (Citton 2017: 150) within which “the immersion in an aesthetic experience leads to the valorization of previously unexpected sensations and feelings, and/ or the modification of associated valorizations” (ibid.). Moreover, the historical variability and synchronic diversity of forms of the good life, stored in the archives of literature and cultural memory and tested in the literary laboratories of the present, reveal many options for overcoming the path of dependency on a modernist ideology of continual economic growth. The forms of life generated in the laboratory of literature can thus serve as a counterweight and perhaps even an antidote to the determinism of digital technologies that have shaped the dominant forms of contemporary life in the late capitalist age of “24/ 7”, which the art historian Jonathan Crary (2014) uses as an umbrella term for round-the-clock communication and consumption. In view of the empirically proven unsustainability of the dominant forms of life in late modernity and capitalism, the appeal in the title of Peter Sloterdijk’s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 98 Ansgar Nünning book, Du mußt dein Leben ändern (You must change your life), is now directed at the vast majority of nations and their citizens. As “the diffusely ubiquitous and growing realisation that things cannot go on like this” (Sloterdijk 2009: 699) has now become irrefutable, the archive and laboratory of literature could serve as important sources for the development of new forms of the good life which we need for future reorientation: “Old forms are to be tested for their reusability, new forms are to be invented” (2009: 698). Not least in view of the proliferation of crises, crisis narratives, and crisis scenarios in the twenty-first century (see Nünning and Nünning 2020a), the radical uncertainty (see Heffernan 2021) about the future associated with them, and the increasing heteronomy of algorithms, the value of literature as a laboratory for the creation of new possibilities of thinking, speaking, and living can hardly be overestimated. The unstoppable rise of digital media has not only brought about a radically changed economy and ecology of attention (Citton 2017; Wu 2017), but has also significantly increased society’s dependence on ‘smart’ technology, deliberately brought about by the monopolistic digital corporations, to such an extent that more and more decisions are now made or, at least, predetermined by algorithms (see Alter 2017). In the context of the increasing call for resistance against the attention economy (cf. Odell 2019), it is precisely the slow reading of literary works and the preoccupation with the forms of the good life constructed by literature that could gain new significance. Recentring the value of literature as an archive, critique, and laboratory for long-forgotten, marginalised and new forms of life could not only aid in sensitising people to the contingency of socially dominant forms of life, but could also serve to present them with vivid alternative forms of life that allow them to regain control over their attention and increase their self-determination. As an essay on literature as a laboratory would be the worst possible place to answer the question “how do we want to live in the future? ” in a normative way, I leave the penultimate word to Peter Bieri, who, even without referring to the laboratory’s methods, succinctly summarises what literature always reminds us of and what it promotes: “For beings like us, who are concerned with self-determination, the category of the possible is of great importance: the idea that there is not only the one way, one’s own way, to lead a human life, but that there are many different and diverse ways of living” (Bieri 2011: 12, original emphasis). In any event, the diversity and multiplicity of forms of human life designed in the laboratories of literature remind us forcefully of the insight, forgotten in an era of TINA-politics (There Is No Alternative), that is succinctly summed up in the title of Harald Welzer’s book Alles könnte anders sein (2019), i.e. everything could be different. Since the prevailing forms of life in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 99 the late capitalist Western world have proven to be unsustainable because they destroy the very foundations of life on this planet, we would be well advised to look for new forms and models of the good life. Both the archives of literary history and the laboratories of contemporary literature - especially the booming genre of speculative fiction - offer rich and vivid material with a plurality of models for how to lead successful and good lives through which we can rediscover old forms, test alternatives, and find or invent new forms of the good life. For research into the open and vital question of what contemporary ideas of a good life might look like, there could hardly be a better source than the laboratories of literature in which forms of the good life are created and tested. If we want to get beyond the impasse of late capitalism and its ideologies of unlimited growth and 24/ 7 consumption, we arguably need to experiment with new and sustainable syntheses between the Western European traditions of eudaimonia and the art of living on the one hand, and indigenous concepts such as buen vivir and the more spiritual ways of life promoted in many Asian cultures on the other. One of the most important affordances of works of fiction is arguably their power to run through experiments in the laboratory called ‘literature’ and to explore vivid what if-scenarios in their fictional story-worlds. Thanks to their capacity to evoke a wide range of what if-scenarios, fictional narratives are uniquely equipped to enhance readers’ imagination and unlock “the power of possibility” (Liu and Noppe-Brandon 2009). What human beings need in this age of uncertainty (see Heffernan 2021), in which it is unclear what the future trajectories of human society could look like, are “agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years” (Krznaric 2020: 32). In that respect fictional narratives can be considered as paradigm examples of how we can get from What Is to What If, to quote the felicitous title of Rob Hopkins’ (2019) thought-provoking book. One might even go so far as to argue that anyone interested in Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, to quote the equally felicitous and telling subtitle of Hopkins’ book, would be hard put to find a medium better suited to that task than the laboratories of literary fictions. Since “human beings thrive on striving for meaningful future goals that gives their lives purpose and direction” (Krznaric 2020: 138), the experiments in life conducted in literary works can arguably foster human flourishing and well-being. The hypothesis that the laboratories of literature can extend the imagination is not the same as claiming that literary works can anticipate future develop‐ ments or that they have Cassandra-like prognostic or even prophetic potential. Although I agree with Jürgen Wertheimer’s opinion that the “prognostic poten‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 100 Ansgar Nünning tial of literature, its seismic abilities are substantial” (Wertheimer 2021: 20-21), I should like to maintain that its value resides mainly in enhancing the horizon of possibility by running through experiments and possible developments. Therefore, 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, and scenarios. Moreover, as a laboratory of the mind, literature is not only uniquely equipped to foster the imagination but also to enhance key dimensions of what Frederik Pferdt (2024: 5) has called “a future-ready mindstate”, including “optimism, openness, curiosity, experimentation, and empathy” (ibid.). The experiments in life that readers encounter in the laboratory called ‘literature’ make them “mentally prepared to experiment and test solutions” (ibid.: 150). Fostering a habit of “perpetual experimentation” (ibid.: 119-150), the laboratory called ‘literature’ shares with other kinds of labs what David Edwards in his fascinating book about artscience labs calls their “core mission”: “they provide mechanisms to help ideas mature and eventually reach audiences outside the lab” (2010: 13). By systematically researching the forms and models of a good life generated by literature, the fields of philology, literary studies, and comparative literary studies can show what kind of knowledge of life literature contains and how this knowledge can be made accessible by scholarly means. At the same time, research on this topic could help to ensure that the study of literature might be given the high status it should justifiably claim in a future of an ever faster-changing informationand knowledge-based society. If we want to regain “the power of possibility”, we would not only be wise to put “imagination first” (Liu and Noppe Brandon 2009) but also to give the experiments in life we encounter in the laboratory called ‘literature’ as much attention as the experiments conducted in other kinds of labs. The fertile and productive laboratories of literature can do important cultural work, fulfilling a function similar to that of social utopias, which “have helped to reframe the human story, offering fresh pathways along which our imaginations can travel and creating beacons of hope for radically transforming the future” (Krznaric 2020: 145). Works Cited ALBER, J. (2021) ‘Literature as Identity Laboratory. Storyworld Possible Selves and Boundary Expansions’, in Nünning, A. and Nünning, V. (eds) The Value of Literature. REAL 36. Tübingen: Narr, pp.-57-71. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 Literature as a Laboratory for Forms of the Good Life 101 ALTER, A. (2017) Irresistible. 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London: Bloomsbury Academic. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0004 104 Ansgar Nünning Diachronic Perspectives: Historicization across Fields and Genres Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama: Epic Structures in Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607/ 08) Christine Schwanecke 1 Studying Genre for the Future: The Politics of Generic Hybridity and the Political Dimensions of Genre Theory Pointing out the disparity between pressing problems of the twenty-first century and a cultural criticism that falls short of tackling these very problems, Ansgar Nünning demands that the study of culture be reframed and reshaped in a way that it enables researchers to take responsibility of the future (2020: 29-31). In the face of the current debates on the importance of the humanities and the blatant institutional devaluation of the ‘humanist reason’ (Hayot 2021), it cannot be reiterated often enough that the study of literature and culture partakes in its own annihilation if it is not changed into a problem-solving paradigm. Much like the arts, literary and cultural studies have the social obligation to construct productive ways towards sustainable futures. As drama scholar Siân Adiseshiah frames it, also by way of referencing a New York theatre practitioner: Drama is both an embodied and dialogic experience, an experience befitting a perform‐ ance of critical engagement with the prevailing system, as well as an opportunity to participate in a collective act of social dreaming. Ezra Brain, a trans theatre practitioner from New York writes, ‘[t]he world is broken - any child can tell you that. So, instead of simply churning out play after play that tells our audiences the world is broken, we should try to paint an image of the future. What could a future world look like? How do we get there? We should begin to think about creating visions of liberation, not just constant performances of oppression’. (Adiseshiah 2023: 189) Like drama and theatre itself, the disciplines concerned with the study of these very art forms - in particular, literary studies and genre studies - have to at least 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 1 See also Jan Rupp’s contribution to this volume. attempt to function as problem solvers. Not just recent drama, but also the case of ‘Instapoetry’, since 2018 a highly vibrant, evolving new genre, brings this necessity to the fore. 1 JuEunhae Knox, James Mackay, and Anna Nacher (2023) demonstrate how a conservative study of literature that has not yet realised that the digital age engenders generic hybridity like none before, disparages and marginalises unconventional genres all too quickly, often purely on the basis of their alleged ‘impurity’. And they call for a presentand future-oriented literary criticism that seriously acknowledges and open-mindedly assesses new literary forms, which are more often hybrid than not, that is, polygeneric, multimodal, and digital. This chapter, too, considers the relationship between literary studies, genre theory, and politics. Contrary to notions that hold that these concepts surely cannot be related to each other, the present chapter delineates some of the ways in which they can and do. In line with the arguments of Nünning, Hayot, Adiseshiah, as well as Knox, Mackay, and Nacher, this study regards decisions made by literary criticism as political decisions. Literary studies not only decide their own fate by choosing their concerns, methods, and trajectories or by paying heed and living up to their political responsibility; choosing and constructing research objects and theories, they also make political decisions; they decide what to discuss, canonise, or marginalise. Genre theory is a particular case in point. As Vijkay Bhatia points out from another angle, genre knowledge is ‘classified’ knowledge, one mainly accessible to privileged, educated elites, who arguably “exploit generic conventions to create new forms […] [, an option] available only to those few who enjoy a certain degree of visibility in the relevant professional community” (1997: 359). Despite the shared interest in genre and politics, this article is less interested in the mechanisms of social exclusion/ inclusion in processes of literary exchange; rather, it is interested in the politics of canonisation and the exclusion/ inclusion of literary works, and in making literary scholars aware of these politics in the hope of making them ‘fit for the future’. The present study does not tackle the political problems surrounding genre formation, generic practice, and consumption; rather, it is interested in the question of how genre theory and politics intersect; and it traces potential consequences of these generic-political entanglements, consequences that a genre criticism that is dedicated to working as a problem-solving paradigm has to deal with. Looking at literary theory and genre theory from a self-reflexive and critical perspective, I would like to engage with the ideological assumptions on which 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 108 Christine Schwanecke ‘we’ - the scholars of literary studies - base our theories and our theoretical endeavours every day. And I would like to deal with the political effects of our doings - be they academic or non-academic in nature. I will examine the interrelations of ‘genre theory’, ‘genre politics’, and ‘English drama history’. My survey takes the discussion on Instapoetry on a higher plane, arguing, with David Duff, that generic preferences, or, if you will, ‘generic tastes’, have, in the history of genre theory and criticism, often been communicated as norms and laws (2000); sometimes as descriptive ones, sometimes as prescriptive ones. Either way, they have always shaped the realities and futures of genres, their esteem, development, distribution, and consumption. Taking a closer look at the mechanisms of genre theory in the realm of drama theory, I will delineate how certain ‘generic preferences’ have been communicated with regard to the genre of drama. I will study the ways in which they have shaped academic and non-academic realities and in which they influenced practices of art production and consumption. By means of a diachronic perspective, I will examine how they have, in the academic realm of drama history, become visible in canonisation practices or in the selection and construction of study objects; I will also assess how generic preferences have shaped the production of plays and their reception in the non-academic realm, namely, the theatre. In other words, I will gauge how they have shaped theatre realities, inducing directors to stage plays or, respectively, to ignore them. Acknowledging these preferences and recognising their mechanisms, literary scholars in general and genre theorists in particular will be well equipped to counteract purist tendencies as well as to shape unbiased generic futures and praxeological ways of ‘doing genre’. By way of example, I would like to focus on the peculiar relation between the concepts of ‘drama’ and ‘narration’. As I have shown elsewhere, the two concepts have traditionally not gone very well together (Schwanecke 2022: 3- 12). According to the alleged ‘laws’ of modern genre theory, drama and narrative have been conceptualised as two spheres that are divided by an unbridgeable chasm: They have been framed as “a contradiction in terms” (Tönnies and Flotmann 2011a: 9) or an “insurmountable opposition” (Genette 1988 [1983]: 41). And yet, they have come together in historical genre practice (Schwanecke 2022: 358-377). I will zoom in on a play which, in the course of its academic and non-academic reception history, has come to be marginalised on the scholarly page and on the stage: William Shakespeare’s and George Wilkins’ Pericles (1607/ 08). Because it has been regarded as ‘too impure’, as ‘too hybrid’, as ‘too undramatic’ - in short, because genre theory and practice was, once more, lagging behind artistic 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 109 reality and creativity. Because genre theory refused to function as a problemsolving paradigm. Instead of solving the problem of how to describe and stage a dramatic work that challenges a straightforward generic categorisation, genre theory and theatre either ignored the decidedly hybrid, polygeneric play or problematised its resistance to traditional classification and pushed it towards the “periphery” of the Shakespearean canon (Mowat 1977: xiv). Conservative points of view, for instance, Barbara Mowat’s, dichotomise ‘the dramatic’ and the ‘narrative’ in Pericles. The critic frames storytelling as something that does not belong to ‘the dramatic’, that is a disturbing imposition on it, that ‘breaks’ it: “the dramatic illusion [is] repeatedly broken through narrative intrusion” (Mowat 1977: 99, original emphasis). In spite of these calls of discontent, Pericles can be assessed in a completely different, farsighted way. It can be regarded as a play with exciting tensions between ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the narrative’. These tensions have obviously contradicted hegemonic expectations of drama and predominant ‘generic preference rules’, which is presumably why they have been underacknowledged and unexplored for so long. It is high time that this is changed and that they receive the critical attention they deserve. In the following, I will illuminate the preferences of modern genre theory, or ‘laws of genre’ in the terms of Jacques Derrida, when it comes to the nexus of ‘drama’ and ‘narration’ as well as the politics of canonical inclusion and exclusion based on these laws. To do this, I will, firstly and in a genre-historical vein, consider the dynamics of generic tastes by way of an example and zoom in on Pericles’ critical and artistic reception history (Section 2); secondly, I will base my argument genre-theoretically on Derrida’s essay “The Law of Genre” (2000 [1980]; Section 3). Thirdly, I will counter the hegemonic laws of genre theory and literary criticism by bringing together what has been deemed ‘inappropriate’ so far: I will reconnect drama and narrative so that the former stops to “occupy the position of narratology’s non-narrative Other” (Fludernik 2010 [1996]: 333). To use literary studies in general and genre theory in particular as problem-solving tools, I argue that we have to reframe dominant premises that concern genre and the ‘system of genres’. The latter is in urgent need of being reframed as a “polygenetic system [sic]”, which “turns observed variety from problem to structural principle” (Mentz 2017: 238). Situating the play’s polygeneric structure in a system in which “hybridity, change, and generic instability are ordering principles, not deviations from fixed marks” (ibid.), one can discard the notion that Pericles is a ‘problematic’ or ‘broken’ play in any way. Instead, one will finally be able to not only adequately analyse the play, but also to show that it does not have to hide behind any other Shakespearean 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 110 Christine Schwanecke 2 Even though these ideas of scholarly detachment to the study object have been challenged, they seem appealing to this very day. Most likely any student of literature and/ or literary scholar has experienced this themselves, acting upon assumptions of a generally unbiased, intersubjective valid practice of literary criticism for pragmatic reasons in the day-to-day business of ‘doing’ literary theory (e.g. by engaging in processes of canonisation, periodisation, literary analysis, or interpretation that are, at least, made intersubjectively traceable and, thus, a common frame of reference for a certain research community at a certain time). products, which happen to be said to better match the generic ‘facts’ and ‘norms’ that modern genre theory has fabricated and communicated. 2 Out of Date and Out of Favour? From Shakespeare’s Pericles as ‘Problem’ in Genre Theory and Theatre History to Pericles as Part of a Problem-Solving Strategy I ground this essay on the assumption that genre theory partakes in worldmak‐ ing, or, factmaking (Nünning 2023). Being written and received, it generates facts, ‘facts of communication’, which people - scholars, students - engaging in literary studies take for granted. But the facts of genre theory, its objects and concepts are wo/ man-made (lat. facere, factum); they are made in a certain culture and at a certain time in history. As such, they are, much like canonisation processes (e.g. Douglas 2012), far more involved in the politics of ‘personal taste’ or the preference of a scientific community than ‘modern’ - e.g. romanticist, formalist, and structuralist - genre theories have arguably made us believe (because they strife for objectivity; e.g. Duff 2000; Basseler, Nünning, and Schwanecke 2013: 5-9). 2 Based on these ideas and with the volume’s central impetus in mind - the question of what literary studies can do for the future - it becomes clear that they have to partake in highlighting the constructedness of genres in order to create more diverse and non-biased universes for unusual, experimental, or hybrid genres. It is high time that the ideas of recent genre theories that inquire into this direction are highlighted, advertised, and communicated. Recent scholarship has taken a praxeological stance, focusing on the practices involved in ‘doing genre’. In a groundbreaking metatheoretical study, Angela Gencarelli enquires into the ways in which academia and non-academic key players in literary culture partake in the active construction of genres, in ‘the making’ of genres. Based on the thesis that common, acknowledged generic practices (e.g. canonisation and anthologisation) are implicit acts of evaluation, she abstracts a matrix of dominant strategies in both literary industry and literary studies that contribute to either a genre’s success or to its demise. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 111 3 A literary genre that centres around the description and discussion of animals. 4 How ubiquitous genre theory’s practice of problem constructing rather than solving can be, is pertinently highlighted by Claudia Hillebrand (forthcoming), who reflects the famous “Lyrik-Problem” described by Rüdiger Zymner and who asks to what extent a praxeological approach that constitutes poetry as social practice can contribute to the reduction or even solution of this so-called ‘poetry problem’. Taking her cue from the hybrid genre of the Bestiarium, 3 she convincingly illustrates how stakeholders in genre theory and practice ‘do genre’, how they tend to produce and constitute genres; and how their ‘doings’ stabilise genres or destabilise them, sometimes contributing to their success, sometimes to their disappearance (Gencarelli 2024). Emphasising that ‘doing genre’ is not to be understood as an isolated act of single actors, but as dynamic negotiation and open-ended interplay between different actors and institutions, she comes to the conclusion that, from a praxeological point of view, genre emergence and remodelling are the result of an incalculable interplay between different stakeholders that can only be reconstructed retrospectively. Agreeing with her on her demand that a genre theory is praxeologically reframed and the historical development of genres be remodelled, I disagree with her conclusion that generic emergence and change is the result of an incalculable interplay between different players which can only be reconstructed retrospectively. What literary studies can learn from the praxeological standpoint for the future is this: We very much engage - in our very presence, not just in retrospect - in the construction of genres, with our preferences and tastes, with our implicit beliefs and tacitly taken-for-granted theories. This is why it is necessary to highlight that we should question ‘laws of genre’ more often; and to reframe generic laws and norms as ‘preferences’. In addition, we have to historicize them, reflect in which academic time they have been made as historia rerum gestarurm and for which time, i.e., for which res gestae. We have to make genre theory fit for the future by using it as a problemsolving instrument instead of constructing problems with it 4 by isolating genres that do not fit traditional expectations, thus engaging in kinds of ‘doing genre’ that fail to do any justice to new, hybrid, exceptional genres and lead to their marginalisation and demise. If we reframe generic laws and norms as ‘preferences’, we have to consider them in three ways: firstly, as the attempt to express a personal taste in an intersubjectively comprehensible way; because if people prefer one thing over the other, they like something better or best, and they try to promote it as such. Secondly, as an ideologically informed action, “the act, fact, or principle of giving advantages to some over others” (“Preference” Merriam-Webster, 20 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 112 Christine Schwanecke January 2025: n.pag.), because the actions of ‘writing genre’ and ‘doing genre’, i.e. genre theory and practice, are based on a certain set of beliefs. Thirdly, genre preference is related to politics and power; because excluding drama from narratology is a predilection. It is the expression of “a greater liking for one alternative [fiction] over another or others [plays]” (“Preference” OED, 20 January 2025: n.pag.): It advances narrative to a higher rank or position than drama; and the latter is not deemed worthy of narratological consideration. Taking practices of ‘doing genre’ into account, we have to reconceptualise genre norms as historically variable tastes and their conceptualisations as ideologically based political actions. Genre theory as well as literary production and reception are based on the construction of and the discrimination between different genres. Often, these processes go together with values of judgement: In her article “Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin’s Theory of Genre”, Jennifer Wise describes the influential ‘politics’ of Bakhtinean taste. According to the genre theorist, Bakhtinean theories of the novel (e.g. Bakhtin 1981 [1975]) and his framings of what is excellent and exceptional in literature have had their share in shaping academic and popular preferences in a way that has resulted in the marginalisation and ‘othering’ of genres equally interesting and innovative, such as drama. They have also promoted the value of generic homogeneity over works which can be regarded as heterogeneous, like Pericles, which features both dramatic as well as narrative qualities. And, just like general, unspecified preferences, genre history and their politics are prone to change with the historically changing and culturally variable perceptions of literary excellence and favoured genres. This becomes especially evident when one looks at the ‘margins’ of the body of Shakespeare’s dramatic work. Amongst this body, which, in general, can be said to have appealed to popular tastes transhistorically and transnationally, there are works which were strongly subjected to the historically changing dynamics of the generic ‘styles favoured in different ages’ and which have, in the course of their history, become marginalised. There is arguably no play like Shakespeare’s Pericles to better exemplify the historically fickle politics of generic preferences. As Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding remark, “[t]he play proved an immense hit with Jacobean audiences, but it never recovered its popularity after London’s theatres were closed […] [in] 1642” (2014 [2004]: 403). And, indeed, one look at the MLA international bibliography and one at the performance database of the renowned Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) confirm: What was once popular enough to have even been termed a ‘hit’ seems now strangely out of date; no longer preferred, out of taste. And this is arguably 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 113 5 Even in comparison to plays of other Shakespearean genres, that is, of his tragedies (TRAG), comedies (COM), and histories (HIST; see Fig. 1) - with Othello, As You Like It, and King John not even the most popular representatives of their kind -, Pericles occupies a marginal position (with the exception of King John in the MLA search). because of its generic hybridity, its inclusion of narrative features and epic character. Key Words MLA hits on 16 April 2022 (search for “Shakespeare + play title”) RSC data base search on 19 April 2022 (search for “play title”) Pericles (RO) 465 publications 14 RSC productions (1900-now) Cymbeline (RO) 571 publications 27 RSC productions (1884-now) A Winter’s Tale (RO) 1.096 publications 49 RSC productions (1895-now) The Tempest (RO) 2.457 publications 58 RSC productions (1891-now) Othello (TRAG) 2.647 publications 49 RSC productions (1880-now) As You Like It (COM) 769 publications 93 RSC productions (1879-now) King John (HIST) 352 publications 24 RSC productions (1890-now) Tab. 1: Tastes of literary critics and RSC artists (maybe even Shakespeare audiences) in numbers: A comparison between Pericles, the other romances (‘RO’), and representatives of other Shakespearean subgenres in terms of critical and theatrical acknowledgement. If one compares the 465 publications on Pericles to the 571 publications on Cymbeline and even 2.457 publications on the The Tempest, one can see that the romance Pericles has been substantially less dignified with critical attention than its generic counterparts (see Tab. 1). 5 In comparison to both other romances and plays of other subgenres, one can see that, even with regard to non-academic tastes, Pericles seems to have lost its initially tremendous appeal to producers and perhaps even audiences. With just fourteen productions since 1900, the RSC has displayed less interest in staging Pericles than in any other canonised Shakespeare play. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 114 Christine Schwanecke The politics of marginalising Pericles in its recent academic and non-academic reception has to be considered together with other evident mechanisms of academic and non-academic criticism: the politics of discriminating against plays that seem ‘not dramatic enough’ or ‘too narrative’. These politics are less ‘recent’ than the ones marginalising Pericles; they can be traced back to the Renaissance, for example, with Ben Johnson calling Pericles a “mouldy tale” (Bloom 1998: 603). Suzan Gossett (2004: 3-4) attributes this disavowing of Pericles not to the fact that the play was disliked by Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights. Rather, she suspects the bard’s contemporaries of having envied his play’s success and the fact that it so obviously appealed to the masses (ibid.: 4). And the play was not only disliked by fellow artists but also by critics. It has repeatedly been called “one of Shakespeare’s lesser romances” (Dunton-Downer and Riding 2014: 403, emphasis added), a play that displays a “patchy” quality (ibid.: 408), that is “uneven”, “peculiar in genre” (Bloom 1998: 603), and even ‘odd’ or “strange” (ibid.: 604f.); in short, it has been defamed as a ‘problematic’ play. 3 Reframing ‘Laws of Genre’ as ‘Preferences of Genre’: The Politics of the ‘Do-s’ and ‘Don’t-s’ of Genre Theory and History Critics have looked for reasons of Pericles’ contemporary marginalisation and it being considered ‘problematic’. They have come up with a variety of reasons, ranging from the play’s unusual print history (Gossett 2004: 10-30) to the text’s poor quality in terms of its ‘preservation’ (Döring 2009) and to its unclear authorship (Bloom 1998: 603); it is suspected to be co-authored by George Wilkins. The peculiar situation of Pericles has, however, never been considered from the perspective of ‘the politics of generic preferences’ - even though the qualitative statements above indicate the legitimisation of such a consideration. Reframing genre norms as preferences and historicizing them, one realises however that it is not Pericles that is the problem, but genre theory. In the treatment of Pericles and its historically changing aesthetic apprecia‐ tion, the implicit power mechanisms of critical preferences and the hidden ideologies of modern genre theory are epitomised. How Pericles might have come to be treated as it has been becomes evident upon reading Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” in terms of the ‘politics of genre’. In the course of the play’s academic and non-academic reception history, ‘generic preferences’ must have unnoticedly become laws; and this process is, at least in part, what Derrida has called ‘the law of genre’. In other words, culturally and historically specific 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 115 preferences of genre distinction and generic homogeneity have been veiled as transhistorical, universal laws. Derrida bases his idea of ‘the law of genre’ on the fact that genres and communicative acts of generic attributions establish limits; in our case, these limits might, if one applies his terminology, look like this: If critics say ‘Pericles is a play’, it is, to them and others, based on Derrida’s idea, automatically not a novel, not an epic, and not a poem. If they say ‘Pericles is a romance’, as I have done above, it is automatically not a history, a tragedy, or a comedy. Derrida goes on, “[a]nd when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do’, ‘Do not’ says ‘genre’, the word ‘genre’, the figure, the voice, or the law of genre. […] Thus, as soon as a genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation” (Derrida 2000: 221). If one sees genres as critically employed lines of demarcations, genres become, once more, graspable in terms of ‘preference’, namely as defined in the OED, as a “discriminative faculty” (2023: n.pag.). Studies in genre theory and criticism as well as the concepts they preferably apply can, therefore, no longer be perceived as innocent and ‘objective’ laws and heuristic tools for literary classification and interpretation. Rather, they have to be understood as manifestations of preferences, tastes of individual scholars, ideologically informed concepts groups of scholars refer to and use, as well as implicit instruments of political power mechanisms of academic communities. What has happened to Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories, which have been “viewed in terms alien to their thinking” (Derrida 2000: 225), can be said to have happened to Pericles - its character, structure, and modes of representation have been increasingly judged a-historically, by modern critical preference rules, generic tastes, and demarcations, which have become hegemonic, which have come to be regarded as ‘natural’, but which, in fact, do not have anything to do with the play’s actual character or with early modern tastes and rules in drama production and reception. But what are these Renaissance terms and rules? They are certainly less prone to the modern tastes of genre purity, singularity in authorship, and perfection in matters of edition history, which have been shaped by Romantic rules and tastes (Duff 2000) and against which, in retrospect, Pericles, the ‘odd’ play, the ‘patchy’ play, has been-- ill-fittingly and a-historically-- measured. With the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, criticism has often attributed narrativity and the existence of diegetic elements exclusively to the novel. Under this hegemonic critical preference in the normalised guise of a very special genre law, namely ‘novels tell stories’, or - in Derrida’s terms - ‘Play, do be mimetic! ’ and ‘Play, don’t feature any narrative elements! ’, Pericles’ complex and rich features of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 116 Christine Schwanecke narrativity and epic strategies have been excluded from critical observation. The play has been misunderstood, misrepresented, and devalued. In the wake of Barbara Hardy’s, Ansgar Nünning’s, and others’ attempts to advertise the critical acknowledgement of narrative elements in drama, genre preferences have to be critically reflected and even remodelled when it comes to drama in general (see Hardy 1997; Schwanecke 2022) and Pericles in particular (Nünning and Sommer 2008). Reframing Pericles, which has so far been considered problematic, as ‘narrative’, I will not only counter the marginalisation of plays that have so far not matched the hegemonic critical taste but also assess a formally rich and stimulating play - fairly and anew. 4 From the ‘Problem’ to a ‘Challenge’, and even ‘Gift’: Pericles as ‘Narrative Drama’ Even though Pericles has never been explicitly called a ‘problem play,’ it has been experienced as a problematic play because critics have felt that it “abandoned [generic conventions]” (Mowat 1977: 99). But Shakespeare and Wilkins cannot have ‘abandoned’ what has become a convention, a generic “sense of what is appropriate, harmonious, or beautiful” (OED 2023: n.pag.) only much later, arguably in Romanticism (Duff 2000: 3-6). This is why a ‘fresh’ examination seems in order; an examination which is, similar to the studies by the critics mentioned above, aware of the historically variable politics of ‘generic preferences’; and an examination that does not frame ‘narrative’ as the other of ‘drama’, but which builds on Barbara Hardy’s paradigmatic idea that “[n]arrative art takes many different forms: drama is one of these forms” (1997: 13). Even though against this backdrop, all plays can be said to ‘tell stories’, there are certainly those in which ‘storytelling’ is particularly salient (see Schwanecke 2020, 2021, 2022). One of these is Pericles (see Schwanecke 2022: 132-42). And although I am about to construct and communicate a generic preference myself now, I will, for heuristic purposes, generically label plays like these ‘narrative plays’. To consider which forms and functions narrative art takes in the present play, I will zoom in on three of the multifaceted ways in which storytelling is highlighted and instrumentalised in Pericles for dramatic purposes. Pericles features epic structures in at least three ways: (1) it contains episodic elements, drawing on narrative romances, (2) it displays spots of meta-storytelling, and (3) it stages a story that is told. Ad (1): With its primary motifs and structure, Shakespeare’s and Wilkins’ story of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, can be said to draw on the style of ancient 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 117 6 Cf. Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the author demands that one event in drama must necessarily result from previous actions (‘unity of action’). Greek Romance: As Suzanne Gossett remarks, “[a]s a romance hero, Pericles travels and has adventures throughout the ancient world” (2004: 107) to find a wife and expand his kingdom. In accordance with its romance content, the play features an episodic, processional narrative typical of romance. Even though there is an overarching story (the story of Pericles’ life), the episodes remain separate, largely independent stories: Succeeding each other in chronological order, they are temporally related rather than causally. They are linked, but by an implicit ‘and then’. To illustrate: The play starts with Pericles solving the riddle pertaining to King Antiochus’ and his relationship to Antiochus’ daughter; ‘and then’ Pericles wins a tournament and, with it, a wife, Thaisa; ‘and then’ his wife dies giving birth at sea; her seemingly dead body thrown into the water; ‘and then’ Thaisa is washed ashore and miraculously becomes alive again; ‘and then’ their daughter, Marina, is given away to foster parents; ‘and then’ the foster family spin a plot to kill her because she is more beautiful than their own daughter; ‘and then’ Marina is abducted by pirates; ‘and then’ Marina is brought to a brothel but is able to keep her virginity; ‘and then’ Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina are reunited; ‘and then’ Marina marries Lysimachus, Governor of Mytilene, and makes her parents happy. As you can see from my highlighting the ‘and then’-s between the individual episodes or ‘mini-stories’, each of which could stand on its own, few events in the play are - in a totally un-Aristitotelean manner 6 - necessarily tied to previous actions. By way of this formal particularity, Shakespeare and Wilkins provided a small treasure box of individual gems of stories. With variations on romance plots, on motifs of medieval legend (e.g. the tournament), and on ancient tales (e.g. the story of ‘Pericles’), the authors provided potential links to which their audience with its knowledge of stories could relate to. Acknowl‐ edging the playwrights’ mixing of old, well-known stories, their providing new variations on them, and their dramatising them in surprising combinations, helps understand how the playwrights were able to create a dramatic story - packed with suspense, pacing from episodic climax to episodic climax -, which became an enjoyable ‘hit’ with its historical audiences and which can become a hit (again) today; especially if artists, audiences, and critics dared to be more open to ‘generic tastes’ foreign to their own. Ad (2): Beside the play’s structure, Pericles’ instances of implicit and explicit meta-references to stories and storytelling provide an enhancement of the dramatic homage to the enjoyment of stories and to stories in themselves. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 118 Christine Schwanecke 7 That the play is to serve this purpose is made clear right in the beginning: It is “[t]o glad your [= the audience’s] ear and please your eyes” (Per I.i.3f.). Intertextual references to Greek epics and Roman myths - e.g. to the Iliad’s “Trojan horse” (Pericles 1.4.91) or to the goddess Diana (Per 5.1.227-236) - make the drama not only narratively denser, they also link the story of Pericles to arguably some of the greatest narratives of mankind. By invoking these myths, Shakespeare and Wilkins seem to invoke their ancient functions, too: firstly, to respond to people’s need to narratively make sense of the world they live in and, secondly, to provide answers to basic questions of human existence. The stories in Pericles are brought into the vicinity of these ancient myths and epic narratives. With this, stories and their functions are made to appear universal; they can be realised diegetically, dramatically, and across all ages. In addition to the genreand time-transcending functions of stories, another quality of stories is invoked and hailed. In explicit references to storytelling, their task as imaginative shelters in times of crises is reflected. In one of the play’s episodes, the impoverishment and hunger of the people of Tarsus are made topics. In this critical situation, the Governor of Tarsus asks his wife, “[m]y Dionyza, shall we rest us here | And by relating tales of others’ griefs | See if ’twill teach us to forget our own? ” (Per 1.4.1-3). The suggestion to ‘tell each other tales of others’ griefs’ is made in a threatening and potentially deadly situation. And the Governor of Tarsus, at his wit’s end, sees his only rescue in narrative distraction. His wife challenges his point of view, however. As such, stories’ potential as hope of shelter are reflected and discussed in the storyworld, while one of the purposes of theatrical storytelling, the distraction through entertainment, is directly fulfilled in the extra-textual world, upon Pericles being watched or read. 7 Ad (3): To underline that the audiences are presented with a tale, one which poses existential questions and, at the same time, provides entertainment, Shakespeare and Wilkins appoint a storyteller, John Gower. Gower is based on a historical figure, a fourteenth-century English poet, who, in Pericles, guides audiences and readers through the drama’s action (parts of which originate from the historical Gower’s tetrameter poem Confessio Amantis, 1393). With Gower and his repeated entrances, which have been experienced as ‘disturbing’ under the paradigm of the modern ‘generic taste’ (see fn. 2), and with his explicit references to storytelling, the play is actually given even more coherence. This is achieved in at least three ways: Firstly, references such as “[t]o sing a song that old was sung | From ashes ancient Gower is come” (Per 1.1.1-2) make clear that, in addition to narrative as form (Romance), and narrative as world explanation 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 119 models (myths, epics), old practices and customs of storytelling, such as the tradition of oral storytelling by the ‘ancient bard’, are revived and worshipped. Secondly, the play is staged as part of a storytelling tradition; the character of Gower ‘sings a song that old was song’. With this, Shakespeare and Wilkins not only actively refer to their source (i.e. the real Gower’s verses); they also show what they have done to them: They have put them in dramatic form (Per 1.1.3-4; 2.0.15-16.). Epic structures and narrative elements are thus employed not as a disturbance, but as a source of creative consistence; they pervade the play in many forms and on many levels. Thirdly, the play brings together traditions of ‘the dramatic’ and ‘the narra‐ tive’. With Gower, Shakespeare and Wilkins do not abandon dramatic ways of storytelling at all: Employing a narrator, they revive the tradition of the choir of the Greek tragedy, which introduces, comments on, interprets, and abstracts what has happened in the storyworld. In doing so, they address not only the merits of narrative but also of drama. And they even celebrate the combination of these qualities: As one of the historical title pages suggests, the union of a “much admired Play” and one “whole Historie” (see Fig. 1) is something that can be proudly advertised (and sold). If one, along these lines, acknowledges Pericles’ narrative quality and analyses its synthesis of dramatic and narrative qualities, its artistic density and coher‐ ence, one will find the following: Generically and aesthetically, Pericles does no longer pose a ‘problem’; rather, it becomes a ‘challenge’. And, to be even bolder, given the play’s formal richness and density, one can even regard it as a ‘gift’; one that has been waiting to be further ‘unwrapped’ and explored by a genre theory and history that is conscious of the politics and power of generic tastes and preferences. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 120 Christine Schwanecke 8 Source: https: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Pericles,_Prince_of_Tyre#/ media/ File: Pericles_1 609.jpg (Accessed: 23 February 2023). Fig. 1: Title page of the quarto edition of Wilkins and Shakespeare’s Pericles (1609). 8 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 121 5 The Potential Benefits of Unveiling The ‘Politics of Generic Preferences’ for Genre Theory and Theatre History: Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama With my conceptualisation of Pericles as narrative play and my short analysis and interpretation of it, I hope to have strengthened an awareness of the politics of genre theory and the importance of praxeological perspectives which draw attention to these very politics. Modern critical preferences have often failed to capture or misrepresented the actual generic conventions of historical study objects, such as Shakespeare’s and Wilkins’ play. The facts that the existence of Pericles’ rich variety of epic structures has been largely ignored (with some exceptions; cf. Nünning and Sommer 2008; Schwanecke 2022: 134-42), and that the play’s heightened degree of (dramatic) narrativity has been perceived as disturbing attest to the pitfalls of modern hegemonic genre theory. A system that is normalised and endowed with an air of objectivity, its preferences and politics often remain, regrettably, unchallenged. To look at these assumed ‘norms’ and laws in the way they are communicated in their respective contexts does not only enable genre theorists and literary historians to reveal the very preferences of scholars, groups of scholars, and their times, but also to dissect the ways in which these laws have shaped and determined (culturally and historically changing) academic and non-academic contexts and, with them, practices of judging, distributing, receiving, and consuming certain genres and genre products. To unveil the politics of generic preferences, to historicize and critically question them helps both academic and non-academic recipients to distance themselves from these politics, to trace historical concepts and their emanations in both drama as res gestae and theory as historia rerum gestarum, and, hopefully, to engage in developing historically and culturally sensitive new categories and concepts, such as ‘narrative drama’. To learn from the historical example of Pericles, to regard the generic system as a polygeneric one, and to integrate praxeological perspectives into genre theory and practice have become the commandments of the hour. Thus equipped for the future, literary scholars become more aware of the benefits of genres of the future, such as the evolving genres of the internet that are polygeneric in their design, multimedial in their form, and resist straightforward classification. It becomes easier to assess emergent genres like twitterature and Instapoetry not as problematic genres, but as ones that are rich in their polygenericity and innovativeness, and to analyse them accordingly. It is suddenly possible to ‘do genre’ in less biased, more responsible, and more sustainable ways. To historicize generic preferences, rules, and norms leads also to the reas‐ sessment of past assumptions. It allows for the realisation that Pericles might 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 122 Christine Schwanecke be much more innovative - generically and thematically - than a large body of modern criticism has so far made its recipients believe. It not only allows the exploration of epic structures in dramatic form, it also makes gauging their performative, cultural power on the historical stage possible. By presenting a host of diverse episodes, that is, mini-stories within one play, by including meta-referential remarks on storytelling, and by implementing a highly salient narrator figure on an extradiegetic level, Shakespeare and Wilkins not only cross the boundaries of conventional dramatic literature. They also use narrative to perform genre politics on stage: What would normally have been considered plainly a play is converted into quasi-narrative literature, similar to myth, folklore, and medieval tale collections orally performed. And in this lies immense performative power. While, on the story level and regarding the life of the eponymous hero, Pericles, clear-cut episodes and morals prevail, Pericles’ structural traits undermine the one-dimensional interpretations of the play. Performing this discrepancy, Pericles is, as Julie Grant Moore states, “a play that uses generic conventions [and their transgression] to challenge […] generic, political, and social assumptions” (2003: 33). Defying prevalent “moralistic reading[s]” (Sprang 2011: 118), the authors’ generic trans‐ gressions present the relatively simple morals of the individual episodes not as veritable historical facts, but as narratives; stories put forth by a narrator, Gower. Thus, they are performed and judged as “lies | disdained in the reporting” (V.i.109 f.). Miracles, simplistic worldviews, clear dichotomies of good and bad are, through the three ways in which they are dramatically ‘reported’, judged as ‘medieval’ and ‘fictional’; and idolised mythical regents and family members are assessed as one-dimensional characters of rather naïve fairy tales and distant, allegedly simpler pasts. As polygenric and praxeological perspectives show, Shakespeare and Wilkins contest not only a potential contemporary desire for moral unambiguity and simplification; they also challenge a much newer desire for homogeneity and simplicity, the one put forth by modern genre theory. And in laying nuances like these bare, there lie some of the great merits of literary studies and its potential for the future. At times in which the desire for unambiguity, for simple solutions, and the lack of what has been called “Ambiguitätstoleranz” (tolerance of ambiguity) are often criticised, not only in the arts but especially in public discourse, social media, literary studies and genre studies are called upon to take on complex, hybrid issues and no longer marginalise or ignore them. They are obliged to describe, measure and assess the potential of the hybrid for the present and the future, not just intra-textually and -generically, but also with regard to its extra-textual implications for more inclusive social and cultural 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 123 futures. Performing genre transgression on the stage and advertising the union of narrative and drama in one play, Pericles, firstly, indicates that simple worlds, straightforward morals, and happy endings are no more than the material of fiction; and it, secondly, furthers the acknowledgement that the alleged facts of genre theory can be no less trouble: Fictitious and misleading, they always have to be contested and historicized. Turning towards hybrid works of the early modern era like Pericles can help us to see the potential and necessity of contemporary emerging hybrid genres. 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(1997) ‘The Power and Politics of Genre’, World Englishes 16 (3), pp. 359- 71. BLOOM, H. (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books. DERRIDA, J. (2000 [1980]) ‘The Law of Genre’, in Duff, D. (ed) Modern Genre Theory. Harlow: Longman, pp.213-231. DÖRING, T. (2009) ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’, in Kindlers Literatur Lexikon Online. Available at: www.kll-online.de (Accessed: 16 April 2022). DOUGLAS, R. (2012) ‘Theory versus Practice: On the Postcolonial Marginalization of Haitian Literature’, Small Axe 16 (3), pp.188-98. DUFF, D. (2000) ‘Introduction’, in Duff, D. (ed) Modern Genre Theory. Harlow: Longman, pp.-1-24. DUNTON- DOWNER, L. and Riding, A. (2014 [2004]) Essential Shakespeare Handbook. London: Dorling Kindersley. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 124 Christine Schwanecke GENCARELLI, A. (2024) ‘Doing Genre: Grundzüge einer praxeologischen Gattungsforschung’, in Gencarelli, A. (ed) Doing Genre. Praxeologische Perspektiven auf Gattungen und Gattungsdynamiken. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.-1-22. GENETTE, G. (1988 [1983]) Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. GOSSETT, S. (2004) ‘Introduction’, in Gossett, S. (ed) Pericles. London: Bloomsbury, pp.-1-163. HARDY, B. (1997) Shakespeare’s Storytellers: Dramatic Narration. London: Peter Owen. HAYOT, E. (2021) Humanist Reason: A History. An Argument. A Plan. New York: Columbia University Press. HILLEBRANDT, C. (2024). ‘“Poetry Game”? Ansätze zu einer Modellierung von Lyrik als sozialer Praxis’, in Gencarelli, A. (ed) Doing Genre. Praxeologische Perspektiven auf Gattungen und Gattungsdynamiken. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.-143-160. KNOX, J., Mackay, J., and Nacher, A. (2023) ‘Global Instapoetry’; European Journal of English Studies; 27 (1), pp.-3-13. doi: 10.1080/ 13825577.2023.2206452. MENTZ, S. (2017) ‘Pericles and Polygenres’, in Stanivukovic, G. (ed) Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, pp.-238-56. MOWAT, B. A. (1977) The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: University of Georgia Press. NÜNNING, A. (1994). ‘Be my Confessors! Formen und Funktionen epischer Kommunikationsstrukturen in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus’, Forum Modernes Theater, 9 (2), pp.-141-60. NÜNNING, A. (2010) ‘Making Events - Making Stories - Making Worlds: Ways of Worldmaking from a Narratological Point of View’, in Nünning, V., Neumann, B., and Nünning, A. (eds) Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives. New York: De Gruyter, pp.191-214. NÜNNING, A. (2020) ‘Taking Responsibility for the Future: Ten Proposals for Shaping the Future of the Study of Culture into a Problem-Solving Paradigm’, in Bachmann- Medick, D., Kugele, J., and Nünning, A. (eds) Futures of the Study of Culture: Inter‐ disciplinary Perspectives, Global Challenges. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, pp.-29-65. doi: 10.1515/ 9783110669398-003. NÜNNING, A. 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(2002) ‘Drama und Narratologie: Die Entwicklung erzähltheoretischer Modelle und Kategorien für die Dramenanalyse’, in Nünning, V. and Nünning, A. (eds) Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Trier: WVT, pp.-105-28. NÜNNING, A. and Sommer, R. (eds) (2004a) Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissen‐ schaft: Disziplinäre Ansätze - Theoretische Positionen - Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag. NÜNNING, A. and Sommer, R. (2004b) ‘Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft: Disziplinäre Ansätze, theoretische Positionen und transdisziplinäre Perspektiven’, in Nünning, A. and Sommer, R. (eds) Kulturwissenschaftliche Literaturwissenschaft, pp.-9-29. NÜNNING, A. and Sommer, R. (2006) ‘Die performative Kraft des Erzählens: Formen und Funktionen des Erzählens in Shakespeares Dramen’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 142, pp.-124-41. NÜNNING, A. and Sommer, R. (2008) ‘Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama’, in Pier, J. and García Landa, J. (eds) Theorizing Narrativity. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.-331-54. NÜNNING, A. and Sommer, R. (2011) ‘The Performative Power of Narrative in Drama: On the Forms and Functions of Dramatic Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in Olson, G. (ed) Current Trends in Narratology. New York: De Gruyter, pp.-200-31. NÜNNING, A. and Nünning, V. (2010) ‘Ways of Worldmaking in Literature and other Media: Theoretical Reconceptualizations and Constructivist Criticism’, in Nünning, V., Neumann, B., and Nünning, A. (eds) The Aesthetics and Politics of Cultural Worldmaking. Trier: WVT, pp.-1-19. NÜNNING, A., Nünning, V., and Scherr, A. (2021) ‘Passion, Pleasure, Problem-Solving and Purpose: Reinvigorating Literary Studies for the 21st Century and Coping with Challenges, Changing Contexts, Concerns and Concepts’, in Nünning, A., Nünning, V., and Scherr, A. (eds) Literature and Literary Studies in the 21st Century: Cultural Concerns, Concepts and Case-Studies. Trier: WVT, pp.-1-42. PREFERENCE (2023) in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Available at: https: / / www.merria m-webster.com/ dictionary/ preference. PREFERENCE (2023) in Oxford English Dictionary. Available at: https: / / doi.org/ 10.1093 / OED/ 7827183124. PYRHÖNEN, H. (2007) ‘Genre’, in Herman, D. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.-109-123. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 126 Christine Schwanecke SCHWANECKE, C. (2020) ‘Worlds of Sighs, Stories, and Music: The Cultural Work of Alter-Generic and Intermedial Forms in Jacobean Tragedy’, in Kovach, E., Polland, I., and Nünning, A. (eds) Forms at Work: New Formalist Approaches in Literary Studies. Trier: WVT, pp.-41-54. SCHWANECKE, C. (2021) ‘Crashing Finances, Clashing Genres: Analysing the 2008 Financial Crisis in Documentary-Narrative-Dramatic Terms in David Hare’s The Power of Yes’, in Nünning, A., Nünning, V., and Scherr, A. (eds) Literature and Literary Studies in the 21st Century: Cultural Concerns-- Concepts-- Case-Studies. Trier: WVT, pp.-185-201. SCHWANECKE, C. (2022). A Narratology of Drama: Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century. Berlin: De Gruyter. SHAKESPEARE BIRTHPLACE TRUST (no date) RSC Productions: Online Database. Available at: http: / / www.calmview.eu (Accessed: 16 April 2022). SHAKESPEARE, W. and Wilkins, G. (2004 [1607/ 08]) Pericles. Ed. by Suzanne Gossett. London: Bloomsbury. SPRANG, F. C. H (2011) ‘Never Fortune Did Play a Subtler Game: The Creation of ‘Medieval’ Narratives in Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen’, European Journal of English Studies, 15 (2), pp.-115-28. TÖNNIES, M. and Flotmann, C. (2011) ‘Introducing Narrative in Drama’, in Tönnies, M. and Flotmann, C. (eds) Narrative in Drama. Trier: WVT, pp.-9-15. WISE, J. (1989) ‘Marginalizing Drama: Bakhtin’s Theory of Genre’, Essays in Theatre, 8 (1), pp.-15-22. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0005 Historicizing Generic Norms and Exploring the Performative Power of Narrative in Drama 127 * Work on this chapter has been financially supported by LCE - Literature, Cognition and Emotions (FPIII at Humanities Faculty, University of Oslo). Some of the arguments made in this contribution form part of my habilitation treatise at Giessen University (title The Cultural and Cognitive Work of Autofiction: Forms, Affordances, and Effects from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-First) and are published in similar form in A History of Autofiction: Cognitive and Cultural Work from 18th-Century England to Contemporary Global Anglophone Literatures, Bloomsbury Academic 2025). 1 Goodreads is an Amazon-owned social cataloging and reviewing site (launched in January 2007), on which mostly lay readers publicly rate and comment on books, compile reading lists, and engage in discussions. Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom Alexandra Effe 1 Introduction The contemporary publishing landscape is full of texts in which life and art are difficult to pry apart. Texts that somehow present a portrait of their author but are also clearly fictionalised fill bookshops, university reading lists, and Goodreads  1 shelves. They are discussed in academic articles, international re‐ viewing organs, on social media, and by the popular press. Prominent examples that have received much critical attention and also become major publishing successes include Karl Ove Knausgård’s Min Kamp (My Struggle) series, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. These three works already make apparent that the respective authors are present, and fictionalised, in these texts to very different degrees. Cusk’s books all feature the same author-character, once in each book identified as Faye. She functions as narrator, but is present mostly as a conversation partner for the stories of others, whose selves take up this book in the main. Ferrante publishes a four-part story of the writer-character Elena/ Lenú, who shares a given name with the author. The textinternal author, Elena Greco, tells of her life from early childhood to finding her profession, and also mentions that she is writing an autobiographical novel. The fact that ‘Elena Ferrante’ is a pseudonym adds an additional layer of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 ambiguity to the question of how author and character are linked. Knausgård, lastly, offers a multi-volume life account that seems to be transparently that of the author, but with several of his family members appearing under different names, and with the author exhibiting scarily detailed memory of conversations, clothing, and food cooked, but also at times reflecting on the fact that such detailed recall is realistically impossible. These kinds of hybrid autobiographical-fictional books are often discussed under the moniker autofiction, a contested term popularised in the 1970s by writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky (who used it on the back-cover of his book Fils). The term is flawed, and there is no shortage of criticism of it. To name just two important issues, for one, the elements of auto and fiction - if we take them to refer to the self and also to something novelistic, something fictionally shaped, perhaps something invented, are in combination found in most literary texts, maybe in all. Secondly, Doubrovsky coined the term as a modification of autobiography, but, in wanting to replace the biography part with the fiction part, unfortunately lost also the bio(life)and the graphe(writing)-parts of autobiography. This chapter will not go into additional problems that the term entails, foregrounding instead its wide use. Despite its flaws, many theorists, critics, and readers seem to feel that the various kinds of texts they group under the label autofiction have something in common, and that the term gets at something specific that would be lost if one were to use descriptors like fiction, novel, autobiography, or memoir. Autofiction is applied with most consensus to texts that, in classically post‐ modern fashion, include extensive metafictional commentary, in particular about the act of writing, and about how the self is transformed through acts of writing, sometimes also of reading. The process is at times conceived of as performative self-creation, at others as falsification, and in many cases as a bit of both. One might exemplarily think of Philip Roth’s oeuvre, in which we find multiple alter egos and extensive commentary on cross-transfers between life and art. In Operation Shylock, for instance, one alter ego finds another, who is posing as Philip Roth; and in The Facts, the alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, questions an autobiographical account written by a textinternal Philip Roth. The term has at times been used also for texts avant-la-lêttre, but diachronic perspectives on autofiction are still rare (see Effe and Lawlor 2025). The fact that autofiction is mostly discussed as a postmodern and contemporary phenomenon is the starting point for this chapter. It proposes to extend autofiction as term and concept diachronically, which, as the chapter demonstrates, brings new insights into the emergence and development of autofictional modes, and into the socio-historical and literary contexts in which we find them. This 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 130 Alexandra Effe approach engenders new readings of texts not previously considered for their autofictional dimension and serves to historicize the contemporary boom. In what follows, the focus is on the early eighteenth century, and specifically, on one of the arguably earliest autofictional texts in English literature: Delarivier Manley’s Adventures of Rivella, the first edition of which appeared in 1714. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of the difficulty of defining what autofiction is, or what it should most usefully denote. This definitional challenge is taken as impetus for advocating a more holistic and cognitive approach that, so this chapter’s claim, allows us to better see and understand autofictional texts, especially in earlier periods. At the example of the eighteenth-century so‐ cio-cultural and literary landscape, and through analysis of Rivella, the chapter then shows that existing accounts of the period - focusing usually on a transition from pseudofactual to fictional texts - have failed to acknowledge the existence of autofictional modes. Textual close reading underpinned by cognitive theory and attention to context of production and reception redresses this oversight. It helps better understand Manley’s text, the workings of autofiction more generally, as well as generic developments of the eighteenth century. The new approach to autofiction advocated and demonstrated in this chapter moreover points to a number of important current themes and new trajectories in literary and cultural studies, which are charted in the conclusion. 2 A Cognitive-Holistic Approach In discussing autofictional practices, one, as Stefan Iversen (2020: 556) notes, grapples with “a type of narrative transgression that, on the one hand, is fairly easy to recognise yet, on the other, very hard to precisely pin down.” The examples mentioned above show how diverse texts we might discuss as autofiction are, and how difficult it is to find a clear definition. We run into trouble, for example, if we try to base a definition on onomastic correspondence or a lack thereof; author and character share a name in Knausgård’s My Struggle, but not in Cusk’s trilogy, only the given name in Ferrante’s quartet, and, in Roth’s oeuvre, some alter egos are called Philip, Philip Roth, or some derivation of the name, while others, Nathan Zuckerman, for instance, are not. Paratextual material does not help either. Many of the texts mentioned so far are labelled ‘a novel,’ but readers are clearly not meant to read them exclusively as such. Genre labels can moreover be used ironically, and, especially in earlier periods, texts are frequently published without such designators. Whether there is metafictional commentary or not cannot be a defining criterion either; we find such elements prominently in Roth’s work, but much less strongly in Cusk’s, Ferrante’s, and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 131 2 I make this argument also together with Hannie Lawlor in a volume on The Autofic‐ tional, in which the move from noun to adjective allows discussing autofictional elements also in other media and to extend the concept more globally (see Effe and Lawlor 2022). 3 Lejeune’s famous concept of the ‘autobiographical pact’ establishes as central for autobiography the author’s promise to tell their story as truthfully as possible (see Lejeune (1973) for the original publication; see 1986, 1989, and 2005 for translations and for his own reconsiderations of his account). 4 For a similar advocacy, albeit discussing exclusively contemporary autofiction see Effe and Gibbons (2022). For a more developed cognitive-holistic and diachronic approach, mapping A History of Autofiction from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, see Effe (2025) (chapter 5 discusses Manley’s Rivella in an expansion of the argument presented in this chapter). Knausgård’s. While this chapter’s focus is not on terminological issues, as part of its interest in a diachronic consideration of autofiction, it argues for a move from the noun to the adjective. Understood adjectivally, autofictional can denote a quality of texts, particular elements within a text, and a quality of writing and reading modes. 2 Autofictional elements and qualities are at least as difficult to pin down, however, as autofiction as a genre. This is so, since neither semantic, nor syntactic, or pragmatic criteria are sufficient for defining a text as autofictional. Neither purely textual criteria, in other words, nor the author’s intention alone, nor purely the reader’s stance, can determine whether a text is autofictional. This chapter demonstrates that the slipperiness of autofiction requires con‐ sideration of textual and paratextual signals together with authorial intention and reading experience. We moreover need to see each text in its particular socio-historical context of production and reception. Autobiography, as Rachel McLennan stresses, is transactual (rather than contractual, as Lejeune would have it). 3 “Crucial to the production and reception of autobiography,” she writes, “are relations of exchange (give and take) between writer and reader” (2013: 112). The same holds for autofiction, and arguably to a heightened degree, since many autofictional texts are centrally about negotiating genre expectations. The text, and also paratextual elements, are the medium via which these transactions and negotiations are conducted, and we need to see text and paratext in combination with actors on each side to understand the phenomenon of autofiction. An approach that is holistic in this sense is already also a cognitive one since it looks at how texts originate in their author’s minds, how they exert effects on the minds of authors and readers, and, in so doing, on their socio-historical and literary context. A cognitive-holistic approach 4 allows exploring potential and actual effects of autofictional modes in a particular socio-historical and personal situation. We can speculate about motivations on the part of the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 132 Alexandra Effe author on the basis of what we know about their biography, and also by drawing on self-commentary, manuscripts, letters, and diaries. How texts act on a readership can be traced through reviews and be hypothesised on the basis of what cognitively inflected theories of discourse processing tell us about likely responses to specific textual prompts. The latter is what this chapter relies on to better understand how Manley’s text worked in its initial context of publication. In drawing on cognitive theory to understand textual effects in diachronic perspective, it is important to keep in mind that conventions of reading and perhaps even our cognitive capacities change over time. Nonetheless, together with consideration of a given period’s generic conventions, socio-historical, socio-cultural, and media context, theories about twenty-first-century readers, at times also based on empirical studies, make cognitive approaches possible also diachronically. 3 Delarivier Manley’s Rivella and Eighteenth-Century Generic Hybridity When Doubrovsky, as he thought himself, coined the term autofiction in the 1970s, he stressed that the practice was not new. As he writes, “si j’ai forgé le mot je n’ai pas inventé la chose” (1994: 72). While it is generally acknowledged that autofiction before Doubrovsky exists, few critics discuss examples before modernism. In the remainder of this chapter, an exploration of autofictional modes in eighteenth-century England illustrates that the term and concept can productively be extended much further diachronically, and that for doing so the cognitive and holistic approach described above is particularly fruitful. The eighteenth century is the time when the modern concept of the author emerges and when copyright is introduced as publishing structures change from patronage to marketplace system. Authors hence newly need to market themselves and their books. The early eighteenth century, in particular, is moreover a time of generic uncertainty. The written word is important for informing people about what is happening in the world, but the kinds of texts people draw on are diverse, and invented elements are common. Lennard J. Davis (1996 [1983]: x) uses the phrase “news/ novels discourse” to describe this fluidity of factual and fictional forms. He refers to the predominant attitude at the time as “cultural indifference to fact and fiction in narrative” (100). By the end of the century, we have a much clearer differentiation of fictional and factual modes of writing, which is why many critics situate the beginnings of the English novel in this period, or at least the beginnings of the prototype that dominates the nineteenth century. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 133 For understanding the workings of autofictional modes in the generically hybrid landscape of the eighteenth century, we will draw on three influential accounts of this transitional period. The first comes from Barbara Foley, who coins the term ‘pseudofactual novel’ for a textual form of importance in particular during the first half of the century. She uses the term to refer to stories that are invented but presented as consisting of, or as based on, actual diaries, letters, or memoirs composed by the protagonist. Pseudofactual novels, according to Foley (1986: 108), invoke “an intrinsically ironic, even parodic contract,” asking readers to accept that characters and events are invented but to simultaneously approach the text as if it were nonfictional, for instance a real diary. Foley believes that this ironic posture is initially adopted to allow writers to “be taken seriously as interpreters of social reality” (115), and to distinguish their work from what was at the time the most widely acknowledged genre of prose fiction, namely the romance. The pseudofactual posture eventually gives way, in her account, to “unabashedly fictional” texts, in which writers assert truth through “analogous configuration” (144). The pseudofactual stance, in other words, is a stage in the novel’s development towards the prototype of nineteenth-century realism. Catharine Gallagher approaches the same transition with a slightly different focus. She foregrounds who stories claim to be about, which, so she argues, changes from accounts about (allegedly) real people to stories about invented and therefore unknown ones. The former means to adopt a pseudofactual stance, for which she lists writers like Defoe or Manley as examples. These, she explains, assume “correspondence between a proper name in a believable narrative and an embodied individual in the world” (2006: 342). The reference, Gallagher notes, can be allegorical (as in Robinson Crusoe) or covert (as in Manley’s works), but pseudofactual pretence is for her a “serious [attempt] to convince readers” that “invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people” (337). In contrast, to present a story as invented and as about unknown people is what for her defines a fictional stance. Here, texts are presented as offering generalised truths by way of an “explicitly nonreferential, fictional individual,” a “nobody” (337). In her account a cluster of mid-century novelists quite suddenly abandon pseudofactual pretence, which is why she speaks of a “discovery of fiction” (341). She admits that the practice of fiction is not entirely new, but stresses that authors before did not consciously and explicitly tell general truths through invented protagonists. Nicholas Paige, in describing the change from pseudofactual to fictional modes as a change in aesthetic values, offers a particularly helpful angle for understanding how autofictional modes relate to pseudofactual and fictional 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 134 Alexandra Effe ones. He identifies a change in aesthetic values in two stages (see 2011: 26). First, there is a transition from valuing tales of heroes, which are appreciated because these are by nature interesting, exemplary, entertaining, and instructive (the Aristotelian regime), to valuing tales about ostensibly historical contemporaries and real documents. The (allegedly) historical is appreciated because real people and events are believed to more strongly move readers, which in turn is believed both to help improve them and to please them (the pseudofactual regime). The subsequent change is to valuing straightforward and explicit invention. It is appreciated for providing the basis of a kind of simulation that grounds emotional effects, and because it is believed to convey general, abstract, and analogical truths about the world (the fictional regime). The second transition - from the pseudofactual to the fictional regime - is what Paige, as do Gallagher and Foley, describes as taking place over the long eighteenth century, even though Paige stresses, in distinction to Gallagher and Foley, that the development is neither linear nor conceptual, but a slow change in tastes over a lengthy period. Autofictional modes are easily mistaken for pseudofactual or fictional ones in the eighteenth-century landscape since they share formal features and elements of communicative stance. That no one has, as of yet, discussed eighteenth-century hybrid life writing texts as autofictional is therefore not particularly surprising. Foley (1986: 186), for example, differentiates between the eighteenth-century pseudofactual novel and what she refers to as “the fictional autobiography” - a term she uses for texts that one might also refer to as autofictional. Both the pseudofactual novel and the fictional autobiography are for her instantiations of a category she calls documentary novel. The fictional autobiography is, in her account, a “new guise” for the documentary novel, appearing only in the twentieth century. She explains the differences by way of two examples: Robinson Crusoe and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Both texts have the appearance of an autobiography - a first-person narrator, named in the title, tells of their life. Robinson Crusoe in pseudofactual fashion wants readers to believe, or at least to join the pretence, that the book is written by Crusoe himself rather than by Daniel Defoe. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in contrast, lets readers in on the joke that what according to the title is an autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and what appears to be told in her first-person voice, is actually written by, and primarily also about, Gertrude Stein. In this lies the main difference, defining one as a pseudofactual text and the other as a fictional-autobiographical hybrid, also for Foley: “Defoe did not, after all, admit to having composed his pseudomemoir,” she stresses; “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is, by contrast, undisguisedly by Gertrude Stein” (190). What Stein 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 135 5 The phrase stems from the subtitle of Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story (1994). does is not something entirely new emerging only in the twentieth century, however. Autofictional texts existed before, as this chapter will show. Gallagher, too, overlooks autofictional modes in the eighteenth century. In her account of The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 5 she describes Manley, Aphra Behn, Charlotte Lennox, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth as creating “rhetorical constructions” that are neither identical nor really distinct from their authors, and that share many characteristics with her category of “explicit, fictional Nobodies” (1994: xix). She acknowledges the autobiographical dimension of some of her case studies, speaking of Rivella and of another of Manley’s texts (The New Atalantis) as confessional, for instance (see 127, 137). Yet, arguably because her focus is on a development towards prototypical nineteenth-century realism, she considers the rhetorical self-constructions of these authors as a stage in the development towards fictional characters rather than as early forms of autofictional self-presentation. In the next section, a cognitively underpinned and holistic consideration of text and context of Rivella will establish that the latter is for Manley more apt, however. 4 Autofictional Publishing as (Self-)Marketing Delarivier Manley (1663-1724) lived an unconventional life for a woman of the early eighteenth century. She worked in diverse genres, including plays, epistolary volumes, and political satire, and is special in earning a living through her writing, at least at intervals. She became famous for her works, but also for personal and political scandals. The Adventures of Rivella constitutes her self-portrait, in part in direct refutation of what others have said and might say about her. It is not straightforwardly an act of self-presentation, however. Rivella evokes the illusion, albeit in a somewhat transparent manner, of being based on the transcript of a conversation between Sir Charles Lovemore and the Chevalier D’Aumont, the former of whom serves as textinternal narrator for most of the text. As we learn in a purported translator’s preface, the book was first published in French by the Gentleman of the Chamber of the Chevalier, whom Lovemore had apparently dictated the content of his conversation to. Rivella, we are invited to pretend, is the result of this transcription in translation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 136 Alexandra Effe Figure 1: Frontispiece to Delarivier Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714). Image by courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. In presenting this frame, Rivella adheres to conventions of pseudofactual pretence. Readers are asked to pretend to believe that they read a historical document recording a conversation that actually occurred. They are not meant to really believe this, however, since the text also makes apparent that Manley as author has creatively created this illusion for us. The frontispiece and the in‐ troduction already expose the pretence to the text’s origin in a real conversation as an illusion, and moreover gesture towards a creative author as the origin of the book. They draw attention to the text’s fictional dimension (although initial readers would not have labelled it as such). In the introduction, a third-person 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 137 narrator, who can realistically be neither Lovemore nor Manley, shows us D’Aumont and Lovemore as they are strolling through the gardens of Somerset House - the scene in which their conversation about the famous Rivella will take place. This third-person omniscient narrative voice - a convention of fiction - recurs at intervals in the main body of the text. The frontispiece (figure 1) depicts the scene of the introduction: Lovemore and D’Aumont next to the Thames. Janine Barchas (2003: 56-57) observes acutely that the two men face the reader “so as to conspiratorially include him or her in their conversation”. That they address readers as much as one another suggests a fictional mode of communication in addition to establishing the pseudofactual frame. Introduction and frontispiece thus both announce a hybrid mode. Since Rivella, through introduction and frontispiece, gestures towards the author who has creatively crafted the text, and who is also the subject of this book, Rivella should be, so this chapter’s argument, considered autofictional rather than pseudofactual or fictional. The book, as so many at this point in time, was initially published anony‐ mously, but its publication history makes clear that Rivella had to be read as being by and about Manley, and that neither the anonymous publication nor the diaphanous anagram of the title was intended to, or did, fool many readers. Manley’s publisher, Edmund Curll, a notorious figure in the eighteenth-century book market, certainly expected her to be recognised as author and subject. We must speculate about Curll’s and Manley’s motivations and actions to some extent, but the following is what likely took place, based in part on what Curll himself writes in a preface to the fourth edition of Rivella. Curll put out word that he would publish a negative account of Manley’s life, attacking her as a pro-Tory writer. The piece was to be written by the hack writer Charles Gildon. Curll’s recent biographers, Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (2007: 52), suspect that he made this announcement in order to “blackmail Manley into working for him”. Manley indeed approached Curll and requested to write the book herself. Curll agreed, as Manley’s biographer, Rachel Carnell (2008: 15), suspects, because he thought that a text written by the famous Manley would sell better. If Curll did not expect readers to know that Manley was the author and the subject of this book, neither the blackmail ploy nor allowing Manley to write the book herself in the end would be reasonably motivated. Curll, in other words, does not have motivation for his actions if he expects readers to read fictionally, nor if he expects them to read pseudofactually. He must have anticipated what we can now call autofictional reading. Moreover, the four editions of Manley’s book (three of which were published during her lifetime and one shortly after her death) consecutively make author‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 138 Alexandra Effe 6 This edition appeared in October 1724, while the date on the title page is 1725 (see Carnell 2017: 17, 28n12). Curll’s preface is dated 29 Sept. 1724. From the second edition onwards, the book appears with a key, identifying most of the historical people commented on. ship and autobiographical content more apparent. The Adventures of Rivella; Or, the History of the Author of the Atalantis. With Secret Memoirs and Characters of several considerable Persons her Contemporaries (1714) first becomes The Adventures of Rivella; Or, the History of the Author of the Four Volumes of the New Atalantis (1715), then is republished as Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Manley (Author of the Atalantis), Containing Not only the History of Her Adventures, but Likewise an Account of the most considerable Amours in the Court of King Charles II’d (1717), and finally, in a posthumously published edition, appears as Mrs. Manley’s History of Her Own Life and Times (1724 6 ). While the author is initially identifiable only through her link to The Atalantis, and while the focus is in the first editions more on political and societal commentary, the later editions direct attention more strongly to Rivella/ Manley, who is in 1724 explicitly named both as author and main subject of the book. In sum, the publication history - how Rivella first came into being and also changes in peritextual material of subsequent editions - shows that the book’s value for readers lies in large part in the fact that Manley is author and subject, and that the fictional dimension (for example, third-person omniscient narrative voice, conversational frame exposed as illusion, and invented names) does not detract from Rivella’s autobiographical appeal. That we see this only if we look at the publication context and read the text in light of eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions confirms that a holistic and contextual angle is necessary to recognise Rivella as an autofictional text. 5 Autofictional Effects through Deictic Ambiguity The fact that Rivella is a generic hybrid is in itself not particularly noteworthy. Neither is that readers were ready to accept the text as fictionally shaped and nonetheless as revelatory about its author. Manley’s book stems after all from a period when it was quite common to combine reportorial and invented elements, and when boundaries between factual and fictional modes were not yet clearly drawn. What Manley does is different, however, from ‘news/ novels discourse’ or pseudofactual signalling. Davis (1996 [1983]: 115) correctly notes that the fictional component of Rivella (and he also refers to The New Atalantis) serves to avoid legal persecution, namely to protect Manley “from the punishment of the libel laws.” She exposed and satirised others, and therefore had to be cautious in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 139 7 Text World Theory was pioneered by Paul Werth; for overviews, see Gavins (2007), Gavins and Lahey (2016), and Gibbons and Whiteley (2018, chapter 17). how she presented her work. Safety is only one effect of Manley’s hybrid mode, however, and an effect merely of the combination of the fictional and the factual. Manley, importantly, also combines the fictional with the autobiographical, and the resulting autofictional mode has additional effects. About Rivella’s autobiographical dimension, Davis says that “every detail, every characteristic [of Manley] is preserved in print” (1996: 118). This statement neglects that Manley, through this text, hides and ambiguates at least as much as she reveals. In Rivella, Manley develops an autofictional mode that allows her to present an image of herself that remains mutable and elusive, that constitutes resistance against being confined to one single identity, that serves as challenge to the roles assigned to women by societal convention, and that functions to promote herself as author and as public figure. How she achieves these effects is understood best through a cognitive perspective on how readers most likely process(ed) the text. The kind of cognitive approach advocated in this chapter can involve a mul‐ titude of theoretical accounts, empirical studies, and also analysis of responses by flesh-and-blood readers. This chapter showcases one of these components. It offers an account of autofictional reading based in Text World Theory and shows how this framework elucidates the workings of Manley’s book in its historical context, while also allowing to describe general mechanisms underlying autofiction. Text World Theory is a comprehensive cognitive stylistic account of discourse processing, and, by making use of it in the analysis of a literary text, this chapter demonstrates one important current trend in literary and cultural studies - namely, the joining of forces in interdisciplinary endeavours to better understand the cognitive-affective effects of literary and non-literary discourse, including effects of specific narrative strategies. Text World Theory is itself representative of new developments in the study of language (related to those in literary and cultural studies). The framework forms part of a cognitive and contextual turn towards embodied situatedness and pragmatic effects. Text World Theory draws on philosophical, psychological, and cognitive approaches and integrates syntactical and contextual criteria in order to explain how we form meaning from textual and paratextual cues. 7 The theory builds on Deictic Shift Theory, which explains how markers that are relative and contextually defined - like ‘here/ there’, ‘yesterday’/ ’tomorrow’ - cue us to take on a particular perspective. We cognitively project to the perspective of the deictic centre, usually the speaker or the person thinking, in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 140 Alexandra Effe 8 For an overview of Deictic Shift Theory and its application in literary and discourse analysis, see Gibbons and Whiteley (2018, chapter 13). For a categorisation of different forms of deixis in literary texts, see Stockwell (2020, 54). order to understand a given speech act from this perspective. When someone says, ‘on my right’, for example, we understand them to be referring to what is on their right side rather than ours. 8 Text World Theory claims that when we process discourse, we construct subjective mental representations, referred to as ‘text-worlds’. We do so on the basis of textual cues, but also on the basis of previous knowledge and experience. For each entity that speaks or thinks in a novel, for example, we, according to Text World Theory, build such a mental world model and project to this entity to understand what they say or think. The modelling process includes constructing a given entity’s consciousness, that is, imagining as best as we can their beliefs, goals, attitudes, and emotions. The theory is helpful in thinking about how we process autofictional texts, but must for this purpose be somewhat adapted. In Text World Theory, worlds are conceptualised as fairly closed off, and usually thought of in spatial terms. Autofictional texts, however, often feature shifts between references to textual and extratextual reality, and moreover references that apply to two levels at once - at the same time to character and author, for example. Such texts frequently allow only for a partial, interrupted, and uncertain cognitive projection to a given entity’s text-world. Ben Lerner’s 10: 04 (2014), forming part of the contemporary boom in autofictional writing, can serve to demonstrate this quality of autofiction, before we return to the eighteenth century and to Rivella. Lerner’s text shows exemplarily that autofiction invites readers to relocate to a narrator’s or character’s text-world only partially. The first-person narrator, a writer-character once identified within the book as ‘Ben,’ has been commis‐ sioned to write his second novel by expanding on a short story of Lerner that initially appeared in the New Yorker and that is reprinted also within 10: 04. The narrator at one point reflects, “Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them” (Lerner 2014: 194). The reference to “the book you’re reading now” points double-deictically both to the book that the narrator-character is writing and to the book that we are reading, that is, the book that Lerner has written. The “I” of the text, in consequence, refers double-deictically both to the narrator-character and to the historical Lerner. The “you”, analogously, refers both to a narratee and to flesh-and-blood readers. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 141 9 Manley, Delarivier (2005 [1714]), The Adventures of Rivella (Selected Works of Delarivier Manley, Vol. 4, edited by Rachel Carnell and Ruth Herman, 1-58 [London, Pickering & Chatto]), p.-7. All subsequent references in parentheses are to this edition. The theoretical framework of Text World Theory can be applied to this kind of text if one modifies the theory to encompass dual, uncertain, or partial readerly positioning. An autofictional reading mode, so this chapter’s claim, involves cognitive projection into the perspectives of a narrator and of characters, but to perceive a narrator and/ or character’s text-world as also that of the author. Autofictional reading, in addition, entails uncertainty about the degree to which such alignment of worlds and entities is adequate. In Rivella, as we will see, this kind of double and uncertain readerly positioning serves strategic effects of value in the book’s original context of production. The introduction to Rivella ends with a shift of deictic centre, namely from the extradiegetic third-person narrator to Lovemore, who “began his Discourse in this manner”. 9 Lovemore’s discourse is what we read for large parts of the remainder of the text, interspersed by short comments from D’Aumont, and interjections by a narrator voice that indicates the speaker (“Methinks, Monsieur le Chevalier, continu’d Lovemore” [18], or “Thus my dear D’Aumont, continued Sir Charles” [101]). The shift to Lovemore as deictic centre is not complete, however. Rivella is Manley’s most obvious alter ego in this text, but Lovemore, as the narratorial voice, functions as another alter ego. Especially since he at times takes on an omniscient narratorial stance, we are likely to also see Manley in his statements, attitudes, and beliefs, or at least to wonder whether Manley is speaking through her textinternal narrator. As is typical for autofiction, readers are asked to cognitively project to a narrator-figure and to acknowledge this figure as a textually created entity (we would now perhaps call him fictional or fictive), but to retain awareness of the fact that Manley as author has created this narratorial entity, and to reflect on how far what the narrator says, feels, and believes represents attitudes of the author. This is the case even though Lovemore also stands in for a historical person. We are, in sum, invited to construct a mind-model of the author based on what the text tells us about Rivella, but also on the basis of what Lovemore says and thinks. At the same time, we are reminded that neither of these sources allows us to model the historical author with any certainty. In processing the text, in other words, we likely project cognitively-emotion‐ ally to Lovemore, but at the same time to Manley as author. The effect of this double-positioning of the readership is a noncommittal speaking position that serves Manley very well. The complex overlaying of perspectives allows Manley for example to criticise Lovemore’s and D’Aumont’s biases, and by implication 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 142 Alexandra Effe those of others who might claim to pronounce on her life and character, while simultaneously capitalising on the men’s perspectives. Through Lovemore’s and D’Aumont’s eyes, Manley appears as alluring and enticingly out of reach. D’Aumont has never met Rivella, but believes that her writing gives him access to her person. He hopes to experience the “Raptures” she tells of in her writing, because he is certain that, if she has “but half so much of the Practice, as the Theory, in the Way of Love, she must certainly be a most accomplish’d Person” (8). The statement refers to two ontological levels simultaneously, namely to Rivella as textinternal character and to the author whose writing the two gentlemen admire. D’Aumont and Lovemore, in a subsequent lengthy section, praise Rivella/ Manley’s character and physique, and, over the course of the narrative, grow increasingly besotted with their image of the author. Manley, through depicting these men’s obsession, mocks the kind of celebrity culture in which a reader, like D’Aumont, becomes enamoured with an image of the author created purely from their work. Rivella nonetheless also contributes to such celebrity culture, since Manley invites her readers to engage with her text as a substitute experience of the author. It is noteworthy also that Manley does not merely use the opportunity to tell her own life story to whitewash and idealise herself. She does not simply ask us to endorse the views proffered by Lovemore and D’Aumont. She presents an ambiguous self-portrait, and the text emphasises that she has not been fully revealed. Lovemore’s bias is exposed when he wonders whether he will be able to provide an “Impartial History” (10), and even more when he claims to be “neither blind to Rivella’s Weaknesses and Misfortunes, as being once her lover, nor angry and severe as remembering [he] could never be Beloved” (29). Manley, in including such commentary, draws attention to the fact that the account that Rivella constitutes is not entirely trustworthy, and by implication warns readers of distortions in other accounts about Manley that are in circulation or that might be told in the future. The ambiguation that results from Manley’s autofictional doubling of her voice also allows the author to, at her desire, own or disown what her charac‐ ter says. The noncommittal autofictional speaking position - inhabiting her narrators’ voice to an extent but also distancing herself from it - serves her to denounce opponents without seeming to do so herself, to keep different career paths open, and as political strategising. Lovemore, for instance, denounces in Manley’s name The New Atalantis, Manley’s previous work, which satirises the Whigs, as a “heinious Offence, and the notorious Indiscretion of which [Rivella/ Manley and the booksellers and printers] had been guilty” (56). Should the Whigs come to power (as they indeed did), this would allow Manley to claim 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 143 the judgment as her own, suggesting regret for her Tory propaganda. Otherwise she could have distanced herself from what Lovemore is saying but not she. That Manley strategically uses her text to promote herself and to respond to eighteenth-century political upheavals is not a new insight. Her clever political manoeuvring, for example, has been described in detail by Carnell (2008: 11-21). The cognitively underpinned analysis offered above nonetheless allow us to better understand how Manley’s text creates its effects within its original context of publication, and also to better understand the workings of autofiction more generally. 6 Autofiction within Eighteenth-Century Genre Transformations The cognitive and holistic perspective adopted in this chapter offers insights not only into how Rivella worked as a strategically shaped act of self-performance - asserting affects through claims to real-world reference and through fictional craft - it also lets us draw conclusions about generic developments in the eighteenth-century literary landscape at large. If we recognise that Rivella (and other texts of the period) are autofictional rather than pseudofactual or fictional, it becomes apparent that autofictional and pseudofactual texts existed parallely, as did (and do) fictional and autofictional texts. If the fictional replaces the pseudofactual, but the autofictional persists, the logical conclusion must be that the autofictional serves different purposes - purposes that, as the contemporary boom of autofiction attests to, are still important, although autofiction’s forms, aims, and effects have in part been transformed. In the eighteenth century, in particular, but continuing throughout literary history, autofictional texts serve authorial self-marketing. Where pseudofactual texts are about unknown contemporary everyday people (see Paige 2011: 28- 29), and fictional texts tell the stories of invented nobodies (sensu Gallagher), autofictional texts are about a known somebody who wishes to be known even more widely, and sometimes wishes to be known slightly differently. For this, the author needs to be able to speak and to be heard as speaking, which is not possible with a pseudofactual stance that foregrounds the ostensible rather than the actual author (say, Crusoe over Defoe). An openly autobiographical mode might seem to be the best option, but self-presentation unabashedly offered as such was perceived as unseemly in the eighteenth century. For Manley, speaking unambiguously in her own voice would moreover have meant to make herself vulnerable for criticism concerning what she says about others. In addition, a straightforwardly autobiographical mode would have taken away 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 144 Alexandra Effe some of the effects that come through the seemingly external perspective on Rivella/ Manley. Lastly, an autobiographical mode does not, or to lesser extent, allow authors to show their ability to craft, which is an important part of autofictional self-promotion. An autofictional mode provides a solution. It enables authors to showcase craft, and to market themselves and their writing, while seeming to remain modest. Additionally, the mode enables them to speak about themselves and society in a noncommittal voice that serves as a safety net and also to keep full disclosure enticingly out of reach. In the eighteenth-century socio-cultural and literary landscape all of this is particularly opportune, since the newly emergent author concept calls for self-marketing, but strict rules are in place about which kinds of self-presentation are allowed in which contexts. It is plausible that, since neither pseudofactual nor fictional or autobiographical modes allow for promoting the author as author, autofictional forms begin to flourish at this time. By looking at eighteenth-century texts anew through an autofictional lens, we are able to better see how textual forms like we find them in Rivella serve these functions. In a second step, we can ask how forms and functions of autofiction transform over the course of literary history. There are other eighteenth-century authors whose work can productively be discussed as autofictional (for example Alexander Pope, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne) (see Effe 2025). Although none of them would have thought of themselves as writing autofiction, of course, exploring the autofictional dimension of their texts promises new insights into their work, into how autofictional practice works at this time, and into how it develops. 7 Conclusion This chapter has shown that the concept of autofiction, despite its flaws, helps us to better see, and with more precision analyse, particular phenomena and elements that the term directs our attention to. The new direction that this chapter has taken the study of autofiction in, namely extending the concept diachronically and approaching it through a holistic and cognitive perspective, does not promise clearer definitions, but it enriches our understanding of autofiction as a vibrant textual and contextual phenomenon. In addition, the approach taken, and the case study discussed, point to themes, subfields, and methodologies that have in recent years been increasingly prominent in literary and cultural studies, and that by all appearance will in the future continue to gain traction. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 145 The example showcased here, of how a holistic and cognitive account of Manley’s Adventures of Rivella allows us to better understand generic develop‐ ments over the course of the eighteenth century, offering insights, in particular, into forms and workings of fictionality, into literary conventions, and into aesthetic values and modes of perception, is intended to serve as an incentive for further development of the following important topics, new approaches, and emergent trajectories in the field of literary and cultural studies. For one, the chapter has developed an approach within the relatively new interdisciplinary conjuncture of cognitive literary studies - a field and method that explores how concepts, theories, and empirical research in cognitive sciences can enrich our understanding of literary texts, as well as what literature can teach us about cognition. Approaches within cognitive literary studies often centre on readers, studying flesh-and-blood people but also offering theoretical models. In this focus, cognitive literary studies shares interests with new formalist approaches, which constitute another important new direction for literary and cultural studies. These fields and approaches are concerned with how cultural artifacts exert effects at individual and collective level, often with a focus specifically on formal elements. To acknowledge the power of cultural productions and to try to get to the bottom of their workings and value will certainly continue to be an important endeavour in years to come. Secondly, this chapter’s discussion of formal effects in eighteenth-century autofiction points to a new direction that narratological research has taken in the new millennium - to the subfield of a diachronic narratology, which asks whether, or in how far, it is possible to make universal statements about narrative, or whether a focus on historical specificities and an interest in functional shifts of narrative forms, structures, and strategies is required. Similar questions are posed about cognitive approaches - namely, whether we can, on the basis of studies from the twentieth and twenty-first century, make claims about the minds and cognitive processes of people from earlier times. This chapter has shown that cognitive approaches are indeed productive also in diachronic perspective, but also that, in such cases, in particular, it is vital to integrate research on sociohistorical context, specifically on generic conventions and aesthetic tastes. Thirdly, the topic of fictionality, research on which, exempting some precur‐ sors, emerged around the 1970s and 80s, has in the last decades rapidly gained traction. It continues to be debated how the concept of fictionality relates to that of the novel and to literature more generally as well as to that of factuality, which is, importantly, not to be seen as an oppositional term. There is vibrant discussion on whether fictionality is best thought of as confined 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 146 Alexandra Effe to the realm of art and moreover to specific historical, cultural, and generic contexts, or whether it is an ahistorical, universal part of speech and thought. This chapter has contributed to fictionality studies through considering the generic conventions and truth claims of eighteenth-century pseudofactual and novelistic texts in relation to those of autofictional ones. The chapter has shown that fictionality can take various forms and serve various functions, and that some of these are historically specific. Research on fictionality, especially as the increasingly interdisciplinary field towards which it has in recent years developed, if anything gains in importance in the context of the twenty-first century’s new media developments (including phenomena like infotainment and virtual realities), information crises, and political changes, as well as in the context of recent insights about the creative workings of perception and memory. This chapter’s account of Manley’s Rivella within the eighteenth-century landscape of generic hybridity and from a cognitive perspective can serve as incentive for further work in literary and cultural studies in all of the directions charted above. It can inspire further diachronic extension of autofiction, and further work on continuities as well as developments in genre signals, authorial positioning, and forms and effects of fictionality (as well as autofictionality). This chapter can serve as invitation also for adopting a cognitive and holistic approach to contemporary (autofictional) texts. Analogously to how Manley’s autofictional speaking position was analysed in the context of the in the eighteenth century newly emerging concept of authorship and against the background of generically undifferentiated factual-fictional hybridity, one can read Lerner’s in-process commissioned book and his acts of reader address in the context of collaborative and continuous acts of self-creation in the increasingly digitised and increasingly virtualised media culture of the twenty-first century. Ferrante’s autofictional presentation by way of a fictional alter ego and through a pseudonym could be explored in the context of a culture that invites us to create various imaginary avatars of ourselves, and Knausgård’s imaginative freedoms in reconstructing and/ or creating personal memory could be analysed in light of insights about the creative dimension of memory work. It would be productive also to compare the formal strategies and structures of these contemporary works of autofiction with earlier examples, and to, by way of such an investigation into shifting forms and effects, try to determine the role of contemporary autofictional hybridity, and of this mode’s popularity, within twenty-first-century proclamations of a ‘post-truth’ or ‘post-factual age’. If we were to try to delineate one common strand between the above-descri‐ bed directions that literary and cultural studies is moving towards, it might be 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 147 an interest in cross-transfers between insights gained from and pertaining to artistic artifacts, on the one side, and everyday contexts, for example, everyday discourse and everyday cognition, on the other side - a trend that importantly goes hand in hand with increased awareness of contextual, historical, media, and generic specificities. Autofiction, in its plying of boundaries and overlaps between art and life, in its interest in identity construction, self-presentation, and in how text mediates (self-)perception, is a particularly fruitful topic for investigating such cross-transfers. In sum, from its early beginnings to its contemporary boom, autofiction constitutes an important field of research in which a number of new directions of contemporary literary and cultural studies productively converge. Works Cited BAINES, P. and Rogers, P. (eds) (2007) Edmund Curll, Bookseller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. BARCHAS, J. (2003) Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CARNELL, R. (2017) ‘The Adventures of Rivella as Political Secret History’, in Hultquist, A. and Mathews, E. J. (eds) New Perspectives on Delarivier Manley and Eighteenth-Cen‐ tury Literature: Power, Sex, and Text. New York: Routledge, pp.-15-29. CARNELL, R. 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(2020) ‘Transgressive Narration: The Case of Autofiction’, in Fludernik, M. and Ryan, M.-L. (eds) Narrative Factuality: A Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 555-63. LEJEUNE P. (1973) ‘Le pacte autobiographique’, Poétique 14, pp.-137-62. LEJEUNE, P. (1986) ‘Le pacte autobiographique (bis)’, in Moi aussi. Paris: Seuil, pp. 13-35. LEJEUNE, P. (1989) On Autobiography. Edited and with a foreword by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine O’Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. LEJEUNE, P. (2005) ‘Le pacte autobiographique, vingt-cinq ans après’, in Signes de vie: Le pacte autobiographique 2. Paris: Seuil, pp.-11-35. LERNER, B. (2014) 10: 04: A Novel. New York: Faber & Faber. MANLEY, D. (2005 [1714]) ‘The Adventures of Rivella’, in Carnell, R. and Herman, R. (eds) Selected Works of Delarivier Manley. Vol. 4, London: Pickering & Chatto, pp.-1-58. MCLENNAN, R. (2013) American Autobiography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. PAIGE, N. (2011) Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. STOCKWELL, P. (2020) Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. 2 nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0006 Eighteenth-Century Autofiction: Historicizing the Contemporary Boom 149 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature through the Lens of Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies Marion Gymnich 1 Introduction The history of literary and cultural studies has shown time and again that theoretical concepts provide new insights and raise innovative questions. By directing scholars’ attention towards hitherto unexplored aspects of literature, new concepts often change the ways literary texts are read. This effect could for instance be observed when scholars started analysing literature from the point of view of feminist literary criticism. In the wake of the Second Women’s Movement, groundbreaking publications like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own (1977), and many others propagated innovative ways of interpreting and contextualising literary texts. Feminist scholars called for new reading strategies, questioning for instance the complex of metaphors and etiologies [that] simply reflects not just the fiercely patriarchal structure of Western society but also the underpinning of misogyny upon which that severe patriarchy has stood. (Gilbert and Gubar 2000 [1979]: 13) Postcolonial studies have likewise explored alternative ways of reading fiction. Edward Said was among the first to highlight the ways in which imperialist thinking is entangled with literature. In Orientalism he argues that “philology, lexicography, history, political and economic theory, novel-writing, and lyric poetry c[a]me to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world” (Said 1994 [1978]: 15) by constructing and disseminating stereotypes about the Oriental Other. Feminist and postcolonial literary criticism are just two of many theoretical approaches that have introduced new concepts and innovative ways of reading literature. I have singled out these two approaches 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 1 The disciplinary affiliations of the current members of the BCDSS include Ancient History, Islamicate History, Early Modern History, Eastern European History, Global History, History of the Law, Egyptology, Tibetan Studies, Anthropology of the Ameri‐ cas, Japanese and Korean Studies, German Medieval Studies, North American Studies, English Studies, Sociology, Art History, Archaeology, Protestant Theology, and Catholic Theology. As this list of disciplines shows, the BCDSS is not a centre for literary and cultural studies; nevertheless, it provides an ideal framework for an interdisciplinary collaboration in which literary scholars can forge new, productive alliances. 2 Terms like ‘freedom’ and ‘agency’ should be used cautiously. Regarding them as neutral, purely descriptive terms would be a misconception since they have acquired strong ideological implications in post-Enlightenment discourse. Joseph C. Miller (2012: 12) for instance stresses that slavery has traditionally been defined by scholars “as the opposite of, or absence of, a particular kind of political freedom implicitly derived from the civic polities unique to the Americas and, increasingly, western Europe, and also only by the nineteenth century.” The fact that the modern term ‘freedom’ has been shaped by post-Enlightenment ideas and thus proves to be anachronistic for an analysis of pre-modern contexts is one of the reasons why the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies proposes an approach that challenges the idea of a straightforward binary opposition between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. In the following, I will use the term ‘agency’ to refer to “the ability of the subject to resist, negotiate and transform certain forms of power that work on the subject both internally and externally” (Hinterberger 2013: 7). Similar to the modern concept of freedom, this notion “is rooted in Enlightenment understandings of the individual” (Hinterberger 2013: 8), i.e. in the idea of “the individual as a free agent whose actions and thoughts were based on rational choices” (ibid.). Since I will focus on post-Enlightenment literature in this article, it seems appropriate to use the term ‘agency’. For a discussion of the problems associated with the term ‘agency’ specifically in the context of slavery studies, see Johnson (2014). because their interests overlap to some extent with the concept I will discuss in the following as well as with the framework in which it is embedded. Though the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency can presumably not be expected to have the far-reaching, paradigm-changing impact on literary studies that feminist and postcolonial criticism have had in recent decades, it promises to complement existing approaches by offering new perspectives on literary works, which also provide information on the production of knowledge about social relations. The concept of strong asymmetrical dependency has been developed and tested in numerous case studies by scholars from a wide range of disciplines in the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS). 1 The concept denotes a type of social relation that is shaped by an extreme power imbalance which causes an individual or group A to experience a lack of freedom/ agency due to an individual or group B exerting a considerable amount of power over A. 2 Such asymmetrical relations can be observed throughout human history and in very different types of societies (see Miller 2012: 36); they have often been institutionalised and stabilised by laws. The concept of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 152 Marion Gymnich strong asymmetrical dependency is not supposed to work as a substitute for existing concepts, such as slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, and unfree labour; nor is it supposed to “erase the manifold differences between historically specific conditions of enslavement or other forms of dependency” (Bischoff, Conermann, and Gymnich 2023: 1). Instead, it has been conceived as an overarching concept that can be used to analyse social phenomena that are historically and culturally distinct but still share certain basic characteristics. The introduction of this concept has encouraged collaboration across disciplinary borders and has brought together different fields of research with their traditions, theoretical approaches, and methodologies. Strong asymmetrical dependency is the core concept of the “emerging discipline” (Winnebeck et al. 2023: 22) of dependency studies. In terms of the phenomena dependency studies is interested in, there is of course a considerable overlap with established fields like labour history (see 11) and slavery studies (see 8). The emerging discipline of dependency studies seeks to combine the expertise of these and further fields. In the following, I will first present the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency in more detail, in particular the features that make it possible to categorise a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency (section 2). In a next step, I will try to show what re-reading nineteenth-century British literature through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependencies may look like. For this purpose, I will touch upon three different literary phenomena: (i) direct references to (transatlantic) slavery in literary texts (section 3), (ii) instances where slavery is used metaphorically or as analogy (section 4), and (iii) direct references to other types of asymmetrical dependency, including borderline cases (section 5). In this way I hope to provide a first glimpse of what literary and cultural studies stand to gain from integrating the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency into their repertoire of analytical tools. The nineteenth century promises to be an interesting context for drawing upon this concept since this is the time when laws abolishing the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833) were passed in Britain, which also meant that intense debates on slavery can be traced in the political sphere. These political developments can be expected to have had an impact on literature. 2 The Concept of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency: A Definition According to sociologist Rudolf Stichweh (2021: 4), strong (or pervasive) asym‐ metrical dependencies can be defined on the basis of a “hierarchy of five conditions” that takes different dimensions of social relations into consideration: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 153 3 Slavery is a prototypical form of strong asymmetrical dependency, but even slavery is a heterogeneous social phenomenon. Enslavement in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, differs in several regards from transatlantic slavery. On Ottoman slavery, see Conermann and Şen (2020) and Czygan (2023). (i) resources: “[T]he control a person has over resources another person wants to own or to use” (4) may be part of a social constellation that is defined as strong asymmetrical dependency. However, since “[t]his situation is near to market exchange” (ibid.), Stichweh assumes that “as long as there are effective markets, no significant dependencies will probably arise on this basis” (ibid.). In other words, asymmetrical control over resources in and of itself is not a sufficient criterion for categorising social relations as strong asymmetrical dependency. Being deprived of resources (e.g. food, clothes, housing, etc.) is a feature that is often part of the experience of strong asymmetrical dependency, but that is by no means associated with all types of asymmetrically dependent positions. (ii) actions: A stronger criterion is “the existence of rights of control (some‐ times only the facticity of control) that someone exercises over the actions of another person” (ibid.). Chattel slavery in the American South is a prime example of this feature of strong asymmetrical dependency since it was typi‐ cally shaped by “the possibility of pervasive rights of control over nearly all the actions of another person” (ibid.). 3 Control over someone’s actions may encompass various dimensions, ranging from forced movement (e.g. abduction), forced immobility (e.g. captivity) to sexual abuse. Complete control over another person’s actions is difficult to maintain, however. In other words, at least a limited amount of agency may often be achieved even in strongly asymmetrical social relations. (iii) lack of voice: Individuals who can be categorised as being in a situation of strong asymmetrical dependency typically lack “the possibility of conflictual communication”, as Stichweh (ibid.) puts it. There are usually no provisions for voicing protest or showing resistance without running the risk of extreme forms of punishment. This lack of voice is also the reason why accounts of enslavement (‘slave narratives’) are typically written by formerly enslaved people, i.e. after having either been manumitted or having escaped from enslavement. Thus, they should strictly speaking be called ‘ex-slave narratives’, as Vicent Sanz Rosalén and Michael Zeuske (2019) stress. (iv) exit: The abovementioned features (i)-(iii) are in and of themselves not necessarily sufficient for categorising a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency. The feature ‘exit’, by contrast, tends to make a straightforward categorisation of a social relation as strong asymmetrical dependency possible, as Stichweh (2021: 4) points out: “if there are strategies that effectively block exit, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 154 Marion Gymnich 4 On Stichweh’s criteria (iii) and (iv) see also Winnebeck et al. (2023: 8): “Asymmetrical dependency is usually supported by an institutional context in such a way as to ensure that the dependent actors cannot simply change their situation by either going away (‘exit’) or by articulating impactful protest (‘voice’).” 5 Winnebeck et al. for instance claim that “the ability of one actor to control the actions of another actor and/ or their access to resources” (2023: 8; emphasis added) is typical of strong asymmetrical dependency. 6 See Eltis and Engerman (2011: 3), who likewise argue for conceiving of forms of dependency as a continuum: “If we are to gain any insight into slavery […] it must be assessed as part of a continuum of dependency typically seen as occupying the opposite pole from free labor and separated from it by such institutions as indentured servitude, convict labor, debt peonage, and serfdom, to mention just a few of the intervening categories.” this establishes the most complete dependency one can think of.” Institutional‐ ised forms of asymmetrical dependency are typically associated with laws that prevent or at least regulate exit (e.g. by specifying conditions for manumission). The criterion ‘exit’ is thus also directly linked with the durability of strong asymmetrical dependency. 4 (v) the impossibility of inner emigration: The last feature mentioned by Stichweh has a somewhat different status than the ones listed above, since it concerns attitudes and emotional and cognitive experience. Stichweh comments on the feature ‘inner emigration’ as follows: It is difficult to control the way somebody else experiences the world, and this is the reason why this can be seen as the last domain of freedom. It is probably characteristic of totalitarian societies that they try to invade even this domain. Reeducation camps are one of the social institutions by which such societies try to establish this improbable type of control. (ibid.) Whether someone is deprived of “the possibility of retreat into a private way of experiencing the world” (ibid.) is difficult to gauge unless there happens to be data on people’s thoughts and emotions. In the global history of enslavement, such data is a rare exception rather than the rule. While social relations where all of the abovementioned criteria are fulfilled are particularly clear instances of strong asymmetrical dependency, there are also cases where only some of the criteria are fulfilled (or partially fulfilled). 5 Thus, strong asymmetrical dependency should be thought of as a scale which encompasses extreme cases (e.g. chattel slavery) as well as less clear-cut ones and borderline cases. 6 The latter may perhaps prove to be particularly interesting for testing and refining the concept and are arguably also the ones that are most frequently referred to in literary texts. The intensity (in terms of B’s control over A’s actions, voice, exit, experience, and access to resources) and the durability 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 155 7 See Winnebeck et al. (2023: 7): “whereas some degree of dependency affects every single being all of the time, asymmetrical, i.e., strong or enduring, forms of dependency do not.” 8 On the political processes leading to the abolition of the slave trade, see Drescher (2014). of a dependency relation are what sets strong asymmetrical dependency most clearly apart from the kind of dependencies that shape human life in general (e.g. in the context of relations between little children and their parents). 7 Starting from the premise that different forms of dependency can be thought of as a continuum might suggest that a typology of manifestations of depen‐ dency is possible and perhaps even desirable. The existence of a plethora of dependency relations in the course of human history, however, means that the task of establishing such a typology can only be approached with extreme caution, if at all. Even established terms for strong asymmetrical dependencies - chattel slavery, debt bondage, etc. - are in fact umbrella terms for heterogeneous social phenomena. Joseph C. Miller, who adopts a global approach to slavery, cautions against comparisons of forms of enslavement in different historical contexts. What is called for is contextualisation: “Situating the slavers and the enslaved in the specific contexts in which the innumerable master-slave dyads in the world’s history in fact lived requires precise definition of context” (Miller 2012: 25). Miller’s insistence on historical contextualisation stresses the heterogeneity of experience. Thus, drawing upon the abstract concept of strong asymmetrical dependency as outlined above must not lead to ignoring distinctions between concrete social phenomena, which can be ensured by taking the relevant historical context into consideration. 3 Direct References to (Transatlantic) Slavery in Nineteenth-Century British Literature The abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in Britain were intertwined with prolonged political debates as well as fundamental changes regarding attitudes towards slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 8 This development can be described as part of a process of modernisation if one assumes that one of the characteristics of modern society is that “[i]nto many of its structures and values are built strong biases against asymmetrical dependencies” (Stichweh 2021: 4). Literary texts that address transatlantic slavery join the multitude of voices partaking in the debate on slavery and on the value system that fuelled the abolitionist cause. Since the late eighteenth century, life writing by formerly enslaved people who describe the experience of being enslaved contributed to making criticism of slavery increasingly visible 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 156 Marion Gymnich 9 For an overview of the genre of the slave narrative see the contributions in the handbook edited by Ernest (2020). 10 See the following description of an American enslaver by Mary Seacole, which resem‐ bles the descriptions provided by North American slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861): “A young American woman, whose character can be best described by the word ‘vicious,’ fell ill at Gorgona, and was left behind by her companions under the charge of a young negro, her slave, whom she treated most inhumanly, as was evinced by the poor girl’s frequent screams when under the lash. One night her cries were so distressing, that Gorgona could stand it no longer, but broke into the house and found the chattel bound hand and foot, naked, and being severely lashed” (Seacole 2005 [1857]: 52). 11 At the time when Edgeworth wrote this tale (and well into the twentieth century) the noun she used in the title would not have been seen as a racial slur, but as a neutral term. in Anglophone literature. These narratives served as an instrument to convince people of the cruelty of slavery and of the moral necessity of abolishing it. Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) is one of the best-known examples of this type of testimonial text. 9 Two decades after the abolition of slavery, the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, who had become famous for establishing a field hospital in the Crimean war, used her autobiographical Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) to attack slavery in the United States in no uncertain terms. 10 Yet, throughout her text she also hints repeatedly at racism in Britain, which she, as a Woman of Colour, was confronted with: “Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? ” (Seacole 2005 [1857]: 73). This serves as a reminder that the abolition of slavery had not led to equality for the formerly enslaved people and their descendants. In addition to testimonial literature by Black authors, there were also literary texts by white authors from the late eighteenth and from the nineteenth centuries that featured slavery more or less prominently. These works range from William Wordsworth’s famous sonnet “To Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1803), which commemorates the Black leader of the Haitian revolution, to Maria Edgeworth’s tale “The Grateful Negro” (1794), 11 which endorses the idea that slavery could be ‘ameliorated’, i.e. made more humane, as an alternative to abolition. Besides literary texts that present enslavement as a prominent theme, there are also works that do not explore this topic in any detail while still including explicit references to slavery in passing. These texts prove to be interesting for an analysis through the lens of asymmetrical dependency since they promise information on how enslavement was integrated into various discourses of the time. Yet, they often confront readers with gaps in their 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 157 12 See for instance von Sneidern (1995). references to slavery that may turn out to be a challenge for literary criticism. Cases in point include the mysterious origin of Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), which has been read as a reference to slavery due to Mr Earnshaw having found the boy in Liverpool, a city associated with the slave trade, 12 and the attitude towards slavery in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), which I will briefly discuss in the following. Mansfield Park features an upper-class family, the Bertrams, whose opulent lifestyle in the English countryside is made possible by possessing a plantation in the Caribbean, on the island of Antigua, which meant at the time the novel was published that the family profited directly from slave labour. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said (1994 [1993]: 107) famously claimed that “[a]ccording to Austen we are to conclude that no matter how isolated and insulated the English place (e.g. Mansfield Park), it requires overseas sustenance”, which might have been an attempt on the part of the nineteenth-century author to justify colonialism and even slavery in economic terms. Although Said’s remarks on the references to slavery in Mansfield Park are certainly the best-known ones, he was not the first to comment on this dimension of Austen’s novel. In his article “The Antiguan Connection: Some New Light on Mansfield Park” (1982), Frank Gibbon provides insights into biographical contexts that make it easier to gauge to what extent Austen was familiar with plantation owners as well as with the ongoing debates about slavery. Gibbon for instance identified a model for the Bertrams: the Nibbs family. As Susan Fraiman points out, Said’s postcolonial reading of Mansfield Park gave rise to a divided reaction when Culture and Imperialism was published: “while reviewers friendly to Said repeatedly cite Austen as definitive proof of his claims, hostile reviewers invoke her with even greater vehemence as the figure most implausibly tied by Said to imperialist wrong-doings” (Fraiman 1995: 806). Although a widespread consensus that the references to slavery in Mansfield Park are indeed significant for an interpretation of Austen’s novel appears to have been reached by now, it seems to be far less clear which position on enslavement can be attributed to this text. Said regarded the novel as essentially devoid of any criticism of slavery; Fraiman (1995: 807) summarises his conclusions as follows: “Unconcerned about Sir Thomas Bertram’s colonial holdings in slaves as well as land and taking for granted their necessity to the good life at home, Said’s Austen is a veritable Aunt Jane - naive, complacent, and demurely without overt political opinion.” Yet not all scholars agree with Said. Fraiman, for instance, claims that the premise of his reading of Mansfield 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 158 Marion Gymnich 13 See also Rita J. Dashwood (2021: 456), who points out that “Austen’s portrayal of the system of property ownership and management in Mansfield Park is invariably negative throughout the entirety of the novel, with the morality of those responsible for this management being portrayed as extremely defective.” 14 See Boulukos (2006: 371): “The one book about slavery and abolition that Austen is widely thought to have read - Clarkson’s History [i.e. Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, first published in 1808, MG] - supports the idea that outlawing the trade would inevitably improve the condition of slaves.” Park is partially flawed, given that his argumentation rests on the assumption “that Mansfield Park epitomizes moral order and right human relations; thus Sir Thomas’s colonial endeavors, underwriting all this happiness, must be condoned if not actually applauded” (1995: 809). Yet the household of the Bertram family is not idealised, being consistently associated with snobbery and immoral behaviour, epitomising “moral blight” as Fraiman (810) puts it. 13 That scholars tend to struggle with pinning down the attitude towards slavery expressed in Austen’s novel is partially caused by the fact that there are very few direct references to slavery, and even these are extremely vague. The enslaved people remain invisible, they do not have a voice, and what their life might have looked like can only be imagined by readers on the basis of general knowledge about plantation slavery or other sources, such as the above-mentioned slave narrative by Olaudah Equiano. There is no information on Sir Thomas Bertram’s visit to his plantation in Antigua, and a scene in which Austen’s protagonist Fanny Price mentions having asked her uncle questions “‘about the slave-trade’” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 199) remains elusive. The text does not provide any details about this conversation, apart from the piece of information that her uncle was pleased by her questions. At first sight, this appears to rule out an abolitionist tenor of Fanny’s questions. Yet, when Mansfield Park was published, seven years after the Abolition Act of 1807, it is conceivable that criticism of the slave trade might have been applauded even by some plantation owners as long as slavery remained legal. George E. Boulukos for example argues that the uncle’s reaction might indicate an approach towards enslavement that had come to be known as ‘amelioration’. This term denotes “a position on slavery that would have been familiar to Austen’s early nineteenth-century audience” and that suggested “that slavery and colonialism were morally redeemable and potentially even heroic pursuits for men such as Sir Thomas Bertram” (Boulukos 2006: 362). Abolishing the slave trade was in fact seen as an important step towards amelioration, which would supposedly render slavery more ‘humane’. 14 The historical context 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 159 15 Dashwood (2021: 460) also argues that the obscure conversation between Fanny and her uncle needs to be read on the background of ‘amelioration’. of ‘amelioration’ being propagated as an alternative to the abolition of slavery allows making sense of a scene that might otherwise appear cryptic. 15 An aspect of Mansfield Park that also deserves attention in attempts to determine the stance towards slavery in this novel is the way Fanny feels about her uncle’s presence in his household in England. In addition to being the main focalizer in the novel, Fanny in many regards functions as its moral compass for the readers, being credited with having a fine instinct as far as people’s (lack of) morality is concerned. She for instance dislikes the morally dubious Crawfords, whereas others are easily taken in by their charms. On this background it seems interesting that Fanny’s attitude towards her uncle appears to be somewhat conflicted. She describes Sir Thomas as “honourable” and “good” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 320) and is obviously grateful for having been included in his family circle. According to Dashwood (2021: 460), Fanny is complicit with slavery since she “benefits directly from the wealth generated by slave labour” and condones her uncle’s role as enslaver: Unable to accept the notion that her uncle is not an upstanding person, Fanny’s belief in the beneficial potential of amelioration represents the injurious influence that the moral corruption which characterises the system of property management in Mansfield Park has had on her. (ibid.) Even though Fanny does not refer to her uncle as immoral, she does not feel at ease in his presence. When Sir Thomas greets his niece with particular kindness upon his return from Antigua, she “reproach[es] herself for loving him so little, and thinking his return a misfortune” (Austen 1994 [1814]: 179). Her attitude towards him is even characterised as “habitual dread” (177). Moreover, the presence of Sir Thomas also tends to cast a shadow on his entire household. Fanny observes that “‘[t]here was never much laughing in his presence’” (198) and that she “cannot recollect that our evenings formerly were ever merry, except when my uncle was in town” (ibid.). All of this is conducive to evoking an image of Sir Thomas as a forbidding figure of authority rather than to presenting him as a “benevolent, reforming land-owner” (Ferguson 1991: 118). Fanny’s lack of affection for her uncle and her dislike of his presence are certainly a far cry from anything resembling a fully-fledged critique of slavery. Could Fanny’s dread of her uncle perhaps still have been read by some contemporary readers as being rooted in the revulsion a young woman feels in the presence of an enslaver? Such a conflicted reaction might have been not 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 160 Marion Gymnich 16 See Fraiman (1995: 812): “The barbarity she [Austen] has in mind is not literal slavery in the West Indies but a paternal practice she depicts as possibly analogous to it: Sir Thomas’s bid […] to put female flesh on the auction block in exchange for male status. For this and other domestic tyrannies […] the slave trade offers a convenient metaphor.” that uncommon in British society at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which included enslavers as respectable members of the upper class and which was used to celebrating some of them as benefactors, for example Edward Colston (1636-1721), whose statue was pushed into Bristol Harbour in 2020 in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests after the death of George Floyd. The question whether Fanny’s dread of her uncle (partially) derives from his role as enslaver must ultimately remain open, but her fear of him soon turns out to have been well-founded, since she is about to become a victim of his disregard for other people’s wishes. He attempts to force her to accept a marriage proposal that he deems advantageous, which indicates that he regards her as a dependent relative, whom he lectures on her shortcomings in truly patriarchal manner: ‘I had thought you peculiarly free from wilfulness of temper, self-conceit, and every tendency to that independence of spirit which prevails so much in modern days, even in young women, and which in young women is offensive and disgusting beyond all common offence. But you have now shown me that you can be wilful and perverse; that you can and will decide for yourself, without any consideration or deference for those who have surely some right to guide you, without even asking their advice.’ (Austen 1994 [1814]: 320-21) While the novel does not pronounce any straightforward judgment on Sir Thomas as enslaver, the verdict on him as family patriarch is quite unambiguous. His notion of patriarchal authority runs contrary to Fanny’s wishes as well as to the critique of marriages of convenience that informs all of Austen’s novels. Mansfield Park invites a comparison between Sir Thomas’s roles as enslaver and as family patriarch and thus uses the reference to slavery as an analogy to the situation of young women in a patriarchal society. 16 While this analogy implies a negative attitude towards slavery, since it “takes for granted - as several scholars have argued Austen did - that slavery is a moral offense” (Fraiman 1995: 812), the fact remains that the main target of criticism is not slavery but women’s lack of rights. The real interest of the novel is the domestic sphere in Britain, and in this context criticism of slavery serves merely as a vehicle for drawing the readers’ attention to the problems young women like Fanny were confronted with in a patriarchal system. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 161 4 Slavery as Metaphor and Analogy A very similar usage of slavery as metaphor and analogy can be found in other nineteenth-century novels, including Austen’s Emma (1816). At one point, a young woman, Jane Fairfax, likens seeking employment as a governess to being sold as a slave when she observes that “‘[t]here are places in town, […] [o]ffices for the sale - not quite of human flesh - but of human intellect’” and continues with an even more direct comparison: “‘[…] I was not thinking of the slave-trade […]; governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies’” (Austen 1985 [1816]: 300). An analysis of this kind of comparison requires paying attention to the position of the speaker, as Winnebeck et al. (2023: 32) suggest when they argue in favour of “expand[ing] the triad of two comparata and a tertium comparationis to a tetrad that includes the situational context of the comparing actor”. The character clearly condemns the slave trade as causing “misery”. At the same time, she appears to be unaware of what the slave trade and slavery really meant for the victims. From today’s perspective, the analogy created by Jane Fairfax is bound to appear highly problematic, smacking of ignorance and white privilege. Though she recognises the guilt associated with the slave trade, her comparison all but erases the suffering of enslaved people. Literature is an ideal medium for expressing ambivalent positions, which may also make it easier to begin to understand the mindset of people in a society that profited from slavery despite growing opposition to this institution. The comparison between the situation of slaves and that of governesses is indicative of a pattern that can be observed in many texts from the nineteenth century (and beyond): The categorisation of enslavement as an inhumane prac‐ tice is drawn upon when the terms slavery and slave are used metaphorically or as analogy in order to convey an idea of how terrible a social situation is for an individual. Upon closer examination, these situations typically show at least some of the features that are characteristic of strong asymmetrical dependency (lack of access to certain resources, lack of control over one’s actions, and/ or having no right to express resentment or protest). In addition to using references to slavery consciously to express suffering and social criticism, as in the scene discussed above, texts sometimes feature a more casual metaphorical usage of slavery/ slave. The latter can also be observed in Emma, for instance in Mr Elton’s riddle about courtship, in which he makes use of the trope of being a slave of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 162 Marion Gymnich 17 See Austen (1985 [1816]: 97): “Man’s boasted power and freedom, all are flown; / Lord of the earth and sea, he bends a slave, / And woman, lovely woman, reigns alone.” Andrea Binsfeld (2024) shows that the trope of the slave of love can already be found in antiquity. It can also be found in Renaissance texts such as William Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It, where one of Orlando’s love poems contains the lines “Heaven would that she these gifts should have, And I to live and die her slave” (Shakespeare 2006 [1599? ]: III.2.150-51). love, 17 or when Emma tells her brother-in-law, who is a lawyer, that she “had no idea that the law had been so great a slavery” (Austen 1985 [1816]: 137). Comparing slavery and a demanding profession (which was quite lucrative) trivialises the metaphor - an effect that seems to be particularly common in instances where the terms slavery/ slave are used in isolation, without any further (textual) contextualisation. The words slavery/ slave thus at times appear to be mere figures of speech, even before the abolition of slavery, when debates about enslavement were still prominent. Other historically specific forms of enslavement besides transatlantic slavery were also drawn upon as metaphors and analogies in nineteenth-century literature. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), for instance, the autodiegetic narrator repeatedly refers to enslavement in the retrospective account of her development (see Bischoff, Conermann, and Gymnich 2023: 4). When she recalls the first, miserable years of her life, which the orphaned girl spent in the household of rich but hostile relatives, Jane compares her situation to that of a slave. The image Jane conjures up in this context is characteristic of the rebellious spirit she had as a child, since she likens herself to a slave in revolt, i.e. someone who claims agency despite lacking freedom: “like any other rebel slave I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 44). The reference to a slave rebellion is not historically specific, but it conveys a very different idea of slavery than the one in Emma, where the tertium comparationis was suffering. The information the text provides about the situational context of the comparison specifies the character’s inspiration for drawing upon the imagery of slavery; Jane accuses her cousin of behaving “like a slave-driver”, “like the Roman emperors” and explains: “I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c.” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 43). These references to slavery in ancient Rome exemplify that the usage of slavery as cultural metaphor in the nineteenth century was not only informed by transatlantic chattel slavery. At a later point in Jane Eyre, yet another form of enslavement is alluded to by the narrator when she describes her situation in terms of harem slavery. Newspapers and travel reports, especially those written by women travellers, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 163 had made British readers familiar with images of harem slavery in the Ottoman Empire (see Gökçe 2024). Jane describes her relation to her employer Mr Rochester, who has declared his love for her and intends to marry the young woman, in a manner that is bound to evoke the imagery of Ottoman harem slavery due to the choice of words: “He smiled; and I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched; I crushed his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and thrust it back to him red with the passionate pressure” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297). The image of the sultan’s harem is also drawn upon by Mr Rochester when he exclaims: “‘I would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio - gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all! ’” (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297). Jane dislikes the sexual connotations of this imagery as the following dialogue with Rochester shows: The Eastern allusion bit me again. ‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,’ I said; ‘so don’t consider me an equivalent for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with you, sir, to the bazars of Stamboul, without delay, and lay out in extensive slave-purchases some of that spare cash you seem at a loss to spend satisfactorily here.’ ‘And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes? ’ ‘I’ll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach liberty to them that are enslaved - your harem inmates amongst the rest. I’ll get admitted there, and I’ll stir up mutiny’. (Brontë 1985 [1847]: 297-98) The novel thus perpetuates stereotypical images revolving around “girls and women secluded and seduced in exotic harems somewhere in a sexualized Muslim palace” (Miller 2012: 2) that are steeped in Orientalist discourse. Again, the idea of being in revolt and seeking liberty motivates the references to enslavement. When Jane imagines herself as “missionary” and (female) British saviour who “stir[s] up mutiny” among harem slaves she reproduces Orientalist notions of Eastern ‘backwardness’. A conversation that started by Jane com‐ plaining about experiencing a lack of freedom culminates in her imagining once more a revolt, coupled with a high degree of agency, which is made possible by the allegedly worse dependency of the (Oriental) Others who are supposedly in need of a European saviour. It is perhaps hardly surprising that slavery was used as metaphor and analogy in a century that saw debates about slavery and its abolition in Britain and in many other countries. According to cultural metaphor theory, “people draw on their preexisting cultural knowledge when they use or process metaphors”, as Ansgar Nünning (2002: 110) points out, and for this reason “metaphors are 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 164 Marion Gymnich 18 There are for instance numerous occurrences of the word ‘slave’ in all CLiC subcorpora: 58 occurrences in the Dickens corpus (12 novels), 238 occurrences in the 19 th Century Reference corpus, 98 occurrences in the Children’s Literature corpus. 19 See Liza Picard’s (2006: 93) description of the Victorian workhouse: “To enter the workhouse meant giving up all self-respect, and abandoning family ties. […] Spouses who had lived together for decades were to go into the workhouse and be separated into wards for ‘male paupers’ and ‘female paupers’. Their children were taken from them.” deeply entrenched in the cultural discourses of their age” (102). As some of the examples presented above suggest, using slavery as metaphor or analogy may, however, also give rise to a certain tendency to normalise or even trivialise this field of human experience. Tools provided by digital humanities, in particular literary corpora and web applications like CLiC (see Mahlberg et al. 2020), provide interesting possibilities for further, more systematic studies of slavery as metaphor and analogy in literature. 18 5 References to other Forms of Strong Asymmetrical Dependency In addition to slavery, various other forms of strong asymmetrical dependency relations are addressed in more or less detail in nineteenth-century British literature. Cases in point include (but are not limited to) representations of the notorious institution of the workhouse, which for example provides an important setting in novels like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838) as well as in numerous street ballads, and images of the equally infamous ‘lunatic asylums’, referred to particularly prominently in sensation novels like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860). Being an inmate in these institutions meant experiencing a lack of control over one’s actions as well as being prevented from leaving on one’s own terms. 19 The decision whether an individual was confined inside these institutions or not was typically based on ‘expert opinions’, on “the diagnosis or attribution of disabilities, deficiencies, and deviances to persons, a diagnosis that is characteristically made by one of the many experts of modern society” (Stichweh 2021: 4). Literary depictions of these institutions provide interesting material for intersectional analyses of specific forms of strong asymmetrical dependencies as well as the value systems and social biases that informed them. While Victorian workhouses and ‘lunatic asylums’ gave rise to social rela‐ tions that can clearly be categorised as strong asymmetrical dependency, there are also borderline cases, such as the situation of domestic servants in private households. Bruce Robbins (1993 [1986]: xi) argues that representations of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 165 “the largest single occupational group in nineteenth-century England” rely on “much-repeated master-servant tropes and devices”, on literary traditions that can be traced back to antiquity. This, however, does not rule out situating these representations in their specific historical contexts and reading them through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependency. The ubiquity of references to domestic servants in nineteenth-century British literature appears to be at odds with the scarcity of information on individual characters who belong to this group. Though approaching references to domestic servants in literature through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependency does often not mean focusing on complex, fully developed characters and may at first sight bring forth comparatively little information, it may still lead to changes in the overall picture of specific texts or subgenres and offer insights into the ways in which domestic servants were talked about. Having said that, it is necessary to stress that it is of course not a foregone conclusion that all domestic servants in nineteenth-century Britain were in a position that can be categorised as strong asymmetrical dependency. Hierarchies among servants and enormous disparities as far as the five criteria defined by Stichweh are concerned need to be taken into consideration. Thus, domestic service and its literary representations may prove a field where the concept of strong asymmetrical dependency can be put to the test particularly fruitfully. 6 Conclusion and Outlook While direct references to transatlantic slavery in nineteenth-century British literature have already received considerable attention in the context of post‐ colonial studies, there are further literary representations of social relations that likewise benefit from being read through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependencies. Depictions of the workhouse, of ‘lunatic asylums’, and of domes‐ tic servants are just three of many fields which promise to yield interesting results when approached in this framework. Literature responds in manifold ways to “the orders of knowledge that legitimize and naturalize” (Winnebeck et al. 2023: 28) strong asymmetrical dependency, as the examples briefly discussed above illustrate. Metaphors and analogies are among the literary devices that turn out to be particularly significant in this context. They provide insights into discourses about power and dependency that are intertwined with historical developments and turning points. As far as their relation to power structures in a specific historical context is concerned, literary texts should not be seen in binary terms, as being either complicit with power structures or questioning them. Literature may also reveal ambivalences and moral conundrums that 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 166 Marion Gymnich 20 See Vera Nünning’s excellent study Reading Fictions, Changing Minds (2014), which explores the processes underlying the potential of literature to create empathy and further cognitive effects of literary texts. accompany ongoing changes or express conflicted positions. In this way, literary texts may provide inspiration for dealing with questions of guilt and justice as well as with moral conflicts for which there simply is no easy solution. While it overlaps to some degree with postcolonial studies, the newly emerg‐ ing field of dependency studies has a more specific focus, in that it also highlights forms of dependency that are not (directly) linked with colonialism and its aftermath, as the example of the workhouse has shown. Though asymmetrical dependencies have left manifold traces in literature from Antiquity to the present day, these have often been neglected in literary studies. By engaging with the interdisciplinary field of dependency studies, literary studies can contribute to answering urgent questions of the twenty-first century that result from the legacy of slavery and other forms of dependency, but also from the asymmetrical dependencies existing today, which are often referred to as ‘modern slaveries’. Especially detailed representations of suffering from the perspective of a dependent individual are apt to evoke empathy and thus, ideally, ‘change minds’. 20 They may help understand the emotional impact of injustices past and present and the anger and hatred resulting therefrom - emotions that cannot be ignored anymore in a society that continues to be rife with conflicts. Works Cited AUSTEN, J. (1994 [1814]) Mansfield Park. London: Penguin. AUSTEN, J. (1985 [1816]) Emma. Harmondsworth: Penguin. BINSFELD, A. (2024) ‘Slavery and its Narratives in Ancient Novels - Stories of ‘Decline and Fall’? ’, in Brüggen, E. and Gymnich, M. (eds) Narratives of Dependency. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.-65-77. BISCHOFF, J., Conermann, S., and Gymnich, M. (2023) ‘Naming, Defining, Phrasing Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies: Introduction’, in Bischoff, J., Conermann, S., and Gymnich, M. (eds) Naming, Defining, Phrasing Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies: A Textual Approach (= Dependency and Slavery Studies 8). 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Persistent Inequalities, Pervasive Asymmetrical Dependencies, and Sociocultural Polarization as Divisive forces in contemporary society’, Global Perspectives 2 (1), pp.-1-9. doi: 10.1525/ gp.2021.25658. VON SNEIDERN, M.-L. (1995) ‘Wuthering Heights and the Liverpool slave trade’, ELH 62 (1), pp.-171-196. WINNEBECK, J., Sutter, O., Hermann, A., Antweiler, C., and Conermann, S. (2023) ‘The Analytical Concept of Asymmetrical Dependency’, Journal of Global Slavery, 8 (1), pp.-1-59. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0007 Re-Reading Nineteenth-Century British Literature 169 Cognition, Affect, and the Eudaimonic Turn Home-Comfort Studies The Dis/ Comforts of Home in Contemporary British and American Pandemic Literature Stella Butter 1 Introduction The twenty-first century is a time of global crises: the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic, and the epistemic crisis in the wake of digital disinformation or fake news are just the beginning of a depressingly long list. The pervasive labelling of these developments as ‘crises’ indicates how strongly these phenomena are seen as a threat to life as we know it. While each crisis has its own history and particularities, it is, as the sociologist Jens O. Zinn points out, fruitful to consider even exceptional crises such as the Covid pandemic within “a broader framework […] of how risk, uncertainty and social change are experienced, approached and envisioned at different times and places” (2021: 604). As a literary studies scholar, I am especially interested in the contribution that imaginary storytelling may make to the ways in which we envision and respond to such crises in contemporary modernity. A crisis is not simply something given, but the perception and experience of ‘a crisis’ is shaped by cultural plots and tropes, that is, a specific imaginary (see Nünning 2009: 240) - an imaginary that is also forged by literary production. A focus on literary representations of the dis/ comforts of home is particularly helpful to gauge how literature taps into but also potentially orders our perception of crises in Western modernity. Literature is attentive to the ways home is profoundly impacted by large-scale crises (witness, for example, the loss of homes in the wake of the financial crisis, the outbreak of wars or ongoing climate change) and how sites of home, in turn, play a vital role in generating macro-level structures, such as patterns of global consumption, that feed into the dynamics of crises in modernity. At the same time, literature is mindful of the myriad experientialities of home - the ways it can morph into an arena of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 1 See, for example, recent special issues on “Representations of Home” (Journal of Literary Studies 36.1 [2020]) or “Imaginative Geographies of Home: Ambivalent Mobility in Twenty-First Century Literature and Culture” (Literary Geographies 5.2 [2019]). 2 Timothy Aubry’s (2022) review provides an astute discussion of the strengths but also distinct shortcomings of James’s innovative approach to literary consolation. 3 For an approach to home comforts that combines literary studies with linguistics, see Bułat Silva and Butter (2019). oppression, violence, and death or, conversely, provide solace and a place of resistance or survival not only in times of crisis. One may extend this perspective to reflect on how writing and reading literature itself might be conceived as a form of dis/ comforting homemaking. The many vloggers who talked about their comfort reading at home during Covid lockdown, for instance, betoken the ways reading literature may, indeed, be experienced as a positive practice of homemaking and (virtual) community building. The experience of living through the Covid crisis prompted my choice of pandemic fiction as a case study to explore representations of dis/ comforting homes, although my corpus will not be restricted to Covid fiction. Despite ever-growing research on representations of home in fiction, 1 strong bridges have not yet been built to comfort studies. ‘Comfort’ refers to physical ease or consolation; it is the possibility of the latter that has enjoyed particular attention in literary studies, especially with regard to elegiac literature (e.g. Spargo 2004; Watkin 2004). More recent publications have analysed historical discourses on the alleged consoling power of literature (Pieters 2021) and challenged conventional understandings of consoling fiction by shifting the focus from a reader-response perspective to a new formalist approach that establishes literary consolation as “an agent of contestation” ( James 2019: 7). 2 However, few publications draw the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ together in their analysis of literary fiction. This is not to say that existing research, especially on nostalgia, longing, or mourning and home (e.g. Rubenstein 2001), does not open up valuable perspectives for reflecting on the interplay of home and comfort, but the conceptual focus in these studies is placed on related terms rather than on the concept of ‘comfort’ or ‘consolation’ itself. The volume of essays on Comfort in Contemporary Culture (2020), which I co-edited with Dorothee Birke, provides the first steps for conjoining ‘comfort’ and ‘home’ as an analytic focus in literary studies. 3 My contribution expands this research through its focus on contemporary pandemic fiction and its mapping of the depicted interplay between homes and specific forms of (in)consolability. As the stock phrase ‘the comfort of home’ already signals, ‘comfort’ is a key element in Western ideals of home, both in the sense of a dwelling place 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 174 Stella Butter that enables physical ease (e.g. due to its interior design) and in terms of a sphere that provides strengthening support or consolation. Comfort, then, can be connected to different dimensions of home, ranging from the spatio-temporal and economic dimensions to the social, cultural, and emotive dimensions. If ‘home’ is “a spatial imaginary” (Blunt and Dowling 2006: 2) that reflects cultural ideals, then ‘comfort’ is one of the key components that furnish the aura of home. Indeed, it is no coincidence that ‘comfort’ finds regular mention in phenomenological descriptions of home. Home is, Yi-Fu Tuan explains, “the locale of human warmth and material sustenance, moral probity and spiritual comfort” (2012: 227). From a sociological perspective, the ways we ‘do’ home, that is, our everyday patterns and routines of our homemaking, encapsulate a whole form of life - one that is traversed by power hierarchies shaped, for example, by race, class, gender, and nationhood. Criticism of these power hierarchies has been clearly voiced in debates on home, thus rendering the so-called comforts of home ambiguous. Feminist assessments of home are a case in point. On the one hand, feminists oppose traditional ideals of home because domestic comforts tend to be based on the large unpaid housework and also draining emotional work of women. While in this critical perspective the alleged ‘comforts of home’ are rejected due to their alliance with patriarchal hierarchies and reactionary values (e.g. heteronormativity, norms of whiteness), other feminist critics such as Iris Marion Young want to use the emotional pulling power of ‘home’ to “extend key values, such as safety or privacy [i.e. crucial comforts associated with home; S.B.], as a basic human right to everyone” (Birke and Butter 2019: 120). All in all, the fierce debates surrounding ‘home’ attest to how our imaginings of home matter because ‘doing home’ is guided by idea(l)s of home. Due to the diversity of ‘homes’ in literature, I will avoid working with a pre-given definition of ‘home’ in favour of identifying how dis/ comforting homes are conceptualised in the selected pandemic stories themselves. It is my contention that the shape home takes in these texts is tied to a specific form of (in)consolability in response to the crisis time of the pandemic. These aesthetic configurations of home and (in)consolability also have implications for thinking about the consolations literature may have to offer. My corpus of pandemic fiction includes two Covid flash fictions, published by the authors Sadia Quraeshi Shepard and Chen Chen in the literary magazine The Margins on the website of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (AAWW), and two British novels: Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (2021) and the pre-Covid novel Cold Earth (2009), written by Sarah Moss. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 175 4 As mentioned earlier, the opposite is the case in research on comfort in literary studies, which is primarily concerned with consolation or psychological comfort. 5 Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019) distinguish between twelve meanings of home comfort that they categorise as either physical, psychological, or physical-psychological. 6 Shepard’s and Chen’s stories stay below 1000 words. The analysis of these case studies serves to demonstrate the valuable role that literary studies may play in the emerging research field of ‘home-comfort studies’. The latter is not an established term - yet - but has been used by the scientists Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs, Louise Reid, and Colin J. Hunter (2019: 204) in the context of a research project devoted to developing a “broader, holistic framework of home comfort” (203). In their extensive research overview on home and comfort (albeit one that excludes literary, media, and art studies), Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019: 204) note the small number of studies on home comforts, more specifically, studies that do not delimit their understanding of comfort to its purely physical dimension. 4 Based on qualitative interviews with Scottish household members, Ellsworth-Krebs et al. provide a nuanced understanding of home comfort by redefining it as “relaxation and wellbeing that results from companionship and control to manage the home as desired” (215). Such a definition is helpful because it allows for an interplay of physical and psychological aspects in what is perceived as home comfort. 5 Literature taps into these different facets in its imaginations of home dis/ comfort, which in turn play a vital role in shaping “broader historical and cultural narratives around the meaning and making of home” (209). A holistic framework of home comfort, then, needs to include the perspective of literature and other forms of art. New directions of research are opened up by a focus on the aesthetic dimension of home comfort: 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 - points that are worth emphasising in the current hostile environment towards the humanities, generated by neoliberalism and populist politicians. 2 Configurations of Dis/ Comforting Homes in Pandemic Fiction Given the upsurge of flash fiction or very short fiction during the Covid pandemic, 6 it seems fitting to start my analysis of literary dis/ comforting homes with this particular genre. As the editors of AAWW’s Flash Fiction project point out, “flash fiction, with its urgent language coupled with its swift writing pace 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 176 Stella Butter 7 In the following, I will abbreviate “Monsters” with ‘M’ and “Summer” with ‘S’. The stories do not have pagination. 8 These quotes from the artist Toby Allen are taken from Mihai Andrei’s (2013) online article on Allen’s art project. has unique possibilities for writing into the present moment” (Khurana and Wei 2021: n.pag.). Read side by side, Shepard’s “Monsters” and Chen Chen’s “Summer” 7 help chart an axis on which representations of dis/ comforting homes in pandemic fiction may be situated. One end of this axis features the sacralised home as the site of remedial consolation, as represented in Chen’s story. On the other end of the axis are stories that tie home to the impossibility of any moments or forms of consolation. Shephard’s flash fiction is roughly situated in the middle of this axis because “Monsters” explores the ambiguity of home comforts. Precisely because Shepard’s story contains elements that pull into different directions, it is helpful to start mapping the field with a discussion of her story. “Monsters” captures the ambiguity of the consoling power of art by drawing on the classic Gothic trope of the uncanny home. Although Covid is not explic‐ itly mentioned in the story, it is evoked through the references to lockdown and a key ritual associated with it, namely the 7 o’clock cheer for health care or frontline workers. The beginning of the story depicts how the home sphere is gradually rendered uncanny through monstrous Covid art. The first-person narrator’s wife, who stays unnamed throughout the story, covers the “walls of […] [the] living room in newsprint” (M) to draw “one monster per day” (M) with sticks of charcoal. These monsters, who have been keeping her awake all night, embody her heightened fear of Covid infection and death, for she is immunocompromised. Her artistic activity allows a distancing of terror by making the previously invisible enemy tangible and by claiming (artistic) agency in the face of the monster. It is worth noting that Shepard’s monsters echo real-life art projects (e.g. by the Cornish artist Toby Allen) equally concerned with “visualiz[ing] diseases as mythological creatures” so that illnesses appear as “more beatable”. 8 Given that monsters belong to the realm of myths and legends, the specific visualisation of the Coronavirus in Shepard’s story could also be seen as a form of mythmaking. The use of newsprint as drawing paper is a heavy-handed metaphorical reference to the role that the media plays in establishing Covid-19 as a global crisis phenomenon. The media, too, creates mythic monsters, as the play with the double meaning of print, namely newsprint and animal footprints, suggests. The presence of media underlines the permeability of home. Such a permea‐ bility is also emphasised in the narrator’s description of his work-related Zoom 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 177 meetings and the sounds of neighbours entering his home. Home is not “a bulwark” (M); instead, just like the Coronavirus “forces itself into a cell by becoming one with its membrane barrier” (Davis 2021: n.pag.), so is the cell of the home - this specific ‘living room’ - not a sealed off space, but its membrane, too, is inscribed with the presence of the virus. The ‘living room’ becomes haunted by the presence of death as the “ash from my wife’s charcoal” (M), which she uses to draw the monsters, “settled into the corners of the room” (M). Permeability is also evoked in the relation between the woman and her artwork. It seems as if she becomes monstrous herself in the act of creation so that it requires a cleansing hot bath each night to unclench “the claw of her fists” (M, emphasis added) and for her to re-appear “new” (M). These acts of merging and cleansing indicate the mercurial dis/ comforts of creation: The consoling act of externalising and thus distancing one’s fears first necessitates a disturbing evocation of what we fear, thus rendering aesthetic consolation ambiguous (see also Dober 2019: 180). The motif of permeability is partly extended to gender stereotypes because the wife will always emerge from the bath “wearing one of the large men’s kurtas she wore at home” (M). The depiction of home in Shepard’s story is interwoven with the theme of solidarity. We learn that the narrator, who prefers staying at home to avoid infection, called “the market on the corner and asked the owner if he could send one of his nephews with bags of onions, rice, and lentils. In the four years we’d lived here the grocer and I had never communicated in our common language”. (M) While their shared language is not specified, the kurta signals that the marital couple might be of South Asian heritage. The narrator’s use of their common language hence solicits solidarity among the South Asian diasporic community. The theme of solidarity is extended to the frontline workers in the pandemic, as the narrator describes how he and his wife “joined in the cheers that erupted on our street every evening at seven” (M). In Shepard’s story, the wife’s rebirth after her nightly bath is dubbed “a kind of nightly triumph” (M). The fact that we then have an immediate transition to the communal nightly cheer suggests that this comforting togetherness, too, may be seen as a kind of triumph over the virus. While the home as a site of artistic creativity is a source of comfort for the wife, it is precisely this aesthetic practice of consolation that renders home painfully uncanny for the first-person narrator, as the ending of the story makes clear: I […] dared myself to look at the monsters lit by the dim glow of the streetlight. […] I closed my eyes and listened to their sharp keening, trying to drown out the wheezing 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 178 Stella Butter and clicking of the ventilators, the flat lines of the monitors. Then I toasted them, taunted them, told them that they didn’t scare me even though it wasn’t true. (M) For the narrator, these aesthetic Covid monsters do not offer any consolation but are a source of terror and give rise to an uncanny temporality. This vastly different response begs the question as to whether “myth process[ed] the horrors of an unfamiliar world, which it found, into stories or did myth generate the horrors for which it then also offered relief or consolation? ” (Blumenberg qtd. in Dober 2019: 217; my translation). The narrator’s strong response to his wife’s drawings may be partly explained by his different mode of subjectivity. Whereas his wife embraces liminality and is therefore arguably better equipped to deal with the ambiguous solace of the arts, the narrator has internalised a key trait of hegemonic masculinity, namely the desire to be or at least “appear [to be] in control” (M). This self-fashioning might also explain why arguably the oldest form of consolation, touch (witness the comforting embrace of children by their parents or caregivers), does not feature at all between the married couple in response to their Covid fears. A comforting embrace entails expressing one’s emotions instead of keeping them on a tight leash to avoid vulnerability. The dynamics within the narrator’s home, however, reveal the hollowness of alleged male strength as opposed to the strength of those perceived to be weak and vulnerable. At this point, one may be reminded of Hans Blumenberg’s discussion of the long tradition of the cave in Western imagination. For after all, does not the image of a living room plastered with mythical creatures and associated with darkness (e.g. the wife’s use of black ink for her drawings) but also with remnants of fire (“ashes in the corners”, [M]) conjure up a cave-like space? It is this un/ homely cave that is associated with aesthetic practices: [Blumenberg’s book] Höhlenausgänge (‘Cave Exits’) places the weak in the cave - such as women, children, the wounded, the old - those who are unable to leave it in order to hunt or fight. […] Weakness becomes an ability of another kind. […] The lack of action inside the cave makes place and gives time for aesthetic impulses, i.e. memories and reflections, […] painting, storytelling, and listening. […] In short, in Blumenberg’s description the cave features not just as a physical shelter but, more importantly, as an aesthetic comfort zone. (Breidenbach 2020: 91f.) By tracing the artistic transformation of the home into a cave-like space, Shepherd’s story pairs mythmaking with what Benjamin Dober calls an “ethics of consolation” (Dober 2019: 223, original emphasis). A myth or image that embraces an ethics of consolation will reflect on its own conditions of produc‐ tion, thereby raising epistemological awareness (see ibid.). In contrast to Plato’s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 179 9 On the widespread denigration of literary consolation among contemporary scholars, see James (2019: 6-15) and Aubry (2022). allegory of the cave, which describes humans as trapped in a world of shadows mistaken for reality, Blumenberg insists on our need for dwelling in the cave precisely because we require consoling fictions. Our need for consolation is enduring because we will always be confronted with the contingencies of life, such as illness or death, which, in turn, give rise to the ever-burning question ‘why? ’ (see Blumenberg 2020: 626, 634f.). Blumenberg’s appreciation of (literary) solace makes for an edifying comparison to the stance of many contemporary critics who sweepingly denigrate all forms of (literary) consolation as an insidious escapism that lulls the reader into complicity with dubious ideology or the status quo. 9 An ethics of consolation, then, entails a careful calibration between avoiding awareness and facing painful realities head-on (Blumenberg 2020: 631f., 655; Dober 2019: 85). Against this backdrop, it seems fitting that the story ends with the narrator oscillating between precisely these two poles, as he toasts and taunts the Covid monsters while admitting to an implicit addressee that they do scare him. Perhaps this explains his motivation for telling his story: sharing his feelings of fear and unhomeliness with an implicit addressee may bring him some solace. Conversely, finding one’s fears acknowledged in the public sphere - after all, this is a published story - might offer some ambiguous solace to the readers of Shepard’s unsettling tale of the uncanny. While Shepard highlights the ambiguous consolations of domestic art, Chen Chen’s “Summer” largely avoids such ambiguities in favour of enshrining ‘home’ as the sphere of consoling touch. “Summer” is told by a male first-person narrator, who describes how a vase of sunflowers falls onto the floor during the night in the home he shares with his lover - a description that is interspersed with memories and reflections about living during the Covid pandemic. The identification of the pandemic as Corona is firmly established by the temporal setting (“July 2020”) and through a reference to its name right at the beginning of the story: “The sunflowers fall […]. Their heads too gloriously full of early July. How they seem to know everything, except the virus. The crown it wears. All the unglory it craves. Receives” (S, emphasis added). From the very beginning, a contrast is introduced between the “unglory” of the virus and the glorious lovers, who are symbolised by the bright sunflowers. Just like the sunflowers follow the sun during the course of the day, so are the lovers turned towards each other: “The[se] sunflowers, overcome with true dizzying delight - with themselves”-(S, emphasis added). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 180 Stella Butter The temporality of the lovers within the home is slowed down, for the narrator keeps imagining the fall of the sunflowers “in slow motion” (S). Such a slow temporality, with its “temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement”, potentially opens you up to states of enchantment (Bennett 2001: 5). In such moments of wonder, the “world comes alive as a collection of singularities” (ibid.). Indeed, the subject ideal in this story is one who is attentive to aesthetic details, as is rendered clear by the narrator’s description of shopping outings during which his lover would ask him to touch an item, then “describe it myself. So soft, yes, but in what way? Like a cloud? About to burst? ” (S). Chen’s story implies that an openness to aesthetic enchantment may contribute to one’s psychological well-being amidst the intense fears evoked by the pandemic. For after all, the narrator would love to have “row after row [of sunflowers] flicker up in the night, in the worry-field of my mother’s head” (S). The consoling quality of the sunflower image also derives from its association with ‘divine holding’ in the story. This is the description of the lovers, the sunflowers, right at the end of the story: I liked the way they [the sunflowers] looked on the carpet, like golden messages from some other, less exhausting place. […] You climb back in bed to touch my face. You climb back in bed to touch my face. You wrap your arms around me and it’s like you’re the patron saint of touch as well as soft sunlight […]. Or you must be the earthly representative of divine holding. Or you’re both and also a boy, like me, holding on. (S) Home is queered insofar as it becomes the site of divine love and comfort between male lovers. The value of consoling touch, especially of touching faces without masks, takes on double urgency in view of pervasive social distancing, or, as the narrator says, “touchless […] experiences” (S). The final line places the relationship between the lovers on a more equal footing by emphasising their vulnerability (‘holding on’) in this time of crisis. As Val Walker writes, comfort “originates from the Old French comfort, meaning ‘to be strong with’” (2010: 3). It is this with-ness and not ‘being strong for someone’ (see ibid.) that is highlighted in the final line of Chen’s story. Chen’s description of ‘divine holding’ taps into a further etymological mean‐ ing of comfort. Up until the nineteenth century, ‘comfort’ primarily referred to “spiritual consolation […]. The understanding was embedded in Christian theology: the comforter was one of the designations of the Holy Spirit” (Boni 2016: 138). Chen’s enshrinement of home as a site of divine holding fuses the physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of comfort. In this light, home is the sphere of remedial consolation: Divine holding promises redemption from the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 181 blights of alienating modernity and salvation from the darkness of the virus. The comfort of home, then, helps ward off the threatening contingency of life in more senses than one. Contingency refers to the fact that things could be different. Events such as the pandemic, which are experienced as something that unexpectedly happens to you, can increase the awareness of the world as contingent. In the story, home not only offers a respite from the threat of the Coronavirus, but the spiritual experience of divine holding, the sacralisation of romantic love, endows life with meaning and purpose. The establishment of home in Chen’s story as an intimate site of consolation is strengthened by the strict opposition the story sets up between the private and the public sphere. The public sphere is represented by a shopping mall with its social distancing and the wearing of masks. More importantly, the mall is featured as the realm of inauthenticity, alienation (the sales assistant appears as a “grinning retail robot” [S]), and a corrosive form of consumer religion. The binary oppositions in the flash fiction in combination with the cross-cutting between the description of the shopping mall and the sunflowers at home establish ‘home’ as a comforting cocoon that is sealed off from threatening and alienating life outside. While the story also hints at how home is experienced as confining during the pandemic, it is the sacralisation of home that dominates. The worry-fields of the pandemic have a bearing on the function of the arts. The narrator at one point reflects on what “any artist hopes for: not only to be remembered, but to be company” (S). Might this short story also keep us company in these anxious times - a consoling ‘golden message’ amidst our current ‘exhaustive place’? This seems to be the implication of Chen’s story. Such a literary consoling of the reader, however, cannot gloss over problematic aspects of Chen’s story. “Summer” is embroiled in glaring self-contradictions as capitalism is denigrated on the one hand but a sensual shopping experience highly valued on the other; the enshrinement of home necessitates ignoring, for instance, the quantifiable costs of residing in a place. Moreover, it is striking how the impermeable home in Chen’s story goes hand in hand with only imagined acts of care for others (the narrator does not act on his concern for a sales assistant), whereas the permeable home in Shepard’s story is embedded within descriptions of seeking and extending concrete forms of solidarity within the neighbourhood. There is not enough textual evidence to probe further, but this striking comparison between the two un/ comfortable homes hints at how practices and idea(l)s of home life interplay with larger forms of community. In contrast to the discussed flash fiction, Sarah Hall’s Burntcoat (B) is not specifically about Covid; instead, the deadly virus is called the Novavirus or AG3 and wreaks even more horrific death and social havoc than Corona. However, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 182 Stella Butter Hall’s novel can be understood as a distinct response to the Corona crisis, not least because there are still enough similarities between Covid-19 and Hall’s dystopian description of the AG3 pandemic. Burntcoat is, as one reviewer aptly puts it, “a feverish reflection on devastation and resilience” (Kreizmann 2022: n.pag.) that bristles “with maximalist feelings” (ibid.), be it intense feelings of loss or sexual ecstasy described in graphic detail. The lyrical story is told by Edith Harkness, a fifty-nine-year-old famous sculptor, in the days before her death. The Novavirus has broken out in her body again, and as her health dramatically deteriorates, Edith recalls key relationships and events from her life, first and foremost the experience of lockdown with her Turkish lover Halit, but memories of her childhood also resurface: the fraught relationship with her mother, a talented writer, who raised Edith by herself despite struggling with severe cognitive impairments due to a stroke. As I will show, ‘home’ in Burntcoat is tied to an art of resilience and an ambiguous comfort different to that of Shepard’s “Monsters”. The importance of home is already signalled by the novel’s title, which is the name of Edith’s current home: a vast “utilitarian warehouse” (B: 26) in the “old industrial part of the city” (ibid.), found in a bad state of disrepair, “scarred” (ibid.), before Edith converted it into an apartment cum studio for her vast sculpted artworks. “Burntcoat became some kind of chimerical home, […], two hemispheres, both me” (B: 87). The word ‘chimerical’ takes on additional meaning in the light of Edith’s infection with the AG3 virus. She survives, but the virus “retreat[s] deep into the cells, lying dormant” (B: 127). “[W]e are not separate” (ibid.), Edith ruminates. If the virus is now part of Edith’s cells, then the DNA within her body is diverse or ‘chimerical’. By becoming an extension of Edith’s embodied subjectivity, including her history of emotional and physical scarring (witness her troubled childhood, the painful loss of Halit), Burntcoat signals resilience. The burning of a top layer (‘burnt-coat’) brings to mind the Japanese charring technique (Shou sougi ban) with which Edith produces her artwork. She learns in Japan “how to wire-brush the scorched charcoal coat [of wood], to reveal the beautiful grain beneath” (B: 14) - the “patterns” (B: 45) of this “true grain” (ibid.) are “so suggestive they became stories” (ibid.). Moreover, charring makes the wood resilient to rot. Destruction, then, births new creativity and resilience - this is the basic premise of Hall’s novel, rehearsed with the help of manifold examples. “I’m the wood in the fire. I’ve experienced, altered in nature. I am burnt, damaged, more resilient” (B: 210), Edith concludes at the end of her tale. If ‘Burntcoat’ is a metaphor for resilience in the novel, then resilience is a mark of home. Edith’s tale, indeed, suggests that resilience is necessary to 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 183 carve out spaces of home from the devastation of our lives, but also that spheres of home may nourish our resilience. The latter is foregrounded by Edith’s experience of home during lockdown. Burntcoat is the place where Edith experiences passionate lovemaking with Halit - a bodily and psychological intimacy that consoles her in the frightening time of the pandemic: [L]overs […] buil[d] shelters with their hopes. Other worlds cease. I know I felt something as it began, an understanding, foreboding, ordinance, even. Love […] grows in the rich darkness. (B: 52) If we went deep enough into each other, there would be a hiding place. (B: 104) This fetishization of romantic love as comforting is reminiscent of ‘divine holding’ in Chen’s story (see Edith’s telling choice of religious words: “ordinance”), albeit with the difference that Hall describes lovemaking in visceral detail, foregrounding the unsettling messy body. There is arguably a feminist impetus driving these graphic descriptions. The positive coding of Halit’s erotic play with an inserted tampon, for instance, breaks with the enduring cultural taboo that women’s bodies are dirty and hence untouchable during that time of the month. (The discussion of a feminist outlook in Burntcoat may easily be extended, for example by addressing the novel’s imaginative replacement of famous male artworks, such as Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’, by Edith’s feminist art.) If Burntcoat is the site of creativity (Edith’s studio), then the strong presence of sexuality extends this creativity to (potential) procreation. The privileging of creativity in the story invites an aesthetisation of life. Precisely this stance is rendered explicit by Edith when she states “It’s all art, even thought, everything is” (B: 110). The premise that destruction engenders new creation introduces cyclical temporality and renders all things ambiguous. Cyclical temporality is reflected on the level of form because the novel begins and ends with Edith thinking about her mother (Naomi). Double-coding runs through the entire novel so that, for instance, the scan of Naomi’s brain haemorrhage is described as “completely horrible and beautiful too” (B: 58, original emphasis). The logic of the double-coding in the novel also helps explain why the AG3 virus is held up for our admiration. “It was”, Edith explains, “- it is perfect. Perfectly composed, star-like, and timed for the greatest chaos, for transmission across borders, replication, creating galaxies of itself” (B: 127, emphasis added) while it destroys human lives. Does such a view of existence offer any consolation? “At any given moment”, Edith ponders, “the body is simply its state: reformation [‘re-creation of cells’, S.B.] and decay of flesh [‘destruction’, S.B.], its neutral routes. There was a sensuality - unfrightening, comforting even - of cells altering hour by hour” 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 184 Stella Butter (B: 92, emphasis added). Acceptance of change, then, appears as a prerequisite for experiencing consolation. However, this same passage ends with Edith’s reflections on how the “body is a wound, a bell ringing in emergency - life, life, life” (ibid.). Despite opening up spaces of consolation, Burntcoat is sobering in its insistence that we never move beyond an enduring inconsolability because we fight death. Such a stance renders all consolation ambiguous, albeit not in the previous sense that one person’s source of consolation may cause another person intense discomfort (see “Monsters”). Instead, Burntcoat presents many moments where consolation and inconsolability are intricately intertwined for the protagonist because their source is double-coded. The “Visitations” (B: 177) of Halit, expe‐ rienced by Edith as she nears her death, are double-edged: “If I turn round, his image will be beautiful, or he will appear as terrifying, foul and dark as my heart” (B: 207). The deadly virus transformed Halit into a “putrid, bluish organism” (B: 177) - an image that Edith cannot shake as she holds on to his decomposing body in Burntcoat. ‘Divine or consoling holding’, then, takes on dark hues in Hall, as this description of her response after Halit’s death shows: “I […] crawled to where the body lay. I moved the heavy arm and put my head against the wall of the chest […]. Halit had gone and you had come. I let you hold me” (B: 180). Passages addressed to a ‘you’ recur throughout Edith’s narration. At times, they refer to Halit, thereby emphasising the closeness she continues to feel to him. In the quoted passage, it seems that the ‘you’ refers to Halit’s corpse, or more precisely, to death itself, foregrounding how Edith’s act of storytelling is also about navigating her relationship to mortality (see also Hall 2022). The ambiguity of comfort means that art in Burntcoat cannot be conceptual‐ ised as providing any form of straightforward consolation, as was the case in Chen’s story and partly in Shepard’s fiction. Tellingly, Edith stresses that the artwork she was commissioned to create as a memorial of the pandemic, her “nova piece” (B: 207), “cannot possibly comfort, or reparate” (B: 208). The story, as a whole, however, ends on a more hopeful note, leaving us with a strong image of resilience, wonder, and being held: “A life is a bead of water on the black surface, so frail, so strong, its world incredibly held” (B: 210). This image refers back to the Japanese master who taught Edith Shou sougi ban because he always left a single drop of water, “a perfect sitting bead” (B: 45), on the sealed and beautified coat of charred wood after he was finished. Are we not back to a form of divine holding, given that one meaning of ‘beads’ is prayer? But what is it that holds the single drop of water, that allows for our resilience? Given the complexity of Hall’s lyrical novel, the answers are manifold. How‐ ever, the discussion of the theme of home has already pointed to the important 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 185 role that art plays in times of crisis. “Those who tell stories survive” (B: 1), we read at the opening of Edith’s tale. Edith is quoting her mother, who uttered these words after her stroke. Edith ponders whether her mother was referring to the power of stories to “make sense of a disordered world” (B: 2), meaning that “life is only an invention, a version necessary for us to accept living” (ibid.). This would be in keeping with Blumenberg’s claim that we require a consoling dwelling in the cave (see above). Arguably, Edith’s storytelling is, indeed, born from a need for consolation: she yearns to be “re-childed” (B: 35), that is, have her mother hold her hand - a stock image of comfort - and give her the courage to soon enter the unknown territory of death. Although Edith will not survive in a literal sense through storytelling, there is a sense that her act of storytelling may provide some form of supportive consolation. After all, her tale conjures up the imaginary presence of the two people she yearns for most: Halit and her mother. Similar to Shepard’s story, Hall is thereby careful to cultivate an ethics of caution by reflecting on the nature of storytelling and art. This brief foray into Covid fiction has already shown how varied the depicted interplay between home, comfort, and art is against the backdrop of a crisis. It is striking, though, that prominent topics in political discourses on the Covid pandemic hardly feature in my literary corpus. The impact of social inequalities and the stark rise in domestic violence during lockdown are not explored in these stories; there is only a brief reference in Burntcoat: “In poorer boroughs, along lines of ethnicity and poverty, the virus spread wildly, exposing the country’s bias, its rotten structures” (B: 124). One would have to turn to books like Sarah Moss’s The Fell (2021) for an engagement with, for instance, the intense discomfort of Covid poverty during lockdown. I now, however, want to turn to Sarah Moss’s debut novel Cold Earth (CE) to move beyond a narrow focus on Covid in pandemic fiction and to show how literary negotiations of ‘home’ and ‘comfort’ also strongly draw on a planetary scale to map our current crises. Cold Earth is a story about extinction and survival in the Arctic North and the world at large. A team of six American and British researchers embark on an archaeological dig in an isolated part of Greenland to ascertain why a thriving fourteenth-century Norse Viking settlement came to an end. During their dig, the research team learns from the internet that a pandemic is rapidly spreading across the globe. They are cut off from the rest of the world because the internet appears to have shut down, and their satellite phone does not work either. When the researchers are not collected by plane on the arranged date, the team is left wondering what havoc the pandemic has caused and whether they will be saved, as the Arctic winter is about to set in. Moss skilfully builds up an atmosphere of dread, as Nina, an English literature PhD student, has dreams of the Viking past, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 186 Stella Butter in which she witnesses the slaughter of farmers and their families by raiding fishermen. The believability of her visions and sightings of ghosts increases when the team excavates a grave with several skeletons on the hillside above the barn. However, it is impossible for readers to decide whether this is a ghost story because we are presented with an alternative explanation of the events. Ruth, a team member unimpressed by the alleged hauntings, diagnoses instead a case of group hysteria. Archaeological digging in the novel, then, not only foregrounds the site of ‘home’ as an archive for the history of a people but also highlights “a mental […] tunneling process” (Monaco 2021: 5) into the landscapes of the mind. There is an overwhelming sense of loss in Moss’s novel: The Northern landscape is inscribed with death (the grave), characters wrestle with their yearning to get back to the comforts of home, and a large chunk of the story deals with the impossibility of consolation due to the sudden death of a loved one. At first glance, the homesickness of the characters pertains only to their localised homes and their absent loved ones. The concept of home, however, is also extended to a planetary scale due to the depiction of the archaeological site. The coding of the derelict Viking buildings as a site of ‘home’ is strengthened by Nina’s dreams of past family life in these buildings and by her daydream of buying this piece of Greenland to convert the derelict barn into a home for herself and her fiancé. The discussions among the researchers as to why the Vikings vanished in Greenland foreground how sites of home are shaped by supra-local and planetary processes. The possible explanations for the abandonment or destruction of Viking settlements include brutal raiding of the settlements by fishermen, the spread of the plague, or climate change. These brief discussions also showcase the multi-temporality of home: It is not only the site of human time but of deep planetary time. The pressures of these supra-local and planetary processes render home fragile: It cannot offer protection against the threatening contingency of the world, as the example of the Viking home shows. The perceived ghostly presence of the Viking dead means that the past bleeds into the present. Instead of linear time, the novel suggests a repetition of the past. Just like the Viking inhabitants of the farmstead will have struggled to survive the Arctic winter, so are the archaeologists caught up in a struggle for survival once they are left stranded. As John Brannigan notes, Cold Earth shows that the “vulnerability of modern society to catastrophe is […] as thin as the Viking settlement they have come to exhume” (2019: 82). A sense of foreshadowing is strengthened by the fact that six Viking skeletons have been uncovered and taken by the archaeologists, who themselves make up a team of six. Will they too become six dead bodies? Moreover, the plague and the little ice age of the past are mirrored in the spreading pandemic and climate change 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 187 on the level of the present. The listed ills of modernity, including terrorism, war, and the threat of nuclear holocaust, which the characters repeatedly voice, contribute to an apocalyptic atmosphere, all the more so because the characters are wondering whether the pandemic is wiping out humanity. In the face of all these ills, Catriona, one of the team members, labels the time of the present as apocalyptic (“I think we’re probably the last generation. Don’t you? ”, CE: 81). If the site of the derelict Viking home encapsulates our apocalyptic future, then it is a collective future envisaged in terms of a ruined home. The title Cold Earth plays with the double reference to the cold earth in the Arctic North and the destruction of planet Earth. Cold Earth, then, does not follow in the footsteps of critics who assert that the environmentalist trope of Earth as our home is detrimental to engaging with climate change because of its anthropocentric bias. The metaphor of home is misguided, so the argument goes, because it solicits “a theory of human hospitality to the planet”, but what is really needed to respond to climate change is “a theory of asubjectivisation” so that climate change can be “addressed as the inhuman, wholly other” (Long 2012: n.pag., original emphasis). In contrast, Cold Earth follows a different path by introducing home “as a cognitive frame that mediates the necessarily human, anthropomorphic element of narrative with the more abstract, non-human spaces and temporalities of a fragile, dynamic planet” (Hegglund 2019: 187). Moss’s mediation of the human thereby traces the landscapes of our (in)consolability. The planetary scale of home in Moss’s novel suggests that the pervasive theme of homesickness captures a larger emotive landscape in the twenty-first century, namely the feelings of mourning and dislocation that stem from the widespread apocalyptic perception of the gradual loss of home on a global or planetary level. This aesthetic diagnosis of a landscape of feeling ties in with more recent research such as Ann Kaplan’s book Climate Trauma (2016). Kaplan argues that the catastrophic futurist scenarios we are constantly confronted with across all sorts of media result in a population living with “severe anxiety about the future […] - an anxiety that warrants the term pretrauma” (1), that is, individuals display signs of trauma although they have not literally undergone a traumatic event but are instead anticipating or imagining it. She argues that in “circular fashion, the real catastrophes caused by humans generate fantasies that in turn have material effects” (ibid: 10). Moss’s literary diagnosis of a broader landscape of feeling marked by anxiety and desolation bears affinities to Kaplan’s description of pretrauma. In Moss’s novel, we learn, for instance, that Catriona experiences a certain relief once she comes to realise that her death is near because having “at last a reality to deal with” (CE: 254) is better than the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 188 Stella Butter state of “dreading” (ibid.) what may come. Given such a state of dread, we are, indeed, in dire need of consolation. Small wonder then that forms of consolation and the troubling of consolation constitute another key theme in the novel. The most extensive reflections on consolation are comprised in Ruth’s narration or rather in the letter she writes to her therapist. Ruth, who is American, decided to join the archaeological team for this dig because she had hoped that the wilderness of Greenland would succeed where her therapist had failed, namely heal her grief. Ruth displays signs of trauma as she obsessively imagines how James, the man she passionately loved, burnt to death in a car crash. She fiercely rejects the widespread idea of grief as something that you work through so that you can then move on: “I found that there’s no place here [USA] for death. We have to call it a problem and go to trauma sharks like you to get it solved. […] I’m not allowed to be a grieving American […] who can’t face her own apartment because of the person who’s not there” (CE: 105). Given this description, the loss of James equals the loss of home. Tellingly, this loss on an individual level is repeatedly connected to those large-scale forces that are identified as destroying homes on a global level. The truck driver who had crashed into James did so because he was distracted by listening to the news about bombings. In Ruth’s ironic gloss: “Death by rolling news” (CE: 131). Moreover, with his death, “James’s DNA [is] erased like the smallpox” (CE: 114) - this comparison establishes a link to a pandemic. These links suggest that we are not just dealing with the depiction of the grief and inconsolability of an individual, but that the novel is also concerned with how the larger landscape of modernity gives rise to feelings of desolation and melancholia. The affordances of the narrative form of Cold Earth can be seen as a distinct response to this landscape of desolation. The novel consists of journal entries or letters written by the characters so that each team member features as a first-person narrator in turn. In a novel concerned with an archiving of what survives of the past, the texts written by the characters may be seen as an attempt at archiving their experiences as well: If loss and environmental changes are registered in the landscape, the very act of narrating reflects a similar archival operation in the attempt to gather the fragments of human memory. […] Moss’s fiction contributes to a poetics of the archive understood as a way to record and compensate for human loss and ecological apocalypse. (Monaco 2021: 1) Monaco’s choice of the word ‘compensate’ does not strike me as felicitous because the archival operation is not shown to fully counterbalance loss and destruction, but I agree that the act of writing texts addressed to loved ones or a significant other, i.e. this archiving of the characters’ experiences, does appear 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 189 10 For an in-depth discussion of the popular notion that the value of literature lies in its power to offer solace, see Pieters (2021). to a varying degree as consoling for the characters. In the context of consolation, the open multiperspectivity, which is introduced by the letters and journal entries, takes on added significance. If one can explain the various happenings either through a supernatural or a realistic interpretive frame, then this inten‐ sifies readers’ perception of contingency. Such an awareness of contingency, that is, an openness towards looking at things from a different perspective, may allow cracks of light to shine through our walls of inconsolability. This is why a “semantics of ambiguity” is frequently seen as distinguishing “the language of comfort” (Pieters 2021: 267 with reference to Fœssel). Cold Earth provides us with an apt example of this on the level of content. Towards the end of her letter to her therapist, Ruth shares an important insight that she gained during her stay and her writing process: James had not been planning to marry her because he saw her as “his present, not his future” (CE: 181). Ruth’s wish to continue the grief counselling she had previously rejected and her readiness to “come home” (CE: 182) indicate that she may now be able to move beyond her melancholic fixation. The reasons for this shift in disposition are arguably varied, but the fact that this shift is signalled after she reassesses her love relationship to James implies that moving beyond inconsolability necessitates opening up spaces of re-interpretation. Identifying potential sources of consolation becomes more pressing in a world where traditional wellsprings of consolation like religious belief are not simply given anymore. It is telling that Cold Earth not only leaves its most religious character, the devout Christian named Jim, largely underdeveloped but also shows how Jim, when he lies dying, ultimately finds comfort in the happy memories of his family life and not in his religious belief. Cold Earth, then, implicitly affirms a shift from “pre-modern [to] […] modern economies of consolation” (Pieters 2015: 129f.) - a shift that may help explain why the idea of fiction as a source of comfort is nowadays so vastly popular. 10 Cold Earth is far from being a comfy read, but it also does not propagate unmitigated gloom. In the spirit of consoling ambiguity, the destruction of Earth as our home is countered by an alternative perspective. While Catriona rehearses apocalyptic thinking, especially by invoking nuclear destruction, Nina counters by pointing out that “People have always thought that. Wordsworth. Homer” (ibid.) and that “we’ve had nuclear weapons for seventy years” (CE: 81). As Greg Garrard explains, insisting on the coming eco-apocalypse does not necessarily galvanise people to action but may have the opposite effect: “Only if we imagine that the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 190 Stella Butter 11 Such a sentiment is also voiced in Sarah Moss’s novel Summerwater: “The land […] far under our feet […] is always shifting, forming, changing state. We write on the surface but the surface moves. […] Should the history of bedrock comfort us, in geological time? ” (2020: 25f., emphasis added). planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it” (Garrard 2012: 116). This adds to the importance of the future being open in Cold Earth. Despite the extensive foreshadowing of death in the novel, the researchers are saved at the end (with the exception of Yanni, the project leader), and humanity is not wiped out by a virus. While the perceived contingency of the world drives our need for solace, Cold Earth implies that awareness of contingency can also afford some consolation when we feel that home is lost. In the words of one of the characters: “The Arctic’s always changing, that’s why I like it so much. […] You can kind of feel the planet moving all the time” (CE: 62). 11 This focus on enduring change is reminiscent of Edith’s ruminations in Burntcoat on how the awareness of one’s cells altering by the hour may bring some comfort, albeit not one that remedies our underlying inconsolability in the face of mortality. 3 Conclusion: The Complexity of Home Comforts The crises of modernity place our normality under duress, hence augmenting the need for creating different forms of life and support structures. The perceived proliferation of crises also means that we are living in a time of a heightened need for consolation. This, at least, is the diagnosis shared by the literary texts in my pandemic fiction corpus. The analysis has shown how the fabric of the imagined home spheres is shaped by specific idea(l)s of consolation, ranging from remedial consolation to variants of ambiguous comfort in response to the pandemic. While stories like “Summer” solicit remedial soothing through the saving grace of home, novels like Burntcoat or Cold Earth render consolation ambiguous due to their intimate dissection of wounding, scarring and death. “Unlike effortless distraction”, David James emphasises, “solace only brings into greater focus the wound it targets, more often exposing than dispelling the desolation it promises to offset” (2019: 1). The reverberations of such a grimmer understanding of consolation are especially salient in Burntcoat, which presents the scarred home as the embodiment of an art of resilience that opens up spaces for ambiguous consolation without claiming reparation. The ‘comfort of home’, then, is revealed on closer inspection to be a multifaceted concept that does not sit easily with dismissive monolithic portrayals of homely solace as a fluffy evasion of the harsh realities of (pandemic) life. The discussion of discomforting 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 Home-Comfort Studies 191 12 See the growing research on Corona fiction, e.g. Heinz (2021) and Völkl et al. (2023). homes in pandemic fiction in this contribution can only present the beginning of a rough sketch of an intricate terrain. The continuous outpour of new pandemic writing, already called a new sub-genre by reviewers, invites further mappings of home dis/ comforts. 12 These literary mappings, in turn, draw attention to ways in which an ‘integrated framework of home comfort’, as proposed by Ellsworth-Krebs et al. (2019), may be developed further, especially with regard to the role of home comfort in times of crisis. As the previous analysis of the literary case studies suggests, this may be done in two ways: firstly, by parsing how configurations of home comfort in cultural narratives hinge on specific versions of psychological comfort (from remedial to ambiguous comfort); secondly, by reflecting on the role that literature and art play in envisioning and experiencing home dis/ comforts. These pointers for future research are not, however, meant to be understood as comprehensive. Instead, this contribution seeks to invite research into what might be called ‘aesthetic home-comfort studies’ to expand our understanding of ‘home comfort’ and its significance on a collective and an individual level. Works Cited ANDREI, M. (2013) The Mental Illness Monsters: Artist Visualizes Diseases as Mythological Creatures. ZME Science. 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VÖLKL, Y., Obermayr, J., and Hobisch, E. (2023). Pandemic Protagonists: Viral (Re)Actions in Pandemic and Corona Fictions. Bielefeld: transcript. WALKER, V. (2010) The Art of Comforting. What to Say and Do for People in Distress. New York et al.: Penguin. WATKIN, W. (2004) On Mourning. Theories of Loss in Modern Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP. ZINN, J. O. (2021) ‘Conclusions: Towards a Sociology of Pandemics and Beyond’, Current Sociology Monograph 69 (4), pp.-603-617. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0008 194 Stella Butter 1 However, quite a number of novels were banned because of their ‘obscenity’ or explicit sexual content in the US before 1959. Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet The Persuasiveness of Fictional Stories Vera Nünning 1 Introduction The persuasiveness of fictional stories is usually only recognised by those who regard literature as a peril or threat. At least from the time of Plato onwards, philosophers and politicians have raised their voices to warn against the undue influence of literature that has been held to poison the minds of readers in general and young women in particular. Especially totalitarian regimes and dictators who censure, ban, or burn books have, as Mario Vargas Llosa contends, a fine sense for identifying texts with subversive potential that might threaten the foundations of their power (see 2007 [2004]: 216, 218), while democratic governments do not often regard books as dangerous. 1 However, even in democratic countries such as Great Britain the debate about the censorship of books has been sparked recently, when it became clear that, for different reasons, and from different points of view, books are expurgated and tampered with. When Puffin Books released a new edition of the works of Roald Dahl in February 2023, an astonished reading public realised that several sensitivity readers had changed not just words but whole passages of Dahl’s novels, deleting or substituting references to race, ethnicity, sex, gender, disability or slavery, as well as descriptions of characters and passages in dialogues. Though the criticism of this tampering with fiction was so strong that Puffin Books additionally released a ‘classical’, unexpurgated version of Dahl’s work, there seems to be a renewed tendency within some Western countries 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 2 This situation might change in the future, since a recent volume deals with the topic of fiction and belief: James, A., Kubo, A., and Lavocat, F. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023). However, this volume comprises articles from a variety of disciplines and deals with many different facets of the topic; it does not focus on the relationship between literary studies and psychology. 3 Transportation (or immersion in a story) is characterised by concentration, affective engagement, and mental imagery (see Green and Brock 2000), it is “a state of cognitive, emotional, and imaginal immersion in a text” (Green et al. 2012: 37-38). to regard books as so dangerous that they should be censored or banned. A ‘woke’ culture demands sensitivity readers and political correctness, making it nearly impossible to discuss certain novels in schools or universities, while US-American states governed by Republicans employ measures to ban the discussion of issues concerning gender, sexuality and race, and the use of words such as ‘queer’. By now, books are under siege from various sides, and there seems to be a general awareness that (even fictional) stories are persuasive and can change readers’ minds. In academia, in contrast, the persuasive potential of fictional works has not been awarded the amount of attention that it arguably deserves. 2 While the potential of fiction to enhance readers’ empathy has instigated a vast amount of research ever since Suzanne Keen published her ground-breaking works (see 2006, 2007), the persuasive potential of fiction has mostly escaped the notice of literary scholars. This neglect is astonishing, since psychologists have conducted research into the power that (fictional and factual) stories have to change readers’ minds since the late 1990s, while literary scholars have by and large ignored these studies. In the following, I want to argue that literary studies and psychology should meet, and that literary scholars should consider the results of psychological studies that have demonstrated that fictional stories can change readers’ beliefs and attitudes. After all, in societies saturated with all kinds of stories, the persuasiveness of fictional narratives is arguably of social and cultural impor‐ tance. If fiction has the power to impact readers’ minds, we need to know more about the mechanisms involved in this process. The factors influencing the degree of persuasiveness that concern the perceptibility of readers (such as ‘transportability’) 3 have already been well established; but which exact properties of fictional texts play a role in the audience’s change of mind has not yet been explored. In this chapter, I will first briefly demonstrate what is meant by the persua‐ siveness of fictional stories, and in a second step focus on the narratological categories and methods that can be used to assess the persuasiveness of fictional stories. Rather than analysing these on a theoretical level, I will offer an 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 196 Vera Nünning 4 A drawback of these studies is that the books are usually read and discussed in preschool groups or classes, which makes it difficult to assess whether the change of beliefs is solely caused by reading the book or whether the discussion played an important part as well. interpretation of Hilary Mantel’s prize-winning and best-selling novel Wolf Hall that exemplifies certain narrative conventions that can serve to enhance the persuasiveness of novels and how these conventions can be identified. In the conclusion, I will identify new directions of research that are opened up when we take the persuasive potential of fictional texts seriously. 2 The Persuasiveness of Fictional Stories A host of empirical studies have attested to the persuasiveness of fictional stories and shown that readers or viewers can change their beliefs after being immersed in a storyworld. From the late 1990s onwards, psychologists explored the way in which stories can change readers’ beliefs, attitudes, and even their self-image (see e.g. Mar et al. 2009; Green et al. 2004; Djikic et al. 2013). Though the potential negative influence of fiction is often in the foreground of the public debate on the importance of fiction and leads to, for instance, lists of banned books that are not allowed to be taught in schools (Huckleberry Finn being a controversial example), fictional stories can also have positive effects, and the integration of health messages in popular TV soaps has been shown to change viewers’ behaviour and induce them to avoid unnecessary health risks (see Slater 1999: 342). There are two fields of psychological research related to the impact of fictional texts that are worth a brief mention here. The importance of fictional stories for the beliefs of children has been demonstrated in many experiments that have highlighted the positive as well as negative effects of children’s storybooks. Stories can reduce the potency of beliefs about gender stereotypes, for instance; they can foster children’s approval of allegedly ‘feminine’ behaviour of boys, and can encourage young girls to consider gender-untypical job choices (see Kneeskern and Reeder 2022: 1474, 1481f.; Abad and Pruden 2013: 1-4). Fictional narratives can also help to reduce homophobia. Reading Brent Hartinger’s novel Geography Club (2003), a young adult novel about a queer boy, considerably diminished prejudices against gay students in a class that read and discussed the book. Moreover, instead of strengthening the beliefs of those with strong prejudices, the reading “was effective in significantly reducing homophobia in participants with high pretest homophobia” (Malo-Juvera 2016: 18). 4 However, stories can have a less than beneficial impact, too. Exposure to superman videos 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 197 5 Unfortunately, parents are not very effective when trying to counteract stereotypes embedded in stories. One study even showed that, after a certain period of time, children not only still held the beliefs that their parents had questioned - they also remembered them better than other beliefs encountered in story books (see Coyne et al. 2014: 416). not only confirmed children’s gender stereotypes, but also induced them to spend more time playing with toy weapons, and to behave more aggressively towards their peers (see Coyne et al. 2014: 427). 5 A second research tradition is concerned with the impact of fictional stories on (young) adults. The insight that fictional stories can induce readers to change their beliefs about the real world is partly a by-product of research into the persuasiveness of stories in general. It quickly turned out that it makes no difference whether readers thought that they were dealing with a fictional or factual story (see Green and Brock 2000). Even when readers were warned that the story they were assigned to read would contain false information, a considerable number of participants still assimilated their beliefs to what they encountered in the story (see Marsh and Fazio 2006: 1140-49; Marsh et al. 2003: 519-36). The experiments tested distinct beliefs (such as the idea that eating chocolate helps you lose weight or that Saturn is the largest planet) and attitudes, for instance towards minority groups (see Johnson et al. 2013). The fact that the degree of fictionality of a story made no difference to the beliefs taken by a considerable number of readers at first puzzled psychologists, who then came up with several explanations. Since readers are not aware of the persuasiveness of fiction, they do not think it necessary to check whether the beliefs encountered in fictions are true or plausible. Reading fiction reduces counterarguing, which is partly due to the conviction that one will not be influenced by fiction anyway, and partly due to the immersion in fictional works. If we are ‘transported’ into a book we do not want to interrupt being in such a pleasant state; we want to know what happens next. The beliefs and attitudes encountered in fiction are therefore quickly integrated into a reader’s mental encyclopaedia (if we are not absorbed by a text, it has no impact anyway). In the words of Melanie C. Green and Karin Dill: Even though individuals often remember that they read a particular piece of information as part of a story, the fictional information also appears to be quickly integrated with related knowledge in individuals’ memory. […] Fictional information becomes accessible in mind, and creates new memory connections between concepts. (2013: 451) Even after a time span of two weeks, readers did not pause to check or delete the beliefs adopted from fictional stories. Instead, the beliefs were, if anything, held more firmly than before (see Appel and Richter 2007: 113-34). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 198 Vera Nünning 6 For a summary, see Green and Dill 2013. 7 For a summary, see Wolf 2009: 144-59. However, there are certain conditions attached to the persuasiveness of stories. Part of them depend on the reader and have been analysed in detail particularly by Melanie C. Green and colleagues, who also set up a questionnaire ascertaining the ‘transportability’ of readers (see Green and Brock 2000: 704). Some people are more prone to be immersed in stories and feel with the characters, others are less predisposed to become absorbed by fiction. Moreover, readers’ preferences - for instance with regard to genres - play a role, and sometimes stress and other circumstances prevent being transported into a book that would otherwise completely occupy their attention (see Vaughn et al. 2009: 447-56). The exact features of stories that heighten their persuasiveness has not been researched in any detail. Green and colleagues established some major factors, all of which are related to the degree to which fictions can prompt readers to become transported: The quality of fictional works (excerpts from bestsellers were more immersive than stories written by psychologists), the ‘perceived realism’ of stories (which refers to readers’ experiencing the fictional as real and life-like, and can thus be attested to fantasies like Harry Potter and many other genres), the vividness of the mental images the stories evoke, and readers’ emotional engagement with the characters. An attitude embodied by a favourite character has a higher degree of persuasiveness than one uttered by others. 6 These findings from psychological studies can be used as a basis for literary analyses of the persuasiveness of narratives. ‘Perceived realism’, for instance, can be understood in terms of ‘aesthetic illusion’, which has been related to a host of literary features in several studies, 7 most of which are relevant for the study of ‘perceived realism’. Readers’ emotional engagement with the characters can be assessed with recourse to the features evoking narrative empathy, a field that has been explored in a number of outstanding literary studies (see e.g. Keen 2007; Breithaupt 2009). Unfortunately, research on the likeability of characters and the likelihood of their becoming the readers’ favourite character (whose views and remarks are more persuasive than others) and on the direction of readers’ sympathy has barely scratched the surface of this important process, but a few theoretical foundations have been established (see Prinz and Winko 2014; Nünning 2020). The vividness of mental images also deserves more research (see Miall and Kuiken 1994). All in all, literary research into those features of narratives that enhance their persuasiveness can build on a solid basis, though these findings have to be adjusted to the specific requirements of the research on 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 199 8 ‘Perceived realism’ can be evoked by reading novels and narrative poetry, by watching or reading plays and watching films. There is an overlap concerning the narrative strategies involved, but, depending on the genre, there are also differences. In the following, the focus will be on novels. 9 Various forms of suspense have been analysed in a host of literary studies (for a summary see Schindler 2020: 56-68). the persuasiveness of fictional works. Moreover, the hypotheses derived from future research should be tested in experiments (see the summary in Green and Dill 2013). 3 A Brief Overview of Narrative Conventions Heightening the Persuasive Impact of Fictional Stories On the basis of these relations between the results of psychological experiments and narratological categories, I would like to suggest that certain narrative conventions heighten the degree of the persuasiveness of the stories (for preliminary studies see Nünning 2014: ch. 5; 2020). The key - and rather broad - category of ‘perceived realism’ can be linked to four related phenomena: aesthetic illusion, the illusion of immediacy (transparency of the level of narrative mediation and the lack of distance between reader and characters), the life-likeness of characters, and the degree of experientiality. 8 Readers’ emo‐ tional engagement with the characters can be raised by narrative conventions fostering empathy with or sympathy for a character. The vividness of the mental images the text evokes can be connected to the use of metaphors and the description of colourful images. The life-likeness of characters is surprisingly difficult to assess, since it is tied to implicit personality theories of readers, which have a common ground in folk psychology, but can vary nonetheless. However, in addition to the categories for exploring the degree of ‘perceived realism’, one can analyse the mode of presenting a character, and focus on the use of gaps and ambivalences, since such gaps induce readers to attribute those traits and feelings to a character that they perceive as plausible and life-like. This, in turn, is bound to lead to a characterisation that readers perceive as life-like - probably more so than the most masterly presentation of a narrator could ever be. Since the reduction of counterarguing and the desire to continue to read is another prerequisite for ‘perceived realism’, it makes sense to add the degree of suspense to the list of factors enhancing the persuasiveness of stories. 9 This rough sketch of narrative conventions heightening the persuasiveness of stories provides a first overview of a field that should be further explored; it cannot do justice to the wide variety of combinations that can be found in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 200 Vera Nünning 10 See, for instance, “the novel’s ability to bring the reader directly into Tudor England and reflect the turbulent political status at the time was magnificent” (Wondereyes 2010: n.pag.). The book was also praised as “not just another historical novel. It’s in a league of its own because despite pulling together a huge amount of information, it is still well written” (H.J. Moreton 2013: n.pag.). Goodreads is an Amazon-owned social cataloging fictional narratives. In addition, each of the key concepts mentioned above can be realised in several ways. Empathy, for instance, can be evoked by extensive focalisation, putting the hero/ ine in a predicament, characterising them as likeable, and the use of narratorial comments or other means of directing readers’ sympathy. Moreover, structural features such as the constellation of characters can also play a role: In a genre with a very moral set of characters such as the eighteenth-century sentimental comedy, even a heroine with minor flaws would, in contrast, appear to be morally highly suspect, whereas in Dickens’ fictional worlds, eccentricities and foibles are so common that they do not attract a lot of attention. The potential of narrative conventions therefore depends not only on the genre, but on the individual features of each storyworld. 4 Narrative Conventions Fostering the Persuasiveness of the Story in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Turning now to my test case, I will use Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall to illus‐ trate the categories that literary critics can use in order to assess the persuasive impact of novels. Following this, I shall explore the narrative strategies used in Mantel’s novel for changing readers’ beliefs about one historical personality, namely Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s novel seems to be a good choice for an analysis of the persuasiveness of fiction, since the book was not only awarded several prizes (including the Booker Prize) and acclaimed by reviewers and critics alike, it also persuaded readers to accept a specific image of the protagonist. Many reviewers praised the novel, asserting that it rings true and provides insight into the period of the Tudors and a fascinating portrait of Thomas Cromwell. As one reviewer stated, “Mantel rewrites the history of England from 1527 to 1535 with Thomas Cromwell as the hero” (Fitzherbert 2015: n.pag.). This is quite a feat, since, as Stephen Greenblatt observes, she chose one of those “figure[s] exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all” (2009: n.pag.). Many critics agreed with this, and many readers showed their approval by rating the novel with three stars or more on Amazon or posting favourable com‐ ments on Goodreads. 10 Some of these comments even reflect on the difference between the personality of the protagonist and the established historiographical 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 201 and reviewing site (launched in January 2007), on which mostly lay readers publicly rate and comment on books, compile reading lists, and engage in discussions. characterisation of Cromwell, and assert that the novel is more truthful than the history books, claiming that this “meticulously researched and beautifully written book […] made me realise how historical reputations can be built up (as with Thomas More) with no justification, or unfairly maligned (as with Cromwell himself)” (Purcell 2009: n.pag.; see also Debra F. 2014: n.pag.). Those readers who liked the book and pondered its historical authenticity changed their beliefs about Cromwell. Most of the readers praising the novel, however, are not unduly concerned about its discrepancy to historical knowledge; they seem to tacitly accept the new image of Cromwell. In contrast to literary critics and many readers who recommend the novel in comments on the internet, some historians with expert knowledge on the sixteenth century did not like the book at all. As Simon Schama makes clear: “When I was doing research for A History of Britain, the documents shouted to high heaven that Thomas Cromwell was, in fact, a detestably self-serving, bullying monster who perfected state terror in England, cooked the evidence, and extracted confessions by torture” (2015: n.pag.). Another renowned histor‐ ian of the period, David Starkey, is scarcely less acidic in his criticism: “This is total fiction. There is not a scrap of evidence for it at all. So the thing that’s used to create Cromwell as a sympathetic character is totally fiction […]. [A]s I understand it, [Wolf Hall] is based on a deliberate perversion of fact” (2015: n.pag.). These are very strong words indeed, and they illustrate that the novel did not change those readers’ minds who already held a strong belief about the ‘correct’ image of Cromwell. The evaluations of the historians also show the extent to which the fictional Cromwell deviates from how he is portrayed in history books, and demonstrate that readers who knew about the traits of the historical Cromwell substantially altered their mental image of him after they read Mantel’s novel. The key factor for the persuasiveness of novels, readers’ immersion in the story, is encouraged by several narrative devices in Wolf Hall. Among the narrative conventions that achieve this overall effect are certain means of heightening the feeling of immediacy, and to enhance the emotional engage‐ ment of readers. Immediacy as well as experientiality (or the feeling of ‘what it’s like’ for the characters in the story) are fostered by the novel’s style and choice of focaliser. Throughout the book, the protagonist functions as the central sensibility, the psychological filter or focaliser through which readers come to know what happens in the storyworld. Readers perceive events through the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 202 Vera Nünning 11 Mantel describes this narrative situation herself: “the camera was behind [Cromwell’s] eyes. The events were happening now […] unfolding as I watched, and what followed would be filtered through the main character’s sensibility” (2012: n.pag.); for the ‘immediacy’ of the homodiegetic focalisation, see also Brosch 2018: 62f. eyes of Cromwell; they seem to be able to relate to him directly. The narrator remains invisible, they refrain from analysing the events and motives of the protagonist or commenting on the story, which would create a distance between the narrator and Cromwell. 11 Instead of feeling the presence of a narrator, readers focus on Cromwell’s perceptions. Information about and evaluations of the other characters are conveyed by means of the protagonist’s thoughts and impressions. When, for instance, Cardinal Wolsey is introduced into the story, it is through the eyes of Cromwell, who goes to visit him. We do not get to know what exactly Cromwell tells him; instead, the protagonist’s perceptions are in the foreground of the story: “As he listens, the cardinal’s face creases into its affable, perpetually attentive folds. From time to time he notes down a figure that he is given. He sips from a glass of very good wine” (Wolf Hall: 20). The following brief account of the cardinal’s plans and his relation to Cromwell confirm the impression that the readers have immediate access to his mind and to his field of vision: He [Cromwell] has the leisure to think about this, because the cardinal is staring down at his desk, at the letter he has half-written. He looks up. ‘Tom…’ And then, ‘No, never mind. Tell me why you are scowling in that way.’ ‘The people up there say they are going to kill me.’ ‘Really? ’ the cardinal says. His face says, I am astonished and disappointed. […] Behind the cardinal there is a tapestry, hanging the length of the wall. King Solomon, his hands stretched into darkness, is greeting the Queen of Sheba. (Wolf Hall: 21) There is no sign of a narrator telling the story; instead, the reader sees the whole scene through the eyes of Cromwell. It is Cromwell who reads astonishment and disappointment in Wolsey’s face. His own ‘scowling’, which is not acknowledged by his internal focalisation or the narrator, is reported through the speech of Wolsey. That this important historical figure thinks highly of Cromwell confirms readers’ favourable image of the protagonist, who seems to be very competent: “‘I am listening,’ the cardinal says. ‘Indeed, I go further. I am captivated’” (Wolf Hall: 20). There are several other aspects contributing to the effect of immediacy and experientiality in these brief quotes. One of these is the use of a “vivid language that does not incorporate archaisms” (Arias 2014: 28) even though it is rooted in sixteenth-century life and refers to ideas and material details that are most likely 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 203 12 The use of the present tense is mentioned by several critics; for a masterly interpretation of it, see Gebauer 2021: 158-67. 13 See also Johnston for the novel’s “interest in the material and, especially, the visual culture of the Renaissance” (2017: 542). According to Marion Gymnich, such a “preoccu‐ pation with material culture in historical novels […] may partially be seen as a response to the increasing competition between different media as far as the representation of the past is concerned” (2018: 79). unfamiliar to modern readers (see Stocker 2012: 313). Perhaps most notably, the whole story is narrated in the present tense. 12 Though it is quite obviously a narrative about a relatively distant past, the mode of narration suggests that the story unfolds in the present. The protagonist is a very perceptive filter, providing visual details that allow the reader to imagine the scene vividly. In the quote above, readers can visualise how the cardinal stares at his writing, the letter half written, and the luxurious and probably colourful tapestry featuring the Queen of Sheba covering the length of the wall. At the beginning of the scene, when Cromwell comes in from the cold, the atmosphere is evoked in a similar way: “Then the whole room is in motion: food, wine, fire built up. A man takes his wet outer garments with a solicitous murmur” (Wolf Hall: 18). Such scenes appeal to a reader’s senses, to what they would see, hear, feel, or taste, were they in that situation. 13 They thus evoke experientiality and render the scene both vivid and plausible. The novel also evokes vivid mental images by means of describing colourful, intense, and dramatic images. Many small details referring to every-day life and the material culture in the sixteenth century enhance the impression that a true picture of society is given. As Jerome de Groot notes, highlighting the materiality of the past and presenting “the details of normality and the minutiae of everyday life” (2016: 26) is one of the strategies that fosters a sense of realism. Such factual details pertain to table manners, the use of (golden) cups and cutlery, clothes in general, and women’s attire and the cut and fabric of dresses in particular. Moreover, significant details concerning the appearance of Henry VIII, Thomas More, or Anne Boleyn conform to well-known paintings, which may help readers to form vivid mental images of the characters. In addition to immediacy and vivid images, the quote provided above, with its short sentences and focus on Cromwell’s subjective impressions, illustrates a characteristic of seemingly ‘life-like’ and engaging narratives: The use of implicatures and ambivalences that leaves room for the reader’s own imagina‐ tion. Empirical studies have demonstrated that a mode of writing that relies on implicitness and suggestiveness allows readers to make their own inferences about the events and the characters’ feelings. This in turn evokes the impression 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 204 Vera Nünning 14 For different interpretations of the function of Cromwell as filter - or the mode of narration as interior monologue - see Brosch 2017: 175f.; Johnston 2017: 543f. 15 See also the description of the novel’s first encounter between Cromwell and his wife Liz: “‘Forget where you lived? ’ He sighs. ‘How was Yorkshire? ’ He shrugs. ‘The cardinal? ’ He nods” (Wolf Hall: 34). that readers can comprehend the characters in a more than just superficial manner and relate to them on a more intimate basis (see Bortolussi and Dixon 2003: 93-95). 14 The description of “a room in motion”, “food, wine, fire”, for instance, offers enough details to enable readers to project their own idea of a bustling atmosphere with a blazing fire providing warmth and light, as well as their own preferences with regard to food and wine onto the scene. There is enough information to visualise an enticing place that contrasts to the wet, cold, and dark evening outside, but the filling in of details about the room and food is left to the reader’s imagination. 15 This mode of presentation even pertains to the character of Cromwell. As Marion Gymnich notes, despite the use of Cromwell as psychological filter, “he remains a somewhat enigmatic character throughout both novels” (2018: 77; see also Gebauer 2021: 163). Readers have to supply themselves with what exactly Cromwell feels when he takes part in these vivid and often dramatic scenes - and they are likely to supply thoughts and emotions that feel plausible and life-like to themselves. In a realist historical novel like Wolf Hall the degree of suspense, which is also among the features fostering persuasiveness, should be quite low. After all, readers versed in history will know what happens to Cromwell and the other characters, and even those who do not know any details may expect that the hero will stay alive and well till the end of the trilogy. In spite of this, there is a surprising degree of uncertainty as far as the fate of the protagonist is concerned. The relentless focus on the present tense and the lack of narratorial comments and prolepses keep the reader in the dark - at least as far as many arcs of suspense are concerned. There is an atmosphere of threat and intrigue, especially with regard to Cromwell’s relationships with the other courtiers, who would gladly be rid of him (see also Knox 2015: 137). Moreover, Cromwell has to fear for his family’s safety; the death of his wife Liz and two daughters show that he is vulnerable. The underlying feeling of insecurity, which keeps up suspense and engages readers’ emotions, can also be witnessed in the conversation between Cromwell and Wolsey quoted above, when Cromwell states that “[t]he people up there say they are going to kill me” (Wolf Hall: 21). Evidently, there are people who would rather see him dead - even though the reader is kept in the dark about who wishes him ill, and why this should be the case. Readers are left in uncertainty, with a vague sense of unspecified threat. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 205 In addition, the novel features narrative techniques that serve to enhance readers’ sympathy for and empathy with the protagonist. Among these features are strategies that evoke a sense of victimisation of the hero. Though the threat in fact emanated - if one believes the historians quoted above - from Cromwell rather than from those who had to deal with this ‘bully’, the novel evokes a different impression through its striking beginning: ‘So now get up! ’ Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; […] his eyes are turned towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, might kill him now. (Wolf Hall: 3) The victim of these continuing acts of violence turns out to be Cromwell, who is abused by his father, and has good reasons to fear for his life. At this stage, Cromwell is still a child, who is at the mercy of his callous father, and readers experience the brutality and the threat posed by his father through Thomas’ thoughts and feelings. His father, Walter, is upset solely because he has “[b]urst my boot, kicking your head” (Wolf Hall: 4), while Thomas’ only aim is to get out of the situation. By the time Thomas loses consciousness, the reader has been provided with ample reason to take his side and feel with him. Such a scene generates ‘situational empathy’, i.e. placing a character in a precarious position, which is one of the most important means of directing the audience’s sympathy, since it reinforces readers’ interest in the fate of the characters by creating a situation of potential harm (see Hogan 2003: 81, 140; Gerrig 1993: 80). Scenes like the well-executed first one present a further strategy that should evoke the empathy and sympathy of readers: They show the character as the victim of cruel, unfair punishments (see Nünning 2012: 96). The feelings of readers are likely to be rather pronounced since the victim is an innocent child who cannot defend himself, and since corporeal punishment (let alone a beating that threatens the child’s life) is now disapproved of in Western countries. The cruelty and neglect the protagonist suffers during his childhood is mentioned several times. One of his very rare childhood memories shows the degree to which he was victimised: “Beth throws something at him. He dodges. It’s always the excuse for breakages, in that house: I threw it at Thomas” (Wolf Hall: 332). Though this might imply that he was a wilful and exasperating boy, Cromwell is shown as someone who habitually suffers from the cruelty of others. The fact that he has an unpromising start in life and had to work hard for his later success probably makes it easier for readers to sympathise with him (see also Dimpel 2011: 95, 166). Moreover, in the context of the novel, Cromwell’s childhood is presented as a “psychological explanation for Cromwell’s personality” (Arias 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 206 Vera Nünning 16 The historical Cromwell was surrounded by servants and others who were below him in rank and therefore had to defer to him. However, such interactions are only rarely described in the novel. Johnston also stresses that Cromwell “is denigrated as a social climber and never permitted to forget his lowly origins” (2017: 540). 2014: 25). Even though he may act in untoward ways occasionally, this can be explained by his sufferings during his childhood. It is difficult to criticise someone who had such negative experiences as a child, and who still manages to grow up to be an accomplished, tender, and humane man. The novel thus abounds with scenes generating ‘situational empathy’ for Cromwell. The positive impression of Cromwell is enhanced by showing the wounded young protagonist leaving England rather than endanger his sister, who wants to care for him. That young Thomas tries to save his siblings from the retributions of the violent father demonstrates his kindness and altruism, which prevails even in situations of utmost danger. This already highlights another characteristic of the protagonist that is conducive to fostering readers’ sympa‐ thy: Engaging and sympathetic characters should show their basic benevolence and good-will, for instance by performing one or two remarkable kind actions (see Snyder 2005: 120-23). Even before the main story of the events that take place 27 years later begins, Cromwell is established as a humane, brave, and likeable hero. The configuration of the characters and the presentation of scenes staging conflicts in which the protagonist has no chance to achieve their goals can also engage readers’ emotions by appealing to their sense of justice and pity (see Nünning 2012: 96f.). In Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell is often placed in such situations. Again and again it is brought home to readers that Cromwell is looked down upon and discriminated against. Nearly all the other characters he meets during his work think themselves superior to him and despise him because of his low rank. This motif is introduced at the beginning of the second chapter, when Cromwell is back again in England, 27 years later, and meets Stephen Gardiner, who talks to him accusingly and “unpleasantly”, and, according to Cromwell, “sings always on one note. Your reprobate father. Your low birth” (Wolf Hall: 17). As Cromwell knows well, this belief of Gardiner is shared by the majority of those whom the protagonist works with - or, to be more precise, those whom he is shown to work with. 16 Even the young aristocrats whom he helps to get out of prison do not hide their contempt of him, and a young boy of thirteen patronisingly and condescendingly refers to Cromwell’s knowledge and abilities, stating that “in men of base degree we often see high gifts of nature” (Wolf Hall: 400). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 207 17 Renate Brosch also notes that Cromwell is attributed characteristics that we admire today, and that he is ‘sympathetic’ (see 2018: 61, 60). José Prieto-Arranz emphasises that Cromwell invites readers’ sympathy because he acts as a focaliser, and because of his pragmatism and his actions (see 2022: 155f., 158, 164). 18 See Fitzherbert for an explication of “Cromwell’s modern sympathies - believing in nurture over nature, loving over burning, learning over prayer” (2015). Leigh Wilson asserts that Cromwell’s mind seems real as well as familiar and sympathetic to modern readers. Johnston (see 2017: 539-41) also notes a number of characteristics that make readers like Cromwell, who is in these respects “remarkably alone in the two novels’ fictional universe” (Wilson 2015: 157, 163). This kind of contempt and discrimination probably prevailed in the sixteenth century, but it is likely to strike modern readers as unfair. It is even more likely that readers take Cromwell’s part against the other characters, because the protagonist is much more talented and knowledgeable than those who despise him: He is repeatedly said to speak several modern languages, and he taught himself Latin and Greek as well. He also knows the New Testament by heart, in Latin, and “he can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury” (Wolf Hall: 31). Moreover, he knows how to cure dogs, keep accounts, and manage parliament. Seen in the light of modern hierarchies of value, the fictional Cromwell is a gifted and competent man, and far superior to those who act as his ‘betters’ and cause him trouble. Just because he is the son of his ‘low-born’, reprobate, and cruel father is, nowadays, no acceptable reason for despising him; it rather invites readers’ sympathy. 17 Apart from general benevolence and goodwill, Cromwell’s position as an outsider who differs from others because he holds some key twenty-first century beliefs is likely to appeal to contemporary readers. In Wolf Hall, Cromwell is arguably presented as a ‘likeable’ hero for modern readers, because he holds a number of beliefs that are nowadays widely shared, but which, in the sixteenth century, were unusual and suspect. The “modern sympathies” (Fitzherbert 2015: n.pag.) 18 of Cromwell have been noted by several critics. Those ‘modern’ features include his social (and geographical) mobility and his attitude towards his family, particularly his daughters. Instead of being a strict and authoritarian father, he is a sensitive family man, tender and kind even to his daughters, especially to Anne, “a tough little girl” (Wolf Hall: 82) whom he allows to learn Latin and Greek. Even though his son Gregory disappoints him as a scholar, he is unfailingly supportive and kind to him. Gathering “children, wards, protégés, close relatives and friends around him” (Arias 2014: 26), Cromwell is a caring and unlikely pater familias, always trying to do the best for everybody, disregarding conventional methods of education. When someone remarks that, formerly, his children “would have been knocked round the head till [they] bled from the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 208 Vera Nünning 19 Gebauer also notes that Cromwell is a ‘likeable’ character with whom readers can empathise (see 2021: 164). ears”, Cromwell calmly remarks “[t]hen we live in happy times”, even though the Cambridge scholar Thomas Cranmer is present and asks incredulously: “The children are not whipped? ” (Wolf Hall: 251). Apart from his attitude towards his extended family and friends, Cromwell shows other modern features such as a dislike of torture and of self-flagellation, not only because of the ensuing pain (in itself an anachronistic attitude), but also because of the fact that workers have to create these instruments. What is more, “[h]e thinks, also, that people ought to be found better jobs” (Wolf Hall: 87). Perhaps most tellingly, he has enlightened views about women, whom he takes seriously and who often confide in him (see also Gymnich 2018: 78). This almost proto-feminist appreciation of women stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of the people at court. The Duke of Norfolk, for example, proclaims: “‘What’s the use of talking to women? ’ [Norfolk] asks earnestly. ‘Cromwell, you don’t talk to women, do you? I mean, what would be the topic? What would you find to say? ’” (Wolf Hall: 509). Several other features invite readers to empathise with Cromwell, to adopt his opinions and think well of him. Though the protagonist only rarely expresses his emotions, readers can identify with the situation he is in, which leaves a lot of space for them to infer what they themselves would feel in such a case, which again makes the protagonist more life-like and likeable. Moreover, Cromwell is kind to animals, saving the life of a little cat (see Wolf Hall: 188), rescuing dogs, and even expertly saving the eyesight of “the favourite bitch” of another character (Wolf Hall: 221, 223). In addition, his family and numerous friends and dependents reinforce this favourable view of Cromwell. The characters in the novel can be divided into two groups: Those who know him intimately and think well of him, and those who only know him on a superficial basis and vilify him. It is made amply clear which attitude readers should adopt, since Cromwell’s critics are discredited by the fact that they are haughty and self-serving. Mantel therefore uses the old device of heightening the credibility and likeability of the hero by having him criticised by ‘bad’ characters, and praised by ‘good’ ones (see Nünning 2012: 95; Staves 2006: 186). 19 In conjunction with other features, the use of Cromwell as the most important focaliser, whose point of view dominates the story, his saving dogs as well as cats, his victimisation and the unfair prejudices against him, the casting of Cromwell as a ‘modern man’ out of tune with his time - all of these enhance the likelihood that readers will empathise and perhaps even identify with him. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 209 There are many situations that should appeal to the readers’ sense of pity and justice, and can serve to evoke sympathy for the protagonist, who attempts to be kind to animals and humans alike, even doing his best to try and prevent harm to those who do not accept him as an equal. A whole battery of fictional devices is thus directed at convincing readers that Cromwell ‘really’ is a good man, undeservedly maligned in many history books. 5 Narrative Conventions Geared towards Revising the Historical Image of Thomas Cromwell While the narrative conventions discussed above are geared towards heighten‐ ing readers’ degree of immersion and fostering their emotional engagement with and sympathy for the protagonist, the novel also contains devices prompting readers to change their beliefs about Cromwell. The novel features a few strategies that can reshape our understanding of the hero, who is presented not as a self-serving upstart, but rather as an honest and loyal man unjustly discriminated against in an obsolete system of rigid social ranks. The overall mode of attempting to change readers’ beliefs through narrative strategies and conventions used in Mantel’s novel can be subsumed under a process that Ellen Peel has called ‘belief bridging’. In some ideologically informed works, well-known, commonly accepted facts or values that are shared by readers are used to establish a common ground that can then be expanded strategically, and gradually broadened in order to include new attitudes (see Peel 2002: 16-47, particularly 36-42). Historical novels, which by definition deal with historical persons and events that happened in the past, can profit from this process: Readers know (or are supposed to know) a few facts about the history of the period in question, and these facts can then be further enriched, elaborated, stretched, and twisted in a process of belief bridging that collapses only when readers detect details which they think are counterfactual or contradict one another. Mantel’s treatment of Cromwell’s outward appearance can serve as an exam‐ ple of the way in which the narrative proceeds from historical facts, which are then either questioned or re-evaluated. Readers might have seen Hans Holbein’s portrait of Cromwell (1532-33), in which he looks rather sinister, dressed in black, against a dark background. This dark image does not seem to be far off the mark, since it is difficult to find sources that describe Cromwell’s countenance as open, friendly, or in any way attractive. There are no overt favourable comments on his appearance in the novel either, and the traditional image seems to be confirmed when a character says that he looks like a murderer (see Wolf Hall: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 210 Vera Nünning 20 Prieto-Arranz interprets this deletion of negative facts about Cromwell as a clue to Cromwell’s and the narrator’s unreliability (see 2022: 161f.). 199, 225). Thus, the novel establishes a common ground by affirming established opinions. Later it becomes clear, however, that this unflattering and critical view of Cromwell stems from someone who is discredited by his own actions: Mark Smeaton, who will later play a dishonourable part in the trial and execution of Anne Boleyn, apparently lying in order to be saved from torture. Cromwell is therefore criticised by someone with a bad reputation, someone who will spread lies, “a silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn” (Wolf Hall: 527) who does not really know Cromwell. Those who know Cromwell better, the women living in his house, voice a different opinion, saying that Holbein’s sinister portrait is unlike him, partly because he is not smiling in the painting (see Wolf Hall: 526). A second device geared at changing the traditional image of Cromwell consists of the deletion or at least toning down of his misdeeds. Again, there is no sudden and disturbing deviation from historical knowledge. Instead, there are quite a number of allusions to the protagonist’s misbehaviour and even cruelty. However, none of these objectionable deeds are presented vividly in a scenic description; they are not even spelt out. Rather, there are brief hints only, all of which concern the past, such as his wild behaviour as a youth. Cromwell admits, for instance, to have been an “unruly child” (Wolf Hall: 248), 20 but readers who have seen how he was mistreated by his father can hardly find fault with that. Moreover, his admission shows self-irony - “[p]irates would have given me back” (ibid.) - and it is difficult to match with the experiences of readers who have witnessed how kind he was to his sister, when he, in spite of his injuries, left the country in order to secure her well-being. The process of toning down and re-evaluating damning facts also pertains to the presentation of an alleged murder that Cromwell committed while he was in Italy. Even this killing is given a spin which reflects favourably on the protagonist. The topic is introduced in an oblique way after Cromwell instinctively ducks away from a movement which, in the shadows, appeared threatening. This brief moment of fear leads to remembrances, when Cromwell recalls that he “didn’t see his assassin, but he saw his shadow move” (Wolf Hall: 72), twenty years ago, in a dark street in Italy. What exactly happened remains vague. Moreover, the killing is justified in several ways. Cromwell’s reaction is shown to be instinctive, it is a response to a threat, and presented as a case of preventing a murder rather than committing one. Even more to the point, it is introduced as a scene in which Cromwell acts like a traumatised victim, instinctively moving away from a menace. This impression that it is 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 211 really Cromwell who has been wronged and who just barely managed to stay alive is heightened by the use of language: The “assassin”, the one who is guilty, is not Cromwell but the man who is killed, whom the cardinal later on refers to as “[t]his dirty fellow who attacked you” (Wolf Hall: 73). This story also highlights a constant feature of the depiction of Cromwell’s behaviour, which serves to shift the responsibility for his misdeeds on to others: He is presented as reacting to circumstances, and to the orders of his masters (the cardinal and later Henry VIII), whom he serves with unwavering loyalty. When he is at court, he is not presented as a powerful agent, as the only one who is able to manage parliament, but rather as someone receiving orders, an outsider who will have to do the dirty work. Thus, he remembers that it was Henry’s idea to plunder the monasteries and chisel “the sapphire eyes out of saints”, while Cromwell only wishes that Henry does not appear as the “poor man of Europe” (Wolf Hall: 533). The protagonist is shown to intend to prevent harm, while the king is portrayed as ruthless and greedy. This becomes more explicit when Cromwell reflects on the king’s future actions. His “guess is, the clergy own a third of England. One day soon, Henry will ask him how the Crown can own it instead” (ibid.). Cromwell’s role in the dissolution of the monasteries is not denied, but it is shown to be Henry’s responsibility. Though the fictional Cromwell may have influenced the King’s plans, his intentions are depicted as noble. The re-evaluation of the contrast between Thomas More and Thomas Crom‐ well, which has been noted by many scholars (see e.g. De Groot 2016: 24), is another means of revising the image of the protagonist. Hilary Mantel recognised the importance of this constellation of the characters right at the beginning: “when I began to explore the contest between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More […] I realised I was writing the climax of a novel, not merely another chapter” (Mantel 2012: n.pag.). Though the good features of the hero are often highlighted by contrasting them with the negative characteristics of the villain, Mantel does so in a most unusual way, by keeping the contrast between the two well-known historical persons intact, but giving it a different valence. She puts More, who is commonly remembered as a conscientious, brave, ascetic scholar, into the position of the villain. On the one hand, the novel foregrounds the similarities between the two men, both of whom are well educated, highly capable, sincere, and called Thomas, with the pronouns “he/ him” often used in a way emphasising that the behaviour, words, or attitudes attributed to “him” could refer to either More or Cromwell. On the other hand, crucial contrasts are established right from the beginning, when Cromwell, as a mere kitchen 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 212 Vera Nünning 21 See Wolf Hall: 113f. Though this appears to be a neutral encounter, the contrast between the privileged young scholar and Cromwell is made clear. boy, first meets More, who is a (pampered) promising young scholar. 21 Other differences pertain to their private lives, where More is shown to be arrogant and cruel towards his wife, family, and his servants (see Wolf Hall: 229-33) by having a poor young servant boy whipped brutally twice merely because he was caught reading the Bible in English, while Cromwell’s affective ties to his wife, his family, and dependents are stressed throughout. In Wolf Hall, even Cromwell’s role in the execution of More is re-evaluated in a way that demonstrates the good qualities of the hero. In an interesting twist, it is More who is characterised as hypocritical, duplicitous, and aggressive, thus taking over the role that history books usually assign to Cromwell, while Cromwell appears to be humble, passive, and kind. Even the positive image that the renowned Erasmus of Rotterdam has of More is turned on his head. The contrast between Erasmus’ views and the fictional reality is highlighted by Cromwell’s musings after listening to a particularly aggressive outburst of insults by More: “‘Perhaps your faith is for purchase. You would serve the Sultan if the price was right.’ Erasmus says, did nature ever create anything kinder, sweeter or more harmonious than the character of Thomas More? ” (Wolf Hall: 352) The reader sees that Erasmus could not have been more wrong, while Cromwell reacts in a meek and humble way: “He is silent” (ibid.). While the narrative conventions discussed above can be found in any subgenre of the novel, historical fiction often employs additional means of achieving ‘perceived realism’ by stressing the truthfulness of the account. Wolf Hall is no exception to this rule. After the table of contents, there is a “Cast of Characters”, a feature usually found in plays. A brief glance at the list, however, shows that it consists entirely of the names of people that can be traced in historical records (see Fletcher 2017: 40). In addition, a genealogical table of the Tudors and the Yorkist claimants to the throne evokes the impression of historical authenticity - though it remains a mystery as to how far this table could in any way help to better understand the book. For readers not well versed in the Tudor period, it may be helpful to briefly characterise the status and roles of, for instance, Wolsey, Gardiner, or Smeaton, who are all introduced without any information about their profession or position; but the genealogical tables of the houses of Tudor and York do not provide any information essential for the plot. Perhaps even more telling, however, are the author’s note and the acknowl‐ edgements at the end of the book. Here, Mantel admits that she followed a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 213 common practice in history books and adjusted the dates of the New Year, which at the time began on 25 March, to our contemporary date of 1 January. The highlighting of such a small tinkering with the sources demonstrates the conscientiousness of the novelist and enhances the impression that the story is true; it suggests that the author took great pains to attend to any and every minor detail which might detract from the factual accuracy of the book. In addition, Mantel affirms that a historian, Dr Robertson, to whom the novel is dedicated, approves of the image of Cromwell presented in her novel. Both primacy and recency effects therefore emphasise that readers have every right to expect a novel which truthfully depicts the years between 1527 and 1535. Moreover, Mantel stressed in interviews and lectures that thorough and serious research is a necessary part of the business of historical novelists. Facts and the complexity of history have to be honoured, she claims, declaring that she never “ever falsif[ied] a date or a place or any item of information” (Attar 2014: n.pag.): “My guarantee to the reader”, she affirms with regard to the story of Cromwell, is that “it could be true” (Wolf Hall: n.pag.). 6 Conclusion: New Trajectories of Research In Wolf Hall, there is a whole array of narrative techniques heightening the persuasiveness of the novel and turning readers’ image of Cromwell upside down; everything is geared towards evoking the impression that her story is realistic, and certainly better than the one propagated by historians such as Simon Schama or David Starkey. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, that despite the inaccuracies and the “liberties with history” which, according to Michael Hirst (qtd. in Bordo 2012: n.pag.), characterise Mantel’s fiction, the novel is praised by readers as providing an authentic portrait of the protagonist and his contemporaries: “everyone says ‘what insights it brings to the Tudors’” (Bordo 2012: n.pag.). Though Mantel’s masterly use of narrative conventions, and the hype ac‐ companying the publication of Wolf Hall are certainly exceptional, there are multitudes of novels providing an immersive reading experience for a broad audience. Such novels can change readers’ beliefs not only about the way the human mind works, but also about a broad range of facts concerning the real world. Historical fiction is special in that it can be a perfect means of teaching history. The persuasiveness of these novels works both ways, however, since they can also convince a large audience to adopt a seriously distorted image of the historical reality. Historian Simon Schama thinks that this happened to the readers of Mantel’s novel: “It grates a bit to accept that millions now think 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 214 Vera Nünning 22 However, Borman insists that it would be anachronistic to separate the private from the public Cromwell. But Mantel’s creation of a new image of Cromwell as a private man makes it possible to join the two sides of the King’s loyal servant. It is thus possible that Mantel’s novels will influence the historiographical understanding of Cromwell. of Thomas Cromwell as a much-maligned, misunderstood pragmatist from the school of hard knocks who got precious little thanks for doing Henry VIII’s dirty work” (2015: n.pag.). Apparently, Hilary Mantel was aware of the persuasive potential of literary fiction: “Mantel knows, too, as she told me, that ‘fiction is commonly more persuasive than history texts’” (Bordo 2012: n.pag.). At least in one sense, Mantel turned out to be right. Not only were numerous readers persuaded by her narrative of the life of Cromwell, the novels also induced a number of historians to thoroughly analyse the records about Cromwell’s life once again, and publish biographies of him. However, it cannot be decided as yet whether these biographies will change the historiographical image of Cromwell. As the historian David Loades, one of the biographers in favour of Mantel’s works, remarks, Mantel’s novels Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies “are essentially concerned with his private life, about which the authentic record is usually and infuriatingly silent” (2013: 288). In her biography of Cromwell inspired by Mantel’s novels, the renowned historian Tracy Borman takes a different view. She pieced together details “found in the many letters, notes and accounts that were seized upon his arrest”, which add up to “a fascinating and very personal portrayal” of the King’s servant (2014: 1). According to Borman, Mantel’s depiction of the private Cromwell as a sympathetic hero is correct, and she seems to think it is very persuasive, too: “It is a portrayal that, though fictional, is based on meticulous historical research and is all the more compelling as a result“ (ibid.: 391). 22 Thus, although the jury is still out on the subject, the recognition of the persuasiveness of fictional stories opens up new directions of research. Two fields of research concern narrative conventions and categories of analysis. First, on a more abstract level we need more research into the literary conventions that heighten the persuasiveness of stories, and more research on the broad range of narrative strategies that engage readers’ emotions and tend to bypass their critical understanding. What has been suggested here provides a basis, but it is anything but extensive or encompassing. We need a deeper knowledge of the strategies that can persuade readers, and on the seemingly infinite combinations of such techniques. Secondly, we need interpretations of the persuasive potential of a broad range of literary works. This is necessary in order to explore how narrative conventions are combined, and how they impact one another. It is also necessary 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 215 in order to add to and refine the categories that have been established so far. In addition, it is desirable to analyse whether some genres tend to employ specific narrative strategies while ignoring others. Moreover, we need research into the historical and cultural variability of narrative conventions prompting immersive reading, fostering ‘perceived realism’, and engaging readers’ emotions. Another trajectory of research concerns the communication of knowledge about the persuasiveness of fiction to a broader audience. Given the persuasive function that literary fictions can fulfil, the ability to assess the degree of persua‐ siveness of narratives and to identify the beliefs and attitudes disseminated by fictions is of cultural importance. In a world replete with stories, it is crucial to be aware of narratives’ possible impact in order to deal with them in a responsible way. Parents, students, and teachers should be able to assess and cope with the fictional stories that they read, recommend, or teach. Such knowledge would, for instance, help facilitate the debates in parent-teacher meetings in the U.S., where one finds failures of understanding with regard to books that should be discussed in class. For literary scholars, the first step in that direction consists of the identifica‐ tion of novels that are likely to be particularly persuasive. This includes popular novels that are often neglected in literary studies. It is essential to establish the exact beliefs that are embedded in such works, to analyse whether they are likely to foster proor anti-social attitudes and beliefs, and to explore whether they disseminate facts or fake facts. I hasten to add that this research agenda does not aim at excluding or disregarding texts that convey incorrect beliefs or anti-social attitudes. On the contrary, it is at least as important to identify and analyse those potentially harmful works that can broaden the gaps and increase the hatred between different social groups, in order to become aware of the possible impact that they have. Moreover, we should differentiate between the potential factual and ethical impact of fictions. The portrait of Cromwell in Wolf Hall is very probably factually inaccurate, and, read in school, one should point out the ways in which it is likely to deviate from the ruthless behaviour of the historical Cromwell. Nonetheless, Mantel’s book is, read as a novel, likely to foster pro-social attitudes such as kindness to human beings as well as animals, supportive behaviour even towards people who are unkind and inefficient, loyalty towards one’s friends, and the belief that girls can be just as intelligent and should study the same subjects as boys. On the basis of such knowledge about the potential impact of literary fictions one can responsibly decide which books one wants to recommend to one’s friends or children, or what should be mentioned in discussions in class. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 216 Vera Nünning Obviously, the consequence cannot be to ‘ban’ a marvellous novel like Mantel’s Wolf Hall from the classroom because it disseminates a factually incorrect image of Cromwell. But teaching such a novel should be based on an analysis of the persuasiveness of the novel and a discussion of the ways in which they can prompt readers to change their minds - for better or for worse. Since most people believe that they are immune to the persuasive potential of fiction, it would be advantageous to raise an awareness of the persuasiveness of fictional stories and of the consequences of an immersive reading experience. This insight may entail the cognitive effort to scrutinise and reflect on what one has read, but it could also heighten a critical competence that, in times of fake news and conspiracy theories, is in high demand. In addition, research into the persuasiveness of fiction can back up claims concerning the use of novels at school and in university. Though usually held to be harmless in Western societies, fictions can and do change some readers’ minds. As Dan Johnson and his colleagues confirm, the results of their experiments “suggest a broader implementation of novels in history, social studies, and other areas in which other cultures are explored” ( Johnson et al. 2013: 594). In a similar vein, David Lewis and colleagues claim that novels such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane can serve as a “Source of Authoritative Knowledge” (Lewis et al. 2008: 198-216), since they can convey a better understanding of the facts of the lives of immigrants in London than sociological books and articles. Though in Germany, the reading of literary stories is decreasing even in classes teaching English, there are in fact good reasons for reading novels for better understanding big social topics such as migration experiences, racism, sexism, or homophobia. 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Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.-144-159. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 Where Literary Studies and Psychology Could and Should Meet 221 WONDEREYES. (2010) Fascinating but… Amazon.co.uk. Available at: www.amazon .co.uk/ gp/ customer-reviews/ R3CBGZDRR6MKFL/ ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl? ie=UT F8&ASIN=0007230206 (Accessed: 30 November 2016). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0009 222 Vera Nünning Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction Establishing Cognitive and Affective Balance in Contemporary Sick-Lit Deborah de Muijnck 1 Introduction Grounded in a postclassical narratological framework and combining cognitive and rhetorical narratology with a medical humanities approach, this chapter highlights the promising potential for future research about the healing as well as the salutogenic value of literature. It explores ways in which fictional characters and readers alike benefit from relativisation strategies and points to future possible, empirical studies with real flesh-and-blood readers. This contribution therefore situates itself in the larger context of the growing field of the medical humanities, in which scholars from varying research areas combine their methods and insights to increase the life quality of patients and of (normatively) healthy audiences alike. The benefits of narrative for mental health and society’s awareness thereof are not limited to the narrativisation of mental distress in therapeutic contexts. Rather, as the eudaimonic turn in literary and cultural studies highlights (see Nünning and Nünning 2020), it also concerns the stories which human beings surround themselves with in their personal and professional lives. By examining the cognitive and affective properties of the subgenre of sick-lit (specified below), this contribution highlights the innovative properties of salutogenic approaches toward literature. As a response to the rising popularity of the medical humanities and to the eudaimonic turn in literary studies (see also Heidi Liedke’s contribution to this volume), which both explore the potential of the healing benefits of literature, this contribution addresses how narrative strategies can support human beings cognitively and affectively in the process of establishing emotional balance when exposed to topics that may evoke intense emotional pain. It discusses why teenage readers specifically might value sick-lit narratives for their emotional properties and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 1 These novels were chosen based on their representativeness of the sick-lit genre, as well as due to their wide success among young adult readers. Although The Fault in Our Stars (Green 2012) has received some attention from literary studies, no research has yet been done about either of these novels that highlights their cognitive and affective dynamics. 2 Cis-gender refers to the gender identity that a human being was assigned to at birth (Aultman 2014: 61). 3 For a detailed overview over the history of sick-lit in the twentieth and twenty-first century, see Elman (2012). sketches how concepts such as experientiality and embodiment influence the reading process of YA (young adult) audiences. This contribution engages with current scholarly discussions of the cognitive and affective properties and resulting salutogenic effects of young adult fiction. It examines the textual and readerly dynamics of three particularly successful novels which portray terminally ill female teenagers. In the first part, I introduce the concept as well as some of the forms and functions of narrative relativisation techniques, arguing that both fictional characters and readers apply these stra‐ tegies to re-establish an emotional equilibrium cognitively and affectively when being confronted with highly distressing topics. In the second part, I explore the value of novels popularly referred to as sick-lit for young adult audiences by highlighting their emotion-balancing properties through the concepts of experientiality and embodiment. I analyse three of young adult fiction’s most prominent novels of the past two decades: The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012), Nicola Yoon’s Everything Everything (2015), as well as Five Feet Apart (2019) by Rachael Lippincott, Mikki Daughtry, and Tobias Iaconis. 1 The term sick-lit refers to a subgenre that features (typically cis-female 2 teenage) characters who struggle with physical or mental illnesses, (attempted) suicide, or self-mutilation (see Elman 2014: 94). 3 Instead of presenting a detailed close reading of each novel, this section will highlight the textual and readerly dynamics shared by these narratives to explore their cognitive and affective influence on (young adult) audiences. 2 Sick-Lit and the Rising Awareness of the Salutogenic Potential of Literature in the Twenty-First Century The past two decades have seen globally rising numbers as well as increased acknowledgement of mental health issues, with depression being at the forefront of these damaging developments (WHO 2022: n.pag.). The past years have also seen a rise in popularity of novels and movies that can be categorised as sick-lit and sick-lit cinema. If we regard literature as a mirror of society, the parallels 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 224 Deborah de Muijnck 4 See also Stella Butter’s contribution to this volume on forms of (in)consolability in response to various crises. 5 The boundaries between narratives of illness and disability can be fluid, so that even the attempt to conceptually grasp corresponding phenomena with terms such as illness narrative, deviance narrative, or sick-lit already becomes a starting point for research (Holst et. al. 2016). between both developments may appear logical. However, as will be argued in the following, one should not regard the rising popularity of novels featuring suffering individuals as only a symptom of its time but also as a response to cognitive and affective needs which contemporary readers attempt to satisfy by reading these stories. 4 In this contribution and in line with the eudaimonic turn in literary and cultural studies, I argue that literature may be used to target psychological needs to the point where it might prevent the development of certain illnesses. Salutogenic narrative theory (see Nünning and Nünning 2017; Mittelmark et al. 2017) should therefore be regarded as a highly relevant new direction in the study of literature in the twenty-first century. Despite the contemporary rise of the sick-lit novel, the trope of the dying girl in literature is far from new. Between the early depictions of physically ill childlike figures and the current expression of chronically ill young adolescents, a development has emerged that is shaped by more dynamic ideas of disability, psychological and physical illness, and gender. 5 Characters such as Beth March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) and Milly Theale in Henry James’ Wings of the Dove (1902) were typically portrayed as the angelic and quietly suffering young female. In contrast to previous canonical novels that equally apply the trope of the dying girl, contemporary sick-lit fiction typically figures a first-person narrator, giving the dying protagonist a voice of her own. This way, the intensely personal physical and emotional experience of dying is presented in a taboo-breaking, brutally honest, yet often romanticised manner. The formula in these novels is frequently the following: a terminally ill cis-female teenager meets a (terminally ill or psychologically suffering) teenage cis-boy. Slowly but gradually, the two fall in love and start to explore their romantic feelings. Due to her (or their shared) state, obstacles must be overcome. This tends to culminate in a brief moment of escape from normality, the climax of the story, in which the two protagonists go on a romantic adventure together, before her or their approaching death forces them to return to their everyday, non-normative reality which is dominated by end-of-life care. Topics of intense friendship and close relationship with one’s family are additionally thematised, as the shortened lifespan of the protagonist leads to the usually reciprocal wish to live life in a condensed manner by closely interacting with one’s loved ones. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 225 6 It should be highlighted that I deliberately do not theorise readers’ enjoyment of sick-lit; after all, not all reading is done purely for the joy of it but serves other, equally relevant purposes. However, as will be shown, I argue that momentary reading experiences which convey a sense of joy are necessary for audiences to continue the reading process. The popularity of novels thematising dying teenagers raises a few questions and highlights the necessity to critically reflect on phenomena in (popular) culture and their potential impact on diverse audiences. The fact that these novels have become such a globally successful phenomenon emphasises that there is a wide international readership that wants to engage with these types of stories. Their taboo-breaking topic, I argue, offers promising potential for research particularly in the medical humanities, as well as in cognitive and rhetorical narratology. After all, one might ask: what do people gain from reading stories that portray the perspective of a slowly but gradually dying, young woman? 6 The theoretical approach of this chapter is rooted in postclassical narratology, more specifically in cognitive and rhetorical narratology combined with the medical humanities. According to David Herman, “[p]ostclassical [n]arratology […] contains classical narratology as one of its ‘moments’ but is marked by a profusion of new methodologies and research hypotheses; the result is a host of new perspectives on the forms and functions of narrative itself ” (1999: 2f.). I apply Herman’s definition of cognitive narratology, which he describes as presenting “a focus on the mental states, capacities, and dispositions that provide grounds for - or, conversely, are grounded in - narrative experiences” (Herman 2014: 46). Cognitive literary studies invite scholars to combine more traditional critical approaches with psychological, medical, and anthropological insights and methodologies. This allows for new observations of and inquiries into salutogenic literary studies and the effects of narrative on the human mind, as exemplified in this chapter. The rhetorical theory of narrative emphasises “the recursive relationships between authorial agency, textual phenomena, and reader response, even as it remains open to insights from a range of critical approaches” (Phelan 1996: 2), and hence conveniently pairs with a cognitive narratological inquiry. The medical humanities are an interdisciplinary field of medicine which includes, among a variety of other disciplines, insights from the humanities, social sciences, and the arts (Kirklin 2003). They address questions such as what it means to be human in the context of health/ -care and include narrative as not only expressive but as transformative and therapeutic for those sharing their stories of grief and pain (Woods 2015). Combined with rhetorical narratology’s focus on textual and readerly dynamics, i.e. readers’ cognitive and affective responses to the plot (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012: 6), this chapter explores how fictional characters as well as readers cognitively and affectively 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 226 Deborah de Muijnck cope with the topic of terminal illness by applying narrative-emotion balancing techniques, and how experientiality and embodiment support (specifically YA) readers in deriving value from the addressed types of stories. 3 Strategies of Containment: The Concept of Narrative Relativisation Techniques It is primarily through narratives that we as human beings construct ourselves, and actively change and manipulate our emotional landscape and our cognitive perception of reality. Through purposive communication, narrative allows indi‐ viduals to shape specific versions of circumstances consciously, subconsciously, and unconsciously according to their varying needs across time and space (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012: 3; cf. also Fivush 2012). By combining cognitive and rhetorical narratology within a medical humanities framework, this chap‐ ter introduces the concept of narrative relativisation techniques. These are conceptualised as strategies applied within and through narrative which help individuals purposively shape their cognitive and affective conceptualisations of negative circumstances, hence supporting them to either contain or actively live through intense emotions. This, as will be highlighted in the following, can be achieved by either emphasising positive experiences that have come into existence because of the originally negative event, or by counterbalancing losses connected to the event. They can directly be used as verbalisations, or indirectly as themes and motifs which both influence the interpretation of the negative event. By applying these strategies, human beings may find emotional balance in distressing circumstances, such as experiencing terminal illness themselves, or reading about it through a gradually dying homodiegetic narrator that one empathises with. Emotional balance is here conceptualised as a state in which human beings allow themselves to feel, identify, and accept their emotions without being overwhelmed by them. The concept of narrative relativisation strategies is inspired by narrative techniques of neutralisation, which are rooted in narrative criminology and which are “verbalizations actors use to tell themselves that their actions are not in violation of the norms they are otherwise committed to” (Presser and Sandberg 2015: 6). Through the use of narrative techniques of neutralisation, (autobiographical) storytellers can de‐ crease cognitive dissonance and hence shape the way they perceive themselves and are perceived by others. I argue that emotion-balancing techniques serve a comparable cognitive and affective purpose. It should be highlighted that the negativity of the original event cannot be extinguished by the application of these strategies, neither is the painful 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 227 7 I conceptualise narrative empathy according to Suzanne Keen, whose seminal definition states that narrative empathy is “the sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another’s situation and condition” (Keen 2014: 521). 8 This article applies an anthropocentric conceptualisation of love, although it acknowl‐ edges that human beings can experience deep and tender feelings of affection for animals as well. Since these are, however, not thematised in the analysed novels, the focus remains on the loving relations between romantic partners, family members, and friends. experience itself emotionally neutralised. Rather, relativisation techniques add an additional layer to the perception of the circumstance, hence not simplifying the human experience but making the destructive force of certain events more bearable for both characters in the story and readers who experience narrative empathy. 7 In the following, this chapter discusses some relativisation strategies that are present in the textual and readerly dynamics of The Fault in Our Stars (Green 2012), Everything, Everything (Yoon 2015), and Five Feet Apart (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019). I highlight their forms and functions and furthermore explore why they may help fictional characters and readers alike to come to terms with the topic of dying. As these novels’ main protagonists are all cis-female, this chapter will continue to refer to the protagonist as she/ her. 3.1 Highlighting Positive Experiences Connected to the Negative Event: Romantic Love and Affectionate Relationships The most dominantly applied relativisation technique in the analysed novels is the highlighting of positive experiences that are connected to the negative event. In the analysed YA novels, this is most prominently achieved through the thematisation of (mostly romantic) love and affectionate familial and friendly relationships that the protagonists experience. 8 Hazel Grace Lancaster (in The Fault in Our Stars, 2012), Madeline Whittier (in Everything, Everything, 2015), and Stella Grant (in Five Feet Apart, 2019) all consider themselves, due to their diagnoses of terminal illness, as physically flawed, which leads to varying levels of real and perceived physical and emo‐ tional isolation from their surroundings. Sixteen-year-old Hazel Grace suffers from stage IV thyroid cancer with metastases forming in her lungs, forcing her to constantly carry around an oxygen tank. Likewise, sixteen-year-old Stella Grant, whose lung function is fatally influenced by cystic fibrosis and who requires a lung transplant, requires breathing support from an oxygen tank to survive. Madeline Whittier turns eighteen in the novel and, for most of the story, is diagnosed with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID). Because of this 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 228 Deborah de Muijnck 9 By the end of the novel, we find out that Madeline actually does not suffer from SCID, but was deceived by her mother, a medical professional, all of her life. After losing her husband and son in a car accident, Madeline’s mother forces her daughter to stay inside the protective walls of her house at all times out of fear of losing her as well. Although Madeline relishes her health by the end of the story, she lives as isolated as if she really were suffering from SCID for the majority of the plot. Additionally, she suffers a cardiac arrest due to a multiviral infection after suddenly entering the world with an immune system that is unprepared for the varieties of pathogens that exist. 10 See also John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” (1819), in which he argues that knowledge of our own mortality can intensify the aesthetic perception of beauty. diagnosis she must stay away from all potential allergens and pathogens, which results in her literal isolation from the rest of the world as she is unable to leave her home. 9 The main protagonist’s male love interest is affected by a similar suffering. Augustus Waters (The Fault in Our Stars, 2012), as we later in the novel find out, is dying from osteosarcoma. Five Feet Apart’s male protagonist Will likewise suffers from cystic fibrosis but, due to an additional fatal bacterial infection, is no longer eligible for a lung transplant (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019). Olly, the young man that Madeline in Everything, Everything falls in love with, although physically healthy, isolates himself from the world because of his physically abusive father. Painful circumstances hence drive the character to mirror Madeline’s behaviour, which becomes a contributing factor in their shared process of falling in love (Yoon 2015). Terminal diagnoses impact the protagonists’ physicality and their ability to interact with others. As their everyday lives are dominated by end-of-life care or constant health-monitoring, the possibility of being perceived as attractive does not occur to either of them. Hence, when Hazel Grace, for example, starts to interact with Augustus Waters and slowly falls in love with him (Green 2012: 37ff.), her life, previously dominated by physical pain, is suddenly rendered unexpectedly joyand beautiful. Statements such as “you are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are” (Green 2012: 123) accentuate that, in contrast to Hazel’s self-perception, it is not the cancer that renders her painfully unique, but that Augustus genuinely falls in love with her warm personality. In fact, the analysed novels are not stories of dying, but stories that deal with the intensity of falling in love and loving wholeheartedly despite challenging circumstances. It is this beauty of (momentary) happiness that also invites the dying protagonist to momentarily value her own body, as suggested in the following quote: “The space around us evaporated and for a weird moment I really like my body; this cancer ruined thing I’d spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors” (Green 2012: 203). 10 Although the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 229 11 It is on this holiday that the two share their first sexual encounter. It is also the time when Madeline suffers a cardiac arrest due to a multi-viral infection and, in the context of being treated by doctors other than her mother, is informed that she was previously maldiagnosed with SCID. 12 This chapter conceptualises ‘tellability’ according to Monika Fludernik as ‘what makes a story worth telling’ (Fludernik 2010 [1996]; Ryan 2005; Herman 2014 [2007]). Originally, ‘tellability’ has its roots in the analysis of conversational storytelling (Fludernik 2010 [1996]), but since then has proven itself relevant and applicable to various other forms of storytelling analyses. ability to explore their sexualities is limited due to their illnesses, Hazel, Madeline, and Stella experience intense emotions and sentiments with their counterparts, voiced through statements such as “I will love you forever” (ibid.: 264). The fact that their life-spans are expected to be shorter than the average person’s life expectancy influences the characters’ perception of the singularity of their romantic feelings. Statements such as “we can’t have a lot of things. But we could have this” (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019: 161) and “I believe in true love, you know? I don’t believe that everybody gets to keep their eyes or do not get sick or whatever, but everybody should have true love, and it should last at least as long as your life does” (Green 2012: 75) highlight the singular importance of feeling (and receiving) romantic love. Going through this positive affective experience tends to culminate in a brief but exhilarating adventure in which the young lovers escape from their medical care-dominated existences. Hazel and Augustus travel to Amsterdam to have one last wish fulfilled (Green 2012: 234-288). Olly and Madeline likewise travel to Hawaii to share a life-changing experience together (Yoon 2015: 267-312). 11 Heavily limited in their breathing capacities and hence unable to perform such travels, Stella and Will escape from the hospital to walk through the snow and see the lights of the skyline that Stella has been limited to gazing at from the hospital roof (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019: 220ff.). It is this adventurous journey that presents the climax of the story, before a catastrophe, connected to one or both of the characters’ limited health, forces them to re-enter their medically dominated world and initiates the parting of the characters. At the same time, statements such as “there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honour in dying of” (Green 2012: 217, original emphasis) highlight that the characters (and therefore also the readers) always remain aware of the impending fate of the protagonists. Romantic love is the most dynamic positive experience which drives the plots of the analysed works. It facilitates Hazel’s, Madeline’s, and Stella’s stories’ increased tellability and supports them cognitively and emotionally in finding a reason to not just fight for their futures, but to also enjoy the present moment more intensely. 12 These momentary experiences of pleasure likewise influence the cognitive, affective, and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 230 Deborah de Muijnck aesthetic responses of the audience (see Phelan 2012: 6). Due to the universality of the concept of falling in love, readers’ ability to empathise with the characters increases. At the same time, the general willingness to assume the perspective of the character equally increases, as the story is not only filled with the depiction of suffering, which might evoke the emotional rejection of empathy from readers unwilling to feel the momentary pain, but is equally filled with joyful experiences. These moments of joy increase the potential for finding emotional balance during the reading process despite the negative intensity of the topic of dying. Romantic relationships are not the only intense bonding experiences that are narratively highlighted in sick-lit. In fact, all of the protagonists are presented as emotionally strongly connected to their parents and their friends. While these relationships do not drive the textual dynamics of the narrative, they are still worth mentioning as creating a solid foundation of love. These relationships create a storyworld (see Ryan 2014: 12) in which a closely-knit network of peers and family members support the individual, de-isolating the protagonist despite her suffering and leading to additional experiences of joy for characters and their readership alike. 3.2 The Relativisation of Loss of Time Through Mental Growth These novels also address questions of ‘quality of life versus quantity of time’ and thereby relativise the sense of lost time. The analysed works specifically address the experience of living in a teenage body and knowing that, despite one’s youth, there is only a limited amount of time left. This restricted amount of time actively lived equally restricts the individual’s possibility to develop their unique personality as the adult they could have become, to grow not just physically older but also emotionally wiser. The female protagonists’ thought processes and speech, however, in The Fault in Our Stars (Green 2012), Every‐ thing, Everything (Yoon 2015), and Five Feet Apart (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019) often appear to be more grown up than their physical age would suggest. The conceptual metaphor (see Lakoff and Johnson 2003 [1980]; Richie 2013) of G R O WIN G TH R O U G H P AIN applies to these stories, as the protagonists’ mental development excels the limits of usual teenager development. Due to their physically painful symptoms, tiring experiences of endless hospital stays, exhausting medical trials, and by being forced to confront themselves with their mortality, these female teenagers appear to be ahead their biological age. On the level of readerly dynamics, this relativisation of the perceived loss of lifetime functions as a counterweight to the characters’ young age. Although readers remain aware that the texts deal with the approaching deaths of young 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 231 women, the grown-up presentation of these characters makes the loss appear a little less extreme. On the textual level, this circumstance is not mentioned by either the terminally ill characters themselves, nor by their loved ones. 3.3 Quality versus Quantity of Time: Living Life More Intensely Next to the experience of positive events that are grounded in the original, negative diagnosis, and the relativisation of lost time, the analysed novels present a third relativisation technique which is the relativisation of the loss of future experiences. All of the presented female protagonists, as well as their equally terminally ill counterparts, Augustus (Green 2012) and Will (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019), use what has become known as ‘bucket lists’. These are enumerations of the experiences or achievements each of them hopes to have or accomplish before they die. This list allows characters to regain a sense of control despite having lost the agency over their bodies. By identifying important milestones, aspirations, and hopes, the protagonists collect goals, such as being kissed for the first time (see Green 2012; Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019), or “snorkeling […] off Molokini to spot the Hawaiian state fish - the humuhumunukunukuapuaa” (Yoon 2015: 2) which support them and their audience in creating the perception that the majority of hopes and aspirations the protagonist has or had have been fulfilled. Bucket lists give their writers the opportunity to make life seem more manageable; they summarise aspirations into bite-sized steps that one can accomplish, making it easier to summarise what has been achieved in the past and what can still be done in the future. Although they can only ever be momentary and reflect a person’s wishes and needs at a fixed point in time, these bucket lists do help the protagonists to find answers to the question what makes theirs a good life and hence supports fictional characters and readers to cognitively and affectively counterbalance the topic of dying. Most importantly, the analysed novels ask: What is a good life? Notions of quantity versus quality are challenged, as a long life does not necessarily accumulate more happiness than a life that has been lived for a comparatively shorter amount of time. Characters and readers alike are hence confronted with reflections on what makes life worth living, which may result in a variety of responses. Will, for example, aware that he is no longer eligible for a lung transplant and expecting to die within the next three to five years, states that the “treatment crap is what stops us from being down there and actually living” (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019: 78). Stella retorts “[t]heir treatment crap is what keeps us alive” (ibid.). This interaction highlights fundamental questions of agency, autonomy, and happiness. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 232 Deborah de Muijnck The characters’ developments throughout the plot also highlight that there is no definitive answer to the notion of quality vs. quantity. Stella, for example, who is introduced as a well-structured, rule-abiding individual, is initially adamant about the necessity to live a cautious, risk-averse existence to increase her chances of survival. However, after having fallen in love, she (momentarily) decides to break out of the hospital, which poses a great risk to her lung functions. Stating that she is “tired of living without really living. I’m tired of wanting things” (Lippincott, Daughtry, and Iaconis 2019: 223), the narrative highlights that life is not just equated by heartbeats per minute, but also by what makes the heart beat faster. At the end of the novel, however, both approaches to the question of quality vs. quantity are validated: Will spends the rest of his shorter lifespan travelling with friends and family, hence filling his time left with as many experiences and interactions as possible. Stella, who eventually receives a lung transplant by the end of the story, has increased her chances of survival because of her careful and reserved demeanour. As the story ends with the two (previous) lovers accidentally meeting at an airport, the narrative suggests that no matter whether focused on quality or quantity, the outcome of life will be the same. What readers may take from this narrative is that while there is no general answer to the question ‘What makes a good life? ’, a definitive answer exists for every unique individual based on their own needs and wishes. This knowledge supports characters to come to terms with their fates. It also supports readers in coming to understand that a good life, whether it is defined by agency, autonomy, relationships, health, or other factors, varies from individual to individual. 4 Salutogenesis and the Minds and Bodies of Young Adult Readers This chapter so far has explored the textual and readerly dynamics of narrative relativisation techniques in a subgenre of literature popularly referred to as sick-lit. It will continue the analysis of the cognitive and affective properties of this genre from a salutogenic perspective by discussing how and why young adult readers may benefit from such novels. It begins by applying the concept of experientiality to highlight the benefits of sick-lit. Specifically, it explores the educational and de-isolating value of these novels for specific readers and argues that they offer a space for extremer emotions to readers who want to explore these. I will conclude this exploration of the salutogenic potential of sick-lit with a discussion of embodiment, highlighting the embodied nature of the stories, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 233 and argue why specifically young adults may be drawn to this subgenre of twenty-first century literature. 4.1 Experientiality and the Emotionality of Sick-Lit A memorable quote from John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars states “[p]ain demands to be felt” (2012: 57), and the fates and diagnoses presented in the discussed novels certainly contain potential for considerable amounts of pain. A question that needs to be addressed in the context of literature that deals with/ narrates the suffering of young adults is why it attracts an audience so wide that it turns into a literary phenomenon. To explore this question, one needs to consider the concept of experientiality which, according to Monika Fludernik’s seminal definition, is the “quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience” (Fludernik 1996: 12), and its impact on teenage readers. Experientiality in literature refers to the ways in which “narrative taps into readers’ familiarity with experience through the activation of ‘natural’ cognitive parameters” (Caracciolo 2014: 149; see also Fludernik 2003), and particularly “the embodiment of cognitive faculties, the understanding of intentional action, the perception of temporality, and the emotional evaluation of experience” (ibid.). When readers engage with stories of terminal illness, they relate to the char‐ acters’ painful experiences by activating cognitive structures that are connected to their own past and present suffering. Particularly relevant is therefore the emotional evaluation of experientiality that happens when (young) readers engage with these novels. First empirical studies addressing this question highlight that sick-lit may be “a positive instrument for making adolescents aware of mortality” (Testoni et.al. 2016: 1), and there is a case to be made for the heightened awareness of one’s own body after experiencing a first-person narrator’s struggle for survival. This focus on mortality partially comprises the educational purpose and value of these stories, but does not take into account teenagers’ motivation to read novels such as The Fault in Our Stars (Green 2012). YA fiction can sensitively explore difficult topics that are not targeted by canonical literature. Especially individuals who have been diagnosed with an incurable disease may find inspiration when engaging with stories that address the beauty of life despite physical and/ or emotional suffering. Terminal illness may be a devastatingly isolating experience when in fact, social relations are considered the most important factors for the perception of a good quality of life (cf. Corsano et al. 2006; Helseth and Misvær 2010). By reading stories of characters who face their terminal fate with humour, love, and courage, people who feel isolated due to their own illnesses may temporarily overcome their 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 234 Deborah de Muijnck 13 For detailed discussions of the concepts of identification with literary characters and immersion in storyworlds, see also Jacobs (2015); Dixon and Bortolussi (2016); de Graaf et al. (2016); van Krieken et al. (2017). sense of loneliness by bonding with the protagonist. This sense of identifying with the characters, and being immersed in the positive events that happen despite (or even because of) their diagnoses, may help certain individuals reach a higher level of emotional balance. 13 Due to the broad, international readership of the discussed novels, it is safe to assume that the majority of their audiences are not suffering themselves from terminal illness, nor is it very likely that many of them are accompanying a loved one’s process of dying. As this chapter has argued so far, sick-lit addresses issues that especially young adults may sympathise with, such as the intensity of teenage love, the existential question of ‘What makes a good life? ’, and the development of one’s personality in times of crisis. Through experientiality, narratives create a safe space in which readers may temporarily explore the feelings and realities of others. Through these stories, readers can indulge in extreme emotions and situations which might societally be frowned upon but which readers might have the urge to experience themselves. This certainly does not mean that readers of sick-lit wish to receive a terminal diagnosis, or to watch their loved ones die. But it suggests that there is the need to create a space for highly intense experiences of self-reflection, which are targeted in these novels. After all, going through puberty may be regarded as an (emotionally and physically) challenging experience that triggers existential crises. Stories which address the most existential crisis there is, namely the struggle to survive, paired with questions such as ‘What do I need in my life to be happy? ’ create a narrative that addresses many contemporary young adults’ needs for self-reflection, (romantic and familial) companionship, and the search for one’s changing and developing identity. Through experientiality, YA readers can address certain needs they might be faced with, which consequently supports them in the process of reaching emotional balance. From a salutogenic perspective, this may have a positive effect on their emotional balance and may consequentially reflect in their mental and physical well-being. 4.2 Embodied Experiences of Autonomy Recent approaches of 4E cognition highlight that human thinking does not exclusively happen inside the brain, but is embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended through extra-cranial processes (Rowlands 2010; Carney 2020; Carac‐ ciolo and Kukkonen 2021). Although all four aspects generally show potential 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 235 for a salutogenic approach towards literature, the concept of embodiment is the most relevant for a discussion of young adult readers and the cognitive and affective relativisation dynamics they apply during the reading process. I will therefore briefly sketch the impact of embodied cognition for a young adult readership of sick-lit. The experience of living in a body that is (comparably) rapidly changing can both be positive as well as scary for human beings. Whether somebody enjoys the process of witnessing their body changing and growing up, or feels overwhelmed by this, sometimes even resulting in psychological destabilisation (see Tarazi-Sahab et al. 2021): Puberty comes with a pronounced lack of control over one’s own body. This lack of physical control is furthermore combined with a lack of legal self-determination until having reached judicial adulthood. This makes young adult readers curious cases of individuals right between the mental and emotional properties of children and adults. The experience of puberty, I argue, impacts the way narratives of physical change will be received by an audience that can identify with a pronounced lack of control over one’s physique. Although physical and hormonal changes experienced throughout puberty are certainly in no way comparable to the experience of cancer, cystic fibrosis, or severe combined immunodeficiency, young adult readers might be particularly attracted to stories that deal with losing control over one’s body. A teenage reader, who brings their own embodied experiences of going through puberty to the reading process, might have a different sense of identifying with the protagonist’s lack of control over their body than a fully grown adult might. As their own bodies may at times appear to be acting out, storyworlds in which the protagonist similarly seems to have no agency over her physiological state of being may appear surprisingly close to home. Living in a body that is experiencing changing sensorimotor capacities because of growing up, one could argue, influences the way the immersed reader may position themselves in the storyworld and identify with the sick character. At the same time, as the cultural context of puberty denotes the end of one’s childhood, YA audiences may feel a sense of connection between the protagonist’s departure from life, and their departure from life as they knew it. Typically, the experience of puberty also encompasses first romantic and potentially sexual encounters. Sick-lit, while it targets teenage romance and budding sexuality, does so in a limited capacity that may appeal to certain readers. The analysed novels’ protagonists are restricted in exploring their sexuality and in engaging in sexual activities with their romantic counterpart. Due to their weakened physical states, the protagonists approach sexual activity 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 236 Deborah de Muijnck very carefully, and only after having been emotionally engaged with their partner for a certain amount of time. This approach to getting physically intimate with a partner suggests a didactic purpose, as it strongly contrasts with other medial representations of sexuality in which (grown-up) characters in movies, series, and computer games may engage in casual sexual activities that entail little emotional connection between the parties. Teenagers who are starting to explore their changing bodies and their sexual preferences may, in my reading of these narratives, be more comfortable being immersed in storyworlds in which the characters approach each other slowly, tenderly, and necessarily with caution and heightened respect of the others’ boundaries. These narratives therefore represent a didactic (heteronormative) approach towards exploring one’s sexuality consensually as a teenager and in light of one’s individual conditions. Young adults’ changing bodies as well as their lack of control over these changes make sick-lit stories particularly attractive for YA audiences. They increase the potential for identification with the protagonist, change the em‐ bodied reading process, and offer young people on the verge of exploring their own sexuality a storyworld in which sexual encounters are dominated by romantic feelings and extremely careful physical interactions. Sick-lit hence offers a unique reading experience to those YA readers who feel attracted to these intense, taboo-breaking stories and, from a salutogenic point of view, may support them cognitively and affectively to work through specific emotional states. However, it needs to be highlighted that all narratives written for children and young adults carry moral, didactic, and social responsibility and that stories of dying teenagers cannot, and certainly should not, be generalised and considered suitable for all audiences. 5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have discussed the cognitive and affective properties of textual and readerly dynamics in young adult novels from a salutogenic point of view. More specifically, this chapter has explored how characters and readers alike re-establish an emotional equilibrium when confronted with distressing topics. This emotional equilibrium may either be out of balance because of intratextual circumstances situated on the plot level, which are targeted by narrative relativisation strategies, or because of real-world issues readers are faced with, which may consequently lead them to seek out these types of stories. In order to find emotional balance in (stories that target) the process of dying, a variety of narrative strategies can be applied. Exceptionally positive events, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 237 circumstances, or experiences that are a result of the original, negative state can be narratively highlighted, which in turn result in a positive cognitive and/ or affective response. Another option to counterbalance the painful experience is to relativise the perception of loss. This can either be achieved by highlighting characters’ growth, presenting them as mentally more mature than they are biologically, hence relativising the perceived sense of loss of life-time. The second option that has been detected in the analysed novels is the minimisation of the perceived sense of loss of experiences, emphasising that quantity of time does not mirror quality of life. Furthermore, this chapter has argued for the impact of experientiality on young adult readers, which supports audiences in the emotional evaluation of their own painful experiences in the process of growing up. This contribution has concluded its discussion of cognitive and affective textual and readerly dynamics in sick-lit with an exploration of embodied cognition, which, as was argued here, is specifically relevant for audiences who experience lack of physiological as well as legal control in the process of growing up. Despite the values and the potential of these novels for YA readers, one needs to acknowledge that their taboo-breaking properties and the general trope of the dying girl can also be dangerous for impressionable audiences. Some stories of this subgenre romanticise the process of dying, and especially the creators of novels, movies, and television series that target topics such as self-mutilation and suicide must be constantly aware of the moral and social responsibilities that their works carry. Sick-lit novels can, when depicted responsibly, i.e. with honesty and based on state-of-the-art research, confront the realities of children and young adults with serious mental and physical conditions, thereby serving as starting points for necessary dialogues about mental health and mortality. At the same time, they have the dangerous potential to romanticise death and reckless behaviour that challenges one’s physical and/ or mental health. This chapter has highlighted how readers and characters may narratively, cognitively, and emotionally respond to existing negative states. As already argued by Fludernik (2020), especially the movement towards empirical literary studies highly benefits from cognitive approaches toward literature, as they allow the inclusion of knowledge structures and emotions triggered when actual (flesh-and-blood) readers process and assign meanings to narrative texts. Future studies with actual readers will benefit from focusing on the salutogenic properties of specific types of stories, hence exploring how literature can foster physical and emotional well-being (see Nünning and Nünning 2017). Certain medical conditions, such as high blood pressure, depression, or stress-related cardiovascular or gastric issues might, for example, be forestalled by certain 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 238 Deborah de Muijnck 14 Elena Semino et al.’s pioneering Metaphor Menu for Cancer Patients (2018) serves as an example here of how metaphors as central cognitive tools shape the way human beings speak and think about coming to terms with potentially terminal illness. 15 See also Heidi Liedke’s contribution to this volume. narratives that, quite literally, foster readers’ emotional and thereby also their physical well-being. 14 This contribution has highlighted the innovative potential of the eudaimonic turn 15 in literary and cultural studies by exploring readers’ and characters’ tendency to find emotional balance in and through narrative(s). Salutogenic narrative theory should therefore be regarded as a promising conceptual approach in literary and cultural studies in the twenty-first century. 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London: Corgi Books. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0010 Salutogenesis and Young Adult Fiction 241 More-than-Human Matters of Concern 1 “[…] die in immer kürzerer Zeit einen immer größeren Ertrag erbringen,“ in the German original. 2 Building on new materialist framings of nonhuman agents, I understand planetary agents as any beings, entities, or phenomena that co-shape planetary dynamics. Asking Animal Questions Literary Animal Studies and the Polycrisis Liza Bauer 1 Introduction Cows, pigs, chickens, and countless other animal species shape the planet’s future alongside human societies. So-called livestock animals spur the develop‐ ment of new technologies, such as milking robots or disassembly lines, neces‐ sitate revisions in labour protection laws, and they are integral components of world-defining economic sectors (cf. Blanchette 2020). On a global scale, they consume a third of the grain harvest; on a planetary scale, the ecological footprint of industrial animal agriculture contributes decisively to pushing the Earth’s biophysical systems towards critical tipping points (Rockström et al. 2009; Agudelo et al. 2023; Lenton 2013). Yet despite this intensive involvement of cows, pigs, or chickens in planetary dynamics, many consumers living in industrial societies regard them as mere objects. They can hardly think of, let alone speak about or relate to, ‘livestock’ beyond their utility for humans; in many consumers’ eyes, these animals appear to be mere production machines that “produce ever greater output in ever shorter time” (Nieradzik 2016: 123, my translation). 1 For the sake of profit and to fulfil culinary preferences and needs, the animal industry hides the living individuals ever more effectively by means of advertising and other strategies. Embedded within this exploitative system, fattening pigs, dairy cows, or laying hens can hardly be pictured as actively shaping societies and ecosystems for better or for worse. Yet in view of the objective to keep the planet habitable, working with these central planetary agents seems crucial. 2 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Dystopian or post-apocalyptic visions of Earth’s future are often devoid of farmed animal characters altogether, thus extrapolating on the perhaps logical developments of current food systems. Whereas these texts appear emblematic of the reluctance or even incapability of western consumer cultures to recognise farmed animals as key figures while navigating the polycrisis (Lähde 2023), other science and speculative fiction (sf) texts may contribute to filling these gaps. Sf is renowned for its capacity to imagine alternative worlds and forms of life (McHale 2010: 23); in this contribution, I argue that they may contribute to the urgent recalibration of human-animal relationships towards more animaland planet-friendly variants. If we undergo the thought experiment of a complete withdrawal from all industrial animal processing, pasture and arable lands previously occupied to grow animal feed could give way to biodiverse and carbon-sequestering wetlands and forests. In contrast to the countless chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs kept in battery cages or factory farms, free-range farmed animal herds and individuals could boost biodiversity by dispersing seeds and insects across meadows or by burying fungal spores into the ground. A large-scale study published by Nature calculates the savings of a global vegan utopia by 2050 to be 547 gigatons of carbon dioxide - roughly equivalent to what humanity currently emits into the atmosphere over a period of fifteen years (Hayek et al. 2021: 21). In that highly unlikely future, factory farms would no longer exist, plant-based foods would have become the default, and hardly anyone could afford meat and dairy consumption. A future of this sort seems unthinkable, even though a whole range of animal ethical reasons as well as aspects of more direct human interest, such as, zoonosis control, antibiotic resistance containment, or particulate matter pollution render a recalibration of global food systems away from animal products imperative (cf. Rockström et al. 2020). The vast majority of consumers do not approve of the undignified conditions under which industrially farmed animals live and die and are aware of their detrimental ecological footprint. Nevertheless, in sight of the lack of concrete political interventions and the fact that only 1,52% of Germans declare themselves as following mostly plant-based diets, animal products remain the more profitable or convenient alternative - both for the people producing, as well as consuming animal products (Lohmeier 2024). Applying an animal studies lens to this controversy shifts the perspective: to gain insights into prevailing views on the relationships humans form with ‘livestock’ animals, scholars in this burgeoning field consult the textual forms these animals take in cultural artefacts, including fictional as well as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 246 Liza Bauer 3 The anthropological machine is understood as a cultural technical apparatus with many functioning parts that aim for maintaining the human-animal divide in human societies (Agamben 2004: 37-83). In her work on how literary texts negotiate animal ethics, Vera Zimmermann argues that narratives are capable of “throwing a spanner into the gears of this apparatus” (2021: 11, my translation). 4 More detailed versions of the readings mentioned here can be found in my book Livestock and Literature (2024) and in my contribution on “Reading to Stretch the Imagination” (2022). non-fictional texts, visual artworks, advertisement of animal products, everyday language-use, and many others. Among them, literary animal studies scholars focus on literary texts, arguing that the active challenging of anthropocentric perspectives in fictional storyworlds is among the central potentials of literature to impact discourses on human-animal relationships (see Moe 2016: 135; Bauer 2021c: 207). A central aim of critical readings of farmed animal narratives, as I suggest here, is to evaluate to what extent fictional narratives with pigs, cows, or chickens as protagonists play a role in current debates on sustainable human-animal relationships. In connection to this specific group of animals, I argue that literary texts can contribute to the sociocultural negotiation of culture-specific animal categories, such as ‘food animal,’ ‘livestock,’ or ‘pet,’ - which means that animal texts might have the potential to change these categorisations. In my monograph on the subject, I argue that cultural imagi‐ naries about the relationships between humans and ‘livestock’ are caught up in dead-end streets that deliver little visions beyond violence and exploitation, and that sf texts provide inspiration for alternative pathways (2024: 1-39). Connected to this, I argue that narratives featuring ‘livestock’ as protagonists, close companions to humans, or even social agents in fictional storyworlds can function towards deindustrialising the imagination - “an essential prerequisite and a utopian ideal at the same time,” to counter the imbalance of human-animal relationships that is detrimental to the future of all life on this planet (327). In this contribution, I seek to convey how I imagine this process to work and why this is relevant in twenty-first century discussions on future forms of life. For that aim, I unmask what animal studies scholars term a hidden belief system which substantiates the animal industry and therefore feeds into the controversy that dominates discussions around food systems in the light of animal welfare and planetary challenges. The cultural or social ‘work’ I contend farmed animal narratives to perform emerges from their capacity to unveil and challenge how this belief system operates - a cultural process that scholars describe as the anthropological machine (Agamben 2004). 3 To illustrate how they do so, I provide exemplary glimpses into readings that demonstrate how the aesthetic repertoire of sf potentially widens readers’ animal-sensitive imaginations. 4 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 247 Yet, before I dive into the ambivalent dynamics inherent to the relationships humans form with farmed animals, I introduce the emerging discipline of animal studies in terms of its significance for literary and cultural studies. In the light of this volume, I suggest that the questions literary animal studies scholars investigate and the methods they apply have already shaped the trajectories of their overarching disciplines and will continue doing so. For asking animal questions in literary studies tends to reveal that cultural and literary productions not only reflect critically on current forms of life but may also contribute to generating new ones. These poietic, reality-, and world-making potentials of literature are of crucial relevance today (Nünning 2021: 332). As cultural theorists argue, there are multiple possibilities of how to live or die in the future, which means that it is high time that human cultures learned how to live well (see Berardi 2017: 14; Bieri 2011: 12). Models of living well in multispecies worlds are not compatible with the animal industry’s designation of individual beings as per se killable objects (cf. Haraway 2003: 79-80). If consumer cultures do not come to realise this inconvenient truth out of respect for their more-thanhuman, subjective partners in world-making, then perhaps the detrimental rise in temperatures, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and the ever-growing number of humans to feed will prompt the necessary shift. After all, the so-called polycrisis concerns all animal species, including human ones (Lähde 2023), and the co-dependent relationships human societies sustain to farmed animals constitutes an integral driver of planetary imbalances. To take part in these conversations, literary and cultural studies need to embrace the question of ‘the animal.’ 2 Literary Animal Studies as a Timely Trajectory of Literary and Cultural Studies Animalor human-animal studies scholars are asking this question in nearly all academic disciplines by now, united by a shared interest in the perception, practice, and reconfiguration of human-animal relationships. This often man‐ ifests in their critical unveiling and challenging of exploitative dynamics, but also in more neutral or descriptive engagements with human-animal interactions or mutually beneficial relationship models. Thematically, animal studies scholars may engage with questions on animal rights, politics, com‐ munication, welfare, geography, training, or trafficking, hunting practices, industrial livestock farming, species extinction, horseback-riding, petor zoo keeping, animal-assisted therapy, animal art, interspecies music, postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 248 Liza Bauer 5 Recent and foundational introductions and overviews on the field can be found in Borkfelt and Stephan (2022), Wright and Quinn (2022), Woodward and McHugh (2017), Kompatscher (2019), Marvin and McHugh (2014), Borgards (2015a+b; 2016), Kalof (2017), Ortiz-Robles (2016), Taylor and Twine (2014), Weil (2012), and others, as well as in the many volumes of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Society & Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies, or Tierstudien. 6 All direct and indirect citations from Borgards’s work have been translated by me, except for 2015b, which was originally published in English. 7 Many scholars consider Derrida’s lecture the founding moment of the cultural and literary branches of animal studies; Derrida’s contribution “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2002) consolidates the thoughts voiced in the lecture (Köhring 2015: 260-62). 8 For a more nuanced differentiation between different approaches cultural and literary scholars of animal studies follow, see Roland Borgards’s contribution on “Cultural Animal Studies” (2015a). or feminist questions, and many more. 5 The animal turn describes an increased attention to the ways nonhuman animals co-shape human lives as well as cultural production that can be observed in the humanities since the 1990s (Ritvo 2007; McHugh 2009a: 24). It follows that cultural animal studies scholars, for example, are interested in how human culture and philosophy shape animal lives. For example, they reconstruct how Eurowestern traditions of thought have contributed to the myriad injustices done to other animals, thereby particularly challenging Aristotle’s anthropocentrism, Cartesian du‐ alism, Kantian idealism, or Heidegger’s humanism (Borgards 2015a: 71, 69). 6 The origin of this branch of animal studies can be traced back to the 1970s: during the first wave of ecocriticism, when humanities scholars started to challenge anthropocentric views in the face of environmental threats and the obvious fallibility of human rationality, they disclosed the conceptual space necessary to think seriously about humanity’s alleged ‘others’ (cf. ibid: 73). Within this space, animal studies scholars have applied poststructuralist theory and new materialist thinking as formulated by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway to “mediat[e] between semiotic culturalism on the one hand and factual naturalism on the other,” and to rethink anthropocentric conceptions of agency, subject/ object oppositions, or the nature/ culture binary (Borgards 2015b: 156). Following Derrida’s infamous 1997 lecture at the Cerisy conference and his insight that humans cannot ever know for sure who or what the so-called “animals” 7 are, the literary and cultural branches of animal studies have rapidly spread into many different directions. 8 Literary scholars, in particular, follow the assumption that the way we think, speak, and write about other animals shapes the way we perceive and treat them (see Bauer 2022: 206-209; Kompatscher 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 249 2019). They start from the core premise in cultural studies that any subject to whom humans relate becomes a cultural construct in the process, the ‘animals’ studied are first and foremost cultural animals, understood as materially as well as semiotically constructed (Borgards 2015a: 70). As Roland Borgards illustrates the material-semiotic hybridity of the emerging, textual animals, “[r]eal wolves seem to play a formative role in every literary wolf - a process requiring serious scholarly attention - and every real wolf likewise exhibits traces - equally meriting careful scholarly attention - of their literary counterparts” (2015b: 156). Connected to the question of so-called livestock animals, “[t]he assumption that cows lack intelligence and pigs are unclean, whereas dogs are loyal, find [sic] expression in literary texts, which means that these texts participate in the sociocultural negotiation of these assumptions” (Bauer 2024: 58). Following cultural narratology, the resulting, textual animals contribute to sociocultural processes of meaning-making while becoming parts of narratives, which means that they can indirectly impact the lives of animals beyond the page (cf. Nünning et al. 2010; Gikandi 2012). Therefore, to shed light on how these processes function, literary animal studies scholars 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. A challenge that literary animal studies faces is that, for a long time in the history of literary criticism, animal texts were assumed to have no connection whatsoever to living animals, causing literary scholars to read them through purely anthropocentric-allegorical lenses. The practice of reading animal representations strictly in the light of the human messages they convey treats fictional animal characters as mere metaphors or empty containers to be filled with any meaning human authors and readers desire to write and read into them (McHugh 2009b: 492). Narrative has, after all, been defined as “somebody telling somebody else, on some occasion, and for some purposes, that something happened to someone or something” (Phelan and Rabinowitz 2012: 3). As cultural mediums relying on human language, they have therefore been studied and interpreted in light of what they convey about humans. The result of anthropocentric-allegorical reading practices has caused literary and cultural studies scholars to overlook the full critical or pedagogical potential of some canonical texts featuring animal figures (cf. McHugh 2009b: 487-88). For example, John Drew convincingly argues that the long-standing tradition of reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) strictly as an allegory for a human story “turns a blind eye to the cruelty of agricultural animal containment 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 250 Liza Bauer 9 See also Susan McHugh’s animal reading of Animal Farm (2009a). 10 See, e.g., the work being done in the burgeoning field of plant studies (Stobbe et al. 2022; Middelhoff 2022; Middelhoff and Peselmann 2023). 11 See, e.g., Borgards, Kugler, and Shah’s interdisciplinary work on the entanglement between island narratives and knowledge production in the Pacific (2023) and Jan Rupp’s contribution to this volume. 12 Animal studies scholars differentiate between an inevitable epistemological anthro‐ pocentrism (the human perspective as formulating knowledge) as opposed to an ontological one (the human perspective as the centre of the universe) (Borgards 2015a: 71). and slaughter,” thus missing out on the opportunity to encourage students to question human exceptionalist beliefs after reading Orwell’s classic as a story on the “asymmetrically distribute[d] frailties that confront all animals, human and otherwise,” in times of ecological crises (2022: 197). 9 To work against what German scholars term ‘Tiervergessenheit’ (the forgetting of animals), literary animal studies scholars dedicate themselves to recovering the many disregarded traces other than human animals have left throughout literary history, asking what anthropocentric filters have caused literary and cultural studies to miss while unravelling sociocultural histories (cf. Borgards et al. 2016). As a productive side-effect, this meticulous uncovering reveals that also plants, fungi, mountains, winds, or bodies of water co-constitute cultural imaginations dynamically with human authors, poets, natural scientists, historians, and oth‐ ers. 10 In the face of planetary challenges, investigating these more-than-human processes of meaning-making may help us overcome anthropocentric and binary perceptions on human-planet relationships. 11 Moreover, animal readings can shed light on analytical blind spots of specific toolkits, such as narrative theory, and thus contribute to expanding upon their analytical depth and potentials. As I argue elsewhere, “[t]o uncover literature’s means of challenging an explicit anthropocentrism” - an ontological privileging of the human perspective as exceptional and central to the universe - “animal studies scholars need to reflect critically upon the insurmountable anthropocentric bias of literary narrative and work with it” (2024: 7). 12 According to Borgards, this work can result in a reflective animalisation of the underlying rationales of literary studies (2019: 124ff.). As the fifth and retroactive effect of the animal reading method he has framed, Borgards states that “an animal text can possibly react upon the prerequisites of looking at an animal text” (2019: 124; 2016a: 228-234). He explains that “key terms in literary studies, such as, metaphors, authorship, literarity, figure, narrator/ narrating, writing/ text, fable, autobiography, theatre and so forth” may have to be reconfigured into versions fit for the analysis of animal narratives (2019: 124). Several animal studies 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 251 13 For a more detailed introduction on Herman’s continuum, see my contribution “Reading to Stretch the Imagination” (2022: 110-112). 14 Another example concerns the expanded conception on a material-semiotic animal agency to convey that material and semiotic processes of meaning-making always work hand-in-hand in the changes animal representations enact in fictional storyworlds or beyond (Borgards 2016: 235; McHugh 2009b). Moreover, Frederike Middelhoff has expanded the genre of the literary autobiography into a literary autozoography to engage with fictional self-narratives about nonhuman characters (2020), Susan McHugh has framed the theory of a narrative ethology to engage with potential impacts of animal narratives to readers’ ethical engagement with them (2011: 217); and I have described genetically modified animal characters in sf texts as postanimal figures in my contribution on postanimal narration (2021b). scholars have already contributed to this process by expanding upon specific concepts, genres, or analytical tools. To mention a particularly useful example, David Herman has contributed an invaluable continuum that describes transfers of “human” or “animal” attributes in animal representations in a more nuanced manner than conventional metaphor theory does (2018: 139). 13 In fact, he ‘ani‐ malises’ the study of narrative as a whole by suggesting a bionarratology, where he expands upon a whole range of narratological categories, such as narrative time, space, and scale to engage with representations of the more-than-human (139; 253-58). 14 It is here where animal studies scholarship may directly shape the future trajectories of literary and cultural studies. As global warming, extreme weather events, sea level rise, biodiversity loss, pollution, pandemics, and other chal‐ lenges increasingly push ecological questions to the attention of humanities scholars, animal questions automatically feed into their analyses. The individ‐ uals affected most severely by environmental disasters tend to be the ones who either cannot escape into safety or be informed about looming threats; this applies to many humans and countless other than human beings (see Twine 2024; Borkfelt and Stephan 2022). Therefore, to critically engage with the many dimensions of planetary crises, it is worthwhile to examine human and nonhuman animal living and suffering side-by-side. In Haraway’s words, in learning how “to live and die well” with other earthlings and allow for the possibility of multispecies co-flourishing on a damaged Earth, it matters which stories we tell and how we read them (2016: 101, 12). Therefore, literary and cultural studies need to expand upon their repertoire, so that they become fit for unlocking cultural artefacts produced by and with more-than-human agents. As I show in the following, animal studies can contribute to that expansion. To come back to the nexus between the animal industry, literature, and imagining the future, a literary animal studies lens tackles the issue at its core: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 252 Liza Bauer Instead of engaging with the violent mainstays of the animal industry directly, it examines the sociocultural processes which have brought them into existence in the first place. Direct aims are to generate knowledge on the complex politics and histories of human-animal binaries and violence (cf. Borgards 2015a: 76). Even though predominantly text-based approaches like the one I suggest might seem detached from the practicalities of animal suffering, they can contribute to destabilising, dismantling, and reconfiguring anthropocentric and logocentric thinking - which may be held responsible for many forms of violence against animals of all kinds, including humans (cf. Calarco 2015: 36). In connection to farmed animal narratives, this concerns the ideological bedrock upon which the animal industry is built, and which continuously legitimises its persistence despite all critique. A literary animal studies perspective unveils this bedrock as a socioculturally constructed belief system, held intact by the anthropological machine and prone to sabotage by literary texts. 3 Negotiating Ambivalent Human-Animal Relationships in Literature on Meat Culture The anthropological machine can be understood as the product of a long history of distancing strategies human cultures have developed while constructing their identities in contrast to other animal species. Between humans and domesticated animals, co-dependent relationship dynamics have always been particularly complicated: without their nonhuman providers of essential materials and products, integral contributors to agricultural processes and developments, or comrades in arms on battlefields, human societies would take markedly different shapes today. Throughout their histories of domestication - reaching back 8-12,000 years depending on the respective species - these animals exchanged their freedom of movement for protection from predators and evolved in close proximity to humans. Ideals developed in animal breeding have thus been deeply ingrained into their bodies. To highlight this mutual dependency or co-becoming of humans and other animals, Haraway has introduced the concept of companion species: an alternative to conventional and culturally specific animal categories, such as, wild, endangered, companion, or food animals, which includes all beings who share their lifeworlds with each other, so that they eat, play, work, live, and “die together” (Bauer 2024: 2; Haraway 2007: 14; 2013). Following Haraway’s definition, farmed animals must be companions to humans, as I have argued elsewhere, they are “most poignantly present at our dinner tables” (Bauer 2021a: 302). However, with the industrialisation of animal agriculture and the accompanied sophistication of breeding practices, recognising ‘livestock’ as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 253 subjective beings with whom humans can form relationships not only becomes increasingly difficult, but even undesirable in view of the suffering humans inflict upon them. Novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) document how these companions to humans have been evolving into beings resembling high-per‐ formance machines since the onset of industrial livestock farming. Published in the aftermath of a crucial turning point in the history of meat production, the installation of the first disassembly line at the world’s first industrial meat plant in 1863, Sinclair’s text extrapolates on the upscaled violence shaping the lives of slaughter animals and human slaughterhouse workers (cf. Armstrong 2008: 137). This phenomenon has severely intensified in the twenty-first century, as molecular breeding techniques are disclosing ever more effective ways to capitalise animal bodies (cf. Nieradzik 2016: 127; Twine 2010: 16). Genetically modified, featherless chickens or cattle with doubled muscle strands illustrate how consumer capitalism has inscribed itself into the bodies and lives of farmed animals. Speculative fiction novels like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) reflect on these developments through fictional counterparts to these living, modified species, which I will describe in depth, shortly. In line with these advanced technologies, the cultural apparatus of what An‐ nie Potts describes as meat culture - one of the many gears of the anthropological machine - distances humans from other animals even further (2016). Not only do advanced mass slaughterhouses create an ever more fundamental, spatial separation between the majority of people and living farmed animals, but the specialisation of industrial livestock farming has also caused the emergence of specialised sub-breeds (e.g. broilers, laying hens, or porkers) and utility-related animal categories (e.g. livestock, pet, food animal). Advertising strategies that conceal the violence taking place in and around the industry obscure the realities of animal lives. The logo of major German meat producer Tönnies, one of countless existing examples, shows an anthropomorphic image of a pig, a dairy cow, and a large cattle of a pig and two cows that are cheerfully ‘smiling’ and form their tails into a heart-shape. Thus, many people do not associate the minute steak on their plates with a living animal - Deborah Levy’s novella Diary of a Steak (1995) takes this up to extremes by envisioning a steak retelling the fragmented narratives of several former cows on their ways to the supermarket shelves. According to feminist Carol J. Adams, meat culture transforms living animals into absent referents, allowing consumers of animal products to emotionally disconnect from animal suffering (1990: 14). In this process, living beings are being declared as food items. Dystopian novels like 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 254 Liza Bauer Joseph D’Lacey’s Meat (2008), Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), or Augustina Bazterrica’s Tender is the Flesh (2020) conduct terrifying thought experiments on how belief systems and cultural practices could one day transform certain humans into edible “products” as well (Bazterrica 2020: 70): The rooms are all connected by a rail that moves the bodies from one stage to the next. Through the wide windows, they see the way the head and extremities of the female stunned by Sergio are cut off with a saw. […] A worker picks up her head and takes it to another table, where he removes her eyes and puts them on a tray with a label that says “Eyes.” He opens her mouth, cuts out the tongue, and places it on a tray with a label that says “Tongues.” (Bazterrica 2020: 69) As I argue elsewhere, brutal narratives of this sort “fall short of providing any alternatives to the brutal realities they illustrate so effectively,” but they encourage an “uncomfortable imagining into the flesh of ‘livestock’” and may trigger critical reflections on real-world food systems (2024: 135). Moreover, these texts exemplify discursive processes that real-world cultural rituals unleash while serving to mark the divide between inedible human subjects and their edible animal others. From an animal studies perspective, the cultural norm of eating other animals but never human ones can be under‐ stood as a crucial cultural performance that secures beliefs in a fundamental distinction between humans and all other animals, the so-called anthropological difference (cf. Borgards 2015c: 184; Diamond 1978). Canonical literary texts pick up on this: The ceremonial roasting of dozens of suckling pigs in Spanish cultures (Cochinillo asado), for example, marks the homecoming of Miguel de Cervantes’ hero Don Quixote in Castilla-La Mancha (1615), and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson (1719) secures his position as a civilised human by roasting the meat of a goat before eating it (cf. Borgards 2015c: 175-85). More recent, speculative texts, such as Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage (1984), feature human characters under threat of being roasted themselves. In contrast, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009), which traces several human survivors’ journeys through a post-apocalyptic wilderness, closes with a passage where the protagonists observe another group of survivors roasting a gene-spliced animal. In this speculative future, the two women’s pity for “[t]he poor creature” and their accompanied fear of the flesh-eating humans illustrate their detachment from beliefs in the anthropological difference (432). In pointing to these dynamics and playing with the fearful idea of reversing them, literary texts of all genres may set impulses to shake readers’ convictions about certain animal species, particularly farmed ones, being ‘more edible’ than others. Ironically, George Orwell’s pigs not only turn inedible after the barnyard revolt, they 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 255 fashion themselves as ‘more equal’ than the other animal members of the collective to justify their tyrannical leadership (cf. Bauer 2024: 122-23). On ‘Animal Farm,’ which is tellingly renamed into ‘Manor Farm’ when the novel ends, anthropocentric hierarchies are ultimately not overthrown but reinstated. There are few literary texts that move further than that and set counterim‐ pulses. Relationship models in which ‘porkers,’ ‘dairy cows,’ or ‘laying hens’ take on the role of individuals with their own perspectives, desires, and needs are not easily thinkable for many people living in industrial countries; they may even lie beyond their imagination. Perhaps justifiably, they may wonder where liberated cows or chickens could fit in current societies, were they to stop producing dairy products and eggs. It is in fact difficult to imagine what might happen to the hybrid-pigs of modern meat production in a vegan utopia, as their in-bred dependency on antibiotics and in-door spaces impedes their easy survival as wild boars and sows (cf. Cudworth and Hobden 2018: 94). If animal advocates wish to convince others of their cause, they need to come up with concrete designs of sustainable forms of living with these animals. Refugia for former livestock, as an increasing number of animal sanctuaries is creating them worldwide, experiment with these very ideas. To convince consumers that animal sanctuaries or plant-based agribusinesses are socially and economically viable options and that non-exploitative relationships to farmed animals are possible, the very concept of living with cows, pigs, and chickens without exploiting them needs to take roots in peoples’ imaginations first. Encouraging such perceptual shifts is far from an easy task, as connected to the apparatus of meat culture, animal advocates are facing three major obsta‐ cles that farmed animal narratives unveil and challenge: speciesism, carnism, and the so-called meat paradox. Speciesism describes the cultural practice of attributing moral worth to other beings on the grounds of their species (Singer 1975). Unsettling the firm conviction in many consumers’ minds that cows, pigs, chickens, and others are less worthy of ethical consideration than dogs, orcas, and rhinos seems almost impossible - not at last for the fact that individuals hardly ever shift their convictions if they are told to do so. In connection to farmed animals, encouraging someone to outthink speciesism is further complicated by questions of tradition and identity, eating habits and the emotions that come with them, slaughter practices and rituals, as well as by the wide-spread usage of derogatory animal designations, which continuously serve the categorical exclusion of ‘livestock’ from the circle of moral community. This connects to what psychologist Melanie Joy describes as the ideology of carnism, which “propagates meat consumption as ‘a given,’ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 256 Liza Bauer the ‘natural’ thing to do, the way things have always been and the way things will always be’” (2010: 29). In contrast to clearly visible lifestyle choices, such as veganism or vegetarianism, carnism cannot easily be opposed or criticised, as it actively works towards keeping itself hidden (33). The result is termed the meat paradox: many people feel compassion for animals yet avoid confronting themselves with the violent realities of meat production to detach themselves emotionally (15). Nearly any discussion between convinced consumers of animal products and advocates for plant-based diets will bring these dynamics onto the table. Whereas these discussions tend to lead into argumentative dead-end streets, literary texts can bring these dynamics to life in readers’ minds without causing as much resistance. Douglas Adams’s science fiction classic, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), stages a self-butchering cow offering her various body parts as the “Dish of the Day” to an Earthling and a group of alien guests, explaining to them that, “to cut through the whole tangled problem” of eating nonhuman animals, it was eventually decided “to breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly,” while ensuring them to be “very humane” while butchering herself (93). Whereas the human is appalled by the idea of eating an animal “that’s standing there inviting [him] to,” the other guests are confused at his reaction, as they know that on Earth, other animals are eaten as well (93, see Bauer and Castle 2024: 133). As Nora Castle and I observe in our work on sf animal characters enabled to speak by means of biotechnology, the opening scene of Adam Roberts’s Bête (2014), “plays on this same scene by presenting instead an animal who markedly does not want to be eaten, and is capable of saying so clearly and distinctly” (133, original emphasis). Even though Roberts’s cow is pleading to a butcher in human language to be spared from slaughter, the human protagonist shoots her without hesitation; he does not “feel like [he is] talking to a cow, even a really smart one. [He feels] like [he is] talking to a spokesperson from the Deep Blue Deep Green organization,” - the science fictional animal rights group who implemented AI-enabled microchips in the animals’ brains enabling them to talk (2014: 7; original emphasis). As most consumers base their decisions on whether to eat other animals or not on the basis of emotional, much less on logical factors, Roberts’s butcher is unaffected by the activists’ strategy. In negotiating these moral ambivalences without directly criticising the animal industry or personal consumer choices, these texts expose and thus shake the underlying belief system that legitimises the systematic exploitation of other animals. They showcase that the objectification of farmed animals is 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 257 not only the product of the violence taking place in slaughterhouses but also its reproducer. As I argue elsewhere, “the animal industry transforms nonhuman animals into objects, and because they are designated as ‘livestock’ animals by means of language use, consumers may easily detach themselves emotionally from their suffering” (2024: 343). As a result, neither moral considerations nor legal regulations prevent the continuation of their suffering, not even for the sake of safeguarding planetary habitability. Literary animal readings of these texts shed light on how this cycle functions and point to its weaknesses. This way, they can provide inspiration for animalor environmental activist strategies that dig into the epistemic, rather than the subjective violence against other animals (cf. Wadiwel 2015: 34). This is essential, as small improvements to the conditions under which other animals live and die in factory farms do not change the fact that many people regard ‘livestock’ as categorically killable beings (cf. Haraway 2007: 105-10). This is where literary texts may set crucial impulses, for while they will certainly not set an end to industrial animal agriculture, they may disrupt readers’ ingrained mental patterns that cause them to associate certain beings with objects, destined to be killed. 4 The Forms and Functions of Farmed Animal Narratives in Science and Speculative Fiction Science and speculative fiction (sf), an increasingly popular literary genre in Western cultures, proves particularly productive in this regard. In the previous sections I have introduced the co-constitutive relationship between the reflection, discourse, or writing about, and the encounter, interaction, or coexistence with other animals. Thus, real-world perceptions of pigs, cows, or chickens infiltrate literature, which in turn influences how living humans and animals live together. The societal functions of farmed animal narratives emerge from this nexus, and they operate through narrative forms and strategies that generate effects on the fictional storyworlds and on the ways readers perceive them while immersing in the story. Alongside many other literary scholars, I have praised the sf genre as an effective vehicle for telling animal stories, as their distance from reality allows for extrapolating on literary thought experiments that reimagine new models of worlds, societies, futures, planets, individuals, and relationships (Bauer 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 258 Liza Bauer 15 For a more profound engagement with the genre in connection to animal questions, I refer readers to the works by Vint (2007, 2010, 2021), Jameson (2005), McCorry (2021), Bulleid (2023), and particularly to the recent collection Animals and Science Fiction (Castle and Champion 2024). 2022: 96; cf. McHale 2010: 23; Vint 2010: 227; 2021: 510; McCorry 2021: 467). 15 Particularly, narratives featuring biotechnologically-altered farmed animal characters may temporarily distance readers from the realities of industrial animal agriculture and aid their imaginative capacities to outthink speciesist and carnist patterns of thought or the ‘livestock’ category (cf. Bauer 2022: 98). According to Haraway, sf crafts alternative worlds in an interplay of “storytelling and fact telling” (sf), which allows these texts to critically portray the living conditions of “real” farmed animals side-by-side with fictional explorations into (yet) impossible versions of these (2016: 31, emphasis added). This way, real-world developments, such as in genetic engineering practices, merge into futuristic narrative worlds, inviting readers to critically engage with them and reflect on potential future impacts. Applying methods from narrative theory to reading these texts reveals that authors frequently employ an aesthetic that alienates readers from assumed realities and familiarises them with new ones. Sf stories tend to build their worlds around one or several central novelties or innovations, the novum/ nova. In animal stories, this can concern fundamental changes to human-animal relationships, as in animals ruling the planet in Dietmar Dath’s The Abolition of Species (2008) or humans and animals being able to communicate in Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020). Alternatively, the novum can concern new subject forms, as in the many gene-spliced animals in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy (2003-2013) or in the human phenomenauts enhanced with high-tech suits enabling them to experience animal phenom‐ enology in Emma Geen’s The Many Selves of Katherine North (2016). While immersing themselves into these alternative worlds and imagining new indi‐ viduals and relationship models, readers’ imaginative capacities are transported into a state of suspension, where they may be uncertain about where the fictional projection starts and where it ends. Cast in this liminal zone, disruptions to their expectations can cause shifts in what they deem conceivable. For example, while imagining a first-person, human narrator approaching a dairy cow, readers may be taken by surprise that the cow addresses the human with whom they presumably identify themselves as ‘it’ instead of ’you’: Could it tell My babies I’m 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 259 16 The alternative font in McKay’s novel marks the narrator’s interpretations of animal communication; the line breaks are reproduced as in the original. still here. (McKay 2020: 182) 16 The passage evokes the neutral pronoun humans tend to use while speaking of other animal individuals (“Take a look at that cow, it seems to be pregnant! ”), instead of using pronouns like ‘he/ she’ that would describe the cow as male or female. German speakers use a neuter article to describe ‘the animal’ as ‘das Tier,’ whereas ‘the human’ is marked as a masculine subject, “der Mensch”. The text alludes to the fact that the second-person pronoun ‘you’ is not usually used while speaking to a nonhuman entity - for why should an ‘it’ be addressed personally? Addressed as if they were an ‘it’ themselves, reading the passage above might feel alienating to readers, which may defamiliarise them with the way they speak about other animals beyond their reading experience. Moreover, “feeling as if the cow was directing her message at them,” they might think of the many real calves lost to the dairy industry, perhaps empathising with the cow’s motherly longing (Bauer 2024: 1, original emphasis). Even though these moments of suspension are temporary in nature and readers are unlikely to change their consumer behaviour afterwards, this feeling of bewilderment might resonate in this person’s next encounter with a living animal or an animal product. Here, I locate the potential of narrative texts to expand readers’ animal-sensitive imaginations and help them perceive ‘livestock’ as individuals and companion species - their co-dependent partners in world-making, whom it is high time to recognise as such. Coming back to my initial question on the role of literature in imagining the future, I would like to argue that miniature shifts in readers’ minds can set crucial impulses. Cultural theorist Franco Berardi identifies a need for transcending the visions of total collapse that apocalyptic scenarios in popular culture frequently prophesy; narratives on future societies must follow more unexpected, non-linear storylines to help us towards “the technical possibility of a good life” (2017: 45, 235). When it comes to reconfiguring relationships to farmed animals, our imaginative capacities seem similarly limited as the many dystopian and apocalyptic scenarios Berardi hints at. As I have explained earlier, the animal industry limits the imaginability of sustainable human-animal relationships; mental representations of its real-world products - laying hens and broilers, porkers and veal calves, Angusand minute steaks, battery cages, disassembly lines, and factory farms - are deeply entrenched within human imaginations. Following psychoanalytical gestalt theory, humans perceive the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 260 Liza Bauer world through culture-specific frames that filter any incoming stimuli (Berardi 2017: 193-94). When consumers of animal products engage with cows, pigs, or chickens physically or conceptually, the cognitive frames filtering their experience or perception have been shaped by the animal industry and many other factors. By disrupting these frames and thus potentially transforming them, narratives and the reading experience they evoke can contribute to deindustrialising readers’ imaginations. Even though these highly subjective processes cannot be generalised, narra‐ tological analyses can shed light on how the underlying narrative forms and strategies function. For instance, texts might distort the gestalt or cognitive frame the animal industry imposes on readers’ minds by portraying strange subject forms: “That’s the head in the middle […]. There’s a mouth opening at the top, they dump nutrients in there. No eyes or beak or anything, they don’t need those” - thus describes fictional scientist Crake the ‘ChickieNobs’ in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, or, to put it more accurately, “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too” (2003: 237-238). Visions of this sort may remind the readers of the suffering of real-world biotech-creatures, such as featherless chickens, for example, bred to produce eggs and meat in low-wage countries with hot climates without suffering from heat strokes (Young 2002). Unleashing a contrastive dynamic, first-person narrators or other anthropomorphic narrative forms may help readers identify and empathise with fictional animal characters. Another passage from McKay’s novel pictures Jean, the protagonist, liberating a group of ‘battery hogs’ from a truck after she has caught herself fantasising about the taste of the sow’s meat while talking to her (2020: 128). While she watches the ‘porkers’ “stumbling around, blind, mad, and fucking hopeful” while exploring the outdoors for the very first time in their lives, readers may hardly avoid an emotional engagement with the scene: Send me A postcard, The sick one says. […] All the little bits saying, Leave me, and, I’ll hear about it, and, Don’t you see It. Move on. There’s More. The ones that can walk stretch their legs, for, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 261 17 Today, more than 1,000 commodity products consumed or used in the global North can be traced back to hogs - about four hundred of which are inedible and may hardly be recognised as such: the gelatine coats of photographs, the glue seaming together household objects, the bone ash holding together German train brakes, or the hog haemoglobin used in cigarette filters to protect human lungs (Blanchette 2020: 13, 211; Meindertsma 2007: 82, 138). Albeit involuntarily, hogs and their body parts shape the Earth system in countless ways, many of which bear harmful consequences on its habitability, as well as more directly on human health. More, More, more. (130, original emphasis) This productive interplay between narrative estrangement (from high-perform‐ ance ‘livestock’ animals) and empathy-generating narrative forms (towards farmed animal companions) disrupts readers’ expectations and can thus expand their imaginative horizons. This way, sf narratives disclose a conceptual space where relationship models to cows, pigs, or chickens that break with the belief system upon which the animal industry is built gain shape - at least in speculative future scenarios. While they do not aspire to represent any accurate truths, these aesthetically mediated speculations are entangled with real animals’ living conditions. In the future society from Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013), genetically modified, highly intelligent pigs participate in political decision-making processes (cf. Bauer 2021a: 307-14). Readers may realise that the living prototypes of the so-called Pigoons are active contributors to current realities, not only in terms of their body parts permeating nearly all areas of human lives today (Blanchette 2020: 240; Meindertsma 2007). 17 In fact, genetically modified pigs are already shaping the future trajectories of medicine drastically: only two years after the deceased, gene-edited pig whose heart was implanted into the body of an American heart patient generated high hopes in the field of xenotransplantation, another pig whose kidney prolongs the life of a 62-year-old dialysis patient causes doctors to suggest that dialysis therapy may become obsolete thanks to the same practice (Rabin 2024; 2022a+b). Some scholars go as far as to argue that narratives featuring biotech-creatures may feed into bioethical discourse, even though they are unlikely to trigger any direct changes (cf. Pusch 2015: 66; Haraway 2007: 93; Kress 2007: 207). Yet the absence of concrete or quantifiable changes in human-animal relationships attributed to narratives does not translate into them being effectless. While readers envision ‘pet’-like relationships with supposed ‘livestock,’ they are invited instead of told to learn that personal, political, and sociocultural processes of negotiation determine where the distinction between their beloved German shepherd companion and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 262 Liza Bauer 18 In Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals, sociologist Paula Arcari provides intriguing material on these processes on the basis of consumer research (2019). a battery hen lies. The parameters deciding what or who qualifies as fit for being used, consumed, or loved by humans (or not) are not set in stone; instead, they are constantly changing as different invidividuals and cultures re-negotiate them, in relation to historical, sociocultural, and political dynamics. 18 As any literary text is part of these discourses, the small impulses they spark matter, which means that it matters how literary and cultural studies engage with them. 5 Conclusion: Towards Deindustrialising the Imagination To conclude, I would like to point out three main functions twenty-first century sf narratives on farmed animals perform and that are of relevance in the light of reimagining future forms of living with them: (1) When literary texts extrapolate on present and future societies and food systems, negotiating “who or what is considered in/ edible, or morally and politically non/ accountable” in these alternative worlds, they expose the belief system that legitimises the perseverance of the animal industry despite all critique (Bauer 2024: 358). (2) By imagining genetically modified farmed animal individuals and bestowing them with capabilities their living models lack, these texts encourage reflection on bioethical questions, challenge assumptions about a fixed human-animal divide (anthropological difference), and they transform high-performance ‘livestock’ into subjective companion species in readers’ minds. (3) Additionally, literary narratives illustrate that attempts to describe and understand animal perspec‐ tives are never free from anthropocentric biases. Beyond the pages of novels, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we cannot escape this bias in any encounter with our animal ‘others,’ for only then can we learn how to live ‘well’ with any other-than-human being on an endangered planet. Literary animal studies readings become most relevant for the future trajec‐ tories of their overarching disciplines when they reflect on the implications this third function bears onto literary criticism. For while scholars seriously engage with the numerous traces living animals have left in canonical and recent literary texts, they challenge anthropocentric-allegorical reading practices and expand upon the analytical concepts and tools that have been created to serve them. Asking animal questions can retrieve knowledges and meanings overlooked throughout more conventional literary criticism and thereby reflec‐ tively animalise the discipline. Analytical toolkits, such as narrative theory, are thus recalibrated towards the more-than-human world, which enables literary 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 Asking Animal Questions 263 and cultural studies scholars to examine how narratives not only co-shape human-animal but also human-planet relationships more widely. By challenging culture-specific animal categories and the anthropocentrically oriented thinking and value systems from which they emerge, literary studies may contribute to the emergence of cultural imaginaries that recognise not only pigs, cows, and chickens, but also lichen, ants, forests, and oceans as more-than-human co-creators alongside whom human societies shape the future of the Earth. Whether literature can truly make a difference in the fight for the planet’s regeneration remains an open question. Yet I can safely argue that the texts I have mentioned fashion farmed animals as subjects entwined in complex relationships with humans and might encourage readers to question the per‐ ception of ‘livestock’ as being mere commodities. Compared to purely utilitarian arguments against industrial livestock farming, emotional and intellectual shifts of that kind pave the way for a consideration of animals’ needs and perhaps their rights for their own sake. Unlike “mobile food pantries” - as historian Juliet Clutton-Brock describes the images of ‘livestock’ inscribed within consumers’ minds (1999: 213) - subjective individuals cannot easily be processed in factory farms without triggering any moral concern. Should these beings consequently receive legally recognised rights, the foundation of the animal industry would start to erode. In this arguably speculative scenario, political interventions aiming for mitigating the industry’s ecological footprint might have a better chance to be implemented than they currently do. However, such interventions fail to materialise for numerous sociopolitical and -economic reasons; cultural perceptions of farmed animals may legitimise their exploitation, but they remain only a fraction among countless other pieces of the puzzle. Moreover, humans do not necessarily cease to eat meat or prohibit the killing of other animals on the grounds of perceiving them as subjects or companions. Nation-wide bans on slaughter, as introduced in Adam Roberts’s dystopian sf society, remain within the realm of fiction. Nevertheless, and as Haraway might phrase it, readers of farmed animal narratives may question their perception of certain kinds of animals as categorically killable objects that are designated for killing only for the fact that they are born as ‘livestock.’ Over time and generations, these impulses may spark larger and more impactful changes in consumer patterns; the consumption of animal products in industrialised societies may one day develop from the dietary norm into an exception. Where literature can make a difference is in providing the space for exper‐ imenting with these possible future ways of living. Connected to the value of real-world experiments of living together that animal sanctuaries put into 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 264 Liza Bauer practice, anthropologist Alex Blanchette argues that literary texts teach us what it might be like to be “un-efficient” creatures (2020: 237). Inefficiency is as incompatible with extractive capitalism as companionship is with industrial animal agriculture. In the challenging task to imagine sustainable forms of living that respect planetary boundaries and keep the planet habitable, the capacity of literary texts to deindustrialise our imagination may be decisive. Works Cited ADAMS, C. J. (1990) The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York, London: Continuum. ADAMS, D. (1980) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. New York: Ballantine Books. AGAMBEN, G. (2004) The Open. Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. AGUDELO, H., Iván, N., LaRocque, R., and McGushin, A. 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(2021) Grenzenlos menschlich? Tierethische Positionen bei Elias Canetti, Marlen Haushofer und Brigitte Kronauer. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0011 270 Liza Bauer Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism Hannah Klaubert 1 Introduction During the walking tour of Suffolk which he later memorialised in The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald came across a curious place called Orford Ness, a shingle spit off the coast of Aldeburgh. The spit, a narrow patch of land that formed and continues to form and re-form as shingle accumulates in front of the former coastline, was used as an airfield by the Royal Air Force from 1915 onwards and later hosted the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (1953-1971). A variety of technologies around radar systems and (nuclear) weapons deployment were tested on the spit (Davis 2022: 25). Around the time of Sebald’s visit in the early 1990s, it was sold to the National Trust and has since become an important natural and cultural heritage site. Sebald describes the landscape, to which he prescribes an “extraterritorial quality” (2020: 233), as follows: Far behind me to the west, scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the uninhabited land; to the north and south, in Flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. (ibid.: 235) Indeed, the remains of the military buildings form the most prominent feature of the Ness: From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with the stones, in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. (ibid.: 235f.) Sebald here captures the enmeshment of different temporalities - the geological, the prehistoric, the Cold War and its Great Acceleration - and of cultural and natural environments (“concrete shells, shored up with the stones”) at the Ness. The site, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 with its fragmentary nature and troubled nuclear and military history, invites a narrative treatment that evokes large timespans of almost mythical proportions and traces of anthropogenic and natural change inscribed into the landscape. Decades later, the site continues to fascinate. The “controlled ruination” of the military structures, as the National Trust calls it (Davis 2022: 21), poses questions about how to engage with the difficult heritage of twentieth-century warfare - and about the role of nature in such an endeavour. Caitlin DeSilvey describes the Ness as “held in an implausible tension” where the “ragged seam between nature and culture unravels and, finally, dissolves” (2014: 83). Around 2012, author Robert Macfarlane was asked to contribute a libretto for a piece called Untrue Island, to be performed on Orford Ness. The libretto formed the basis for his later publication Ness, in cooperation with artist Stanley Donwood who produced ink drawings to accompany the prose poem. Ness is part myth and part suspenseful adventure story. It makes, I suggest in the following, use of narrative’s capacity to capture environmental processes and events that are hard to grasp in human everyday experience while straddling questions about nuclear culture and nuclear politics. It therefore lends itself to exploring two emergent subfields in literary and cultural studies: econarratology and the nuclear humanities. 2 Narrating Ness: Econarratology meets (Post-)Nuclear Environments My explorations into the representations of Orford Ness are shaped by two (re)emerging themes in literary and cultural criticism, namely: 1) methodologi‐ cally, a renewed interest in form not only as an ordering element in cultural representation but as a generative force in various forms of discourse, and more specifically, the uses of narrative form in representing the troubled ecological realities of what many have come to call the Anthropocene; and 2) thematically, a growing consideration of the material and infrastructural legacies of the Cold War nuclear conflict and nuclear technologies more broadly. As I have suggested elsewhere, these two strands of research can be fruitfully brought together - not least because the politics of ‘giving shape’ or form are particularly prevalent in the representation of phenomena which remain imperceptible or hard to grasp due to their material makeup and/ or due to their enmeshment with cultural forms of invisibility and secrecy, as often happens to be the case in the nuclear realm (Klaubert 2021). Additionally, questions of scale, temporality, and non-human agency animate both recent investigations into nuclear cultures and ecocritical interventions interested in the politics of narrative and literary form. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 272 Hannah Klaubert The exploration of narrative form has begun to take centre stage in ecocritical scholarship in the last few years. In Extraction Ecologies, for instance, Elizabeth C. Miller positions literary forms and genres as “important objects of environ‐ mental analysis” since they can be read as “epistemological structures that embed our most fundamental conceptual formations” (2021: 3). Taking an even broader view, Marco Caracciolo, in Narrating the Mesh, declares that “through formal strategies, narrative offers a wealth of imaginative resources to embrace the conceptual and affective trouble that defines our Anthropocene times” (2021: 26). Strongly informed by narratological scholarship, Erin James’ Narrative in the Anthropocene proposes that the examination of narrative forms adds to environmental discourses in three different ways; it helps us understand “what narrative resources tend to lend themselves to particular ideologies”, how “narrative is changing to accommodate or respond to new material, social, and political realities”, and “what work narratives do to readers and the world in which they read” and, consequently, how they can be mobilised for a more just and sustainable future (2022: 25). These scholars’ interventions, among many others, offer a robust argumentative basis for understanding the important roles that narrative form plays in humans’ interaction with and understanding of the material world around us. Econarratologist interventions of recent years can be understood somewhat in opposition to earlier ecocritical proposals by so-called material ecocritics. Serpil Oppermann, for instance, inspired by new materialist scholars like Karen Barad, proposes that “matter is not only lively, agentic and generative, as it is theorized in the new materialist paradigm […], but also densely storied” (Op‐ permann 2018: 411). Matter itself here becomes a “site of narrativity” embodying stories not only “in the minds of human agents” but also the “very structure of its own self-constructive forces” (ibid.). In such an understanding of narrative agency as distributed among all types of human and non-human actants, reading and narrating become undiscernible from other modes of interpretation or expression, and are positioned as activities similarly distributed among all kinds of actants, be they human, animal, bacterial, fungal, or geologic. Econarratologists, in contrast, warn of a conflation of these different terms and activities and stress the “inherently anthropogenic nature of narrative as a rhetorical mode” ( James 2022: 21). Nonetheless, as Caracciolo emphasises, the questions raised by Oppermann and others can help econarratologists explore “the strategies through which stories can channel materiality” (2021: 17) and the “pathways through which narrative can render, in formal terms, the complexity of our Anthropocene moment” (2021: 18). Narrative and formal analysis can nuance human ways of meaning-making and push for the continued relevance 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 273 of literature and literary readings in environmental debates. By stressing the narrative dimension of environmental discourses and our ways of relating to non-human processes, things, and timescales, econarratologists argue for the continued relevance of literary modes of reading and expression not despite but because of the fact that these are exclusively human activities. The second context in which this contribution is set is the slow consolidation of a field preliminarily called the nuclear humanities. While the humanities have, since the emergence of the nuclear age, been interested and invested in the cultural representations of nuclear technologies and particularly its potentially spectacularly devastating effects, the emergence of broader fields like the environmental and energy humanities have also paved the way for new and sustained inquiries into nuclear culture. This is not least because various ‘turns’, like the ‘material turn’ or the ‘infrastructural turn’, as well as central new concepts like Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” (2011) and Tim Morton’s “hyperobject” (2013), have turned scholars’ attention to phenomena which commonly escape, through various ways of disguise, the logic of attention within and beyond scholarship. This also concerns the fact that the techno-political project of nuclear tech‐ nology was and is deeply enmeshed with natural processes, materials, and environments, which some earlier scholarship on nuclear culture and history had overlooked. Hogg and Brown note how the post-1945 nuclearisation of Britain was not only dependent on the significant mobilisation of “money, scientific knowledge, people and military-industrial capacity” (2019: 63) but also on land being “set aside to accommodate nuclear infrastructures” (ibid.). These often-remote sites were deemed expendable in the face of what was seen as a much more urgent project of nuclear deterrence; and many of these spaces remain closed to the public to this day. In the US context, scholars have stressed how ‘weapons to wildlife’ conversions, for instance, the creation of nature reserves at former weapon production sites for which clean-up is either not feasible or deemed too expensive, mobilise environmental rhetoric to gloss over the complicated legacies of the Cold War (Krupar 2013; Cram 2016). In an observation of conservation practices around the Hanford site, where plutonium was produced during the Manhattan Project, Shannon Cram suggests that the “constitutive contradiction” of these nuclear wildlife/ wasteland environments, their oscillation between “ruin and redemption”, or “pristine habitat and waste frontier” (2016: 91), positions nature as a ‘healing’ force tasked with the material and discursive clean-up of uncomfortable, and often quite persistent, Cold War legacies. Other scholars have drawn attention to the fact that ‘the nuclear’, as a techno‐ political assemblage, extends far beyond the measurable presence of radiation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 274 Hannah Klaubert Hecht’s influential concept of ‘nuclearity’ has opened paths to studying how the state of ‘being nuclear’ can be made, unmade, and remade in the face of geopolitical and market interests (2009). Jessica Hurley has stressed how the nuclear military-industrial complex in the United States was realised not only as “an unthinkable paradox or a future threat but also as a new national infrastructure that has determined the flow of resources and risks across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (2020: 3). Along these lines, the Nuclear Natures research project, underway at Linköping University in Sweden, investigates how nuclearity, whether radioactive or not, produces new human/ non-human relations. They emerge through the creation of buffer zones around operating power plants, through environmental monitoring around outflow canals, or through mining activities and nuclear waste burial in deep geologic storage sites. While not necessarily contaminated, these sites operate under the logic of nuclear regulation and can thus be understood, in some sense, as nuclear. Orford Ness is also a place that was remade under the nuclear logic without being contaminated. The experiments which took place there were designed to help with the seamless employment of nuclear weapons, even though no fissile material “was said to be involved”, as the National Trust ambiguously phrases it (National Trust n.d.), heeding to rumours that some actual nuclear testing may have taken place at the site. What is certain is that simulation tests for temperature, vibration, pressure, and flight paths were implemented to ensure the actual nuclear bombs would not explode while being transported or right after being dropped (Davis 2022: 25). The site afforded the experiments, to speak with Caroline Levine (2017), not only due to the pre-existence of military infrastructure, its flatness and relative remoteness, but also because the loose shingle could buffer accidental explosions. Several of the buildings in which tests were conducted are heaped with the small stones against the side walls and on the roof, which in some cases is held up by massive concrete pillars. “The silhouettes of these Brutalist ‘pagodas’”, DeSilvey writes, “became iconic of Cold War secrecy and threat” (2014: 80). The shapes of the structures found on Orford Ness have become emblematic of British nuclear cultural heritage, and their treatment in literature and art raises questions not only about British nuclear politics and the logics of nuclearity but also about the politics of form in representing them. In The Wild Places, prominent nature writer Robert Macfarlane himself provides something like a theory of natural forms. In stressing the interplay between chaos and order, he observes the “fractal habits of certain landscapes, their tendencies to replicate their own forms at different scales and in different contexts” (2017: 246). While the “wild energies” of natural forces have the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 275 “capacity to frustrate representation” as “feedback systems of unresolvable delicacy and intricacy” remain removed from the human gaze, he also prescribes a “near mythical sense of organization”, of “order and repetition” (ibid.), to some landscapes. Orford Ness, which Macfarlane mentions briefly in The Wild Places, has an “exquisite patterning” (ibid.: 241) to it, as he writes. The shingles, which form the basis for all life on the spit, are in “continual slow migration, forming and reforming their shape as they shift” (ibid.); though mineral in essence, Orford Ness acquires something of an organic character, with new shingle adding distinct new layers like growth rings on a tree. The spit has the “complex beauty of a neuron” (ibid.: 242), and the “dialogue between solid and liquid” (ibid.) that constitutes these porous landscapes creates a constant oscillation between disorder and order. This sense of liveliness and complex order returns in Macfarlane’s later treatment of the spit. In the following, I propose to read Ness through the lens of form, understood in the broadest sense as “patterning, shapes, and arrangements” which organise, according to Levine, “both social and literary objects” (2017: 13), and, as I would add here with Macfarlane, also partly organise the natural world - though, as Macfarlane stresses, the “wild energies” of non-human nature tend to break the formal constraints and expectation placed upon them. I suggest that Ness investigates the totalising logic of Cold War rhetoric through contrasting it with the unbound movement and rhythms of its non-human characters, and through a curious double-conversion - of place into character and character into place. 3 Place/ Character Conversions in Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s Ness Ness was written by Robert Macfarlane and first published in 2018 with ink illustrations by artist Stanley Donwood. The text consists of multiple narrative strands interwoven in a wild symphony of place. It is a generic hybrid, “part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play”, as the blurb announces. It creates suspense as “five forms” (1) - it, he, she, they, as - approach the land of Orford Ness to halt the destructive actions of a group of human-like figures, among them The Armourer, The Engineer, The Botanist, The Physicist, and The Ornithologist. In the “Green Chapel”, identified as one of the military testing pavilions now left to decay on Orford Ness, the group is preparing to detonate a “toothpaste-white finned missile a little longer than a man” (13), designed to “maximise injuries incompatible with life” (27). Yet, before they manage to perform the required rituals, which include the singing of a “firing song”, it, he, she, they, and as swerve (float, trickle, flow, grow, …) in and take over. In 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 276 Hannah Klaubert “uncontrolled ruination” (78), as the text cheekily comments on the National Trust’s wording of “controlled ruination”, the “firing song” of the Armourer is replaced with the “song of Ness” (ibid.). Kyra Morris has provided a convincing examination of the “fissile forms”, the poetic strategies, of the text. She describes Ness as a “lexicon of shingle beach, salt marsh, and nuclear detonation” (2022: 1) and carefully traces its intertextual references. In a Benjaminian reading of the prose poem, Morris suggests that the textual strategies produce paradoxical “non-fungible reproductions” (ibid.: 19) of this “untrue island”, evoking a flat ontology of ‘like-ness’ between the different characters. The estrangement elicited by this flatness, she argues, “allows for a theory of art useless for the purpose of autocratic ‘death-dreaming’ figures like The Armourer” (18) as it pushes against all essentialist claims of authenticity. I want to add to Morris’ reading, which is mostly focused on the poetic language and the play with metaphors, allusions, and intertextual references, by exam‐ ining further formal features of the text, and more specifically, one common feature of environmentally engaged literary writing, as Caracciolo and James have observed (Caracciolo 2021: 109f.; James 2022: 118f.): the transformation of place into character. Ness begins with an appeal to the reader: “Look - five forms moving fast through the forest to Ness” (1). It is central to the text’s poetic strength that these strange forms, moving with intention towards a narrative centre, the Green Chapel, are converted to character. In doing so, Ness deconstructs what Marco Caracciolo has called narrative’s “first and maybe most important pillar”, the “bias towards human or human-like characters” (2018: s174). It does so by making use of the ‘container’ of character, as a bounded whole with intention and purpose in the story, and breaking it down in various ways. The five beings, each in their own way, expand the boundary of what can function as a narrative agent in the text. First, after The Armourer and his companions have been introduced and their dark plans exposed, it approaches: “It is Drift. Drift nears Ness. Drift is a world-shaper. Drift makes itself up as it goes along” (Ness: 17). Drift “loves lists”, it “looks drastically disorganized to the untrained eye but is in fact a micro-manager of obsessive-compulsive tidiness” (ibid.). Of all the five forms, it even receives something like a biography, a back-story mocking the decided un-humanness of Drift: Drift is constantly underestimated by those who encounter it. Drift is frequently seen as lacking any clear direction in life. Drift’s school reports repeatedly drew attention to its lack of commitment, its inability to settle on a single course of action. […] Afloat on the job market, however, Drift began quietly to impress in its various workplaces with 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 277 its skills of improvisational spontaneity, untiring gathering, its devotion to habitat creation & and its ecumenical readiness to admit all-comers to its care. (ibid.: 18) The description of Drift then turns back to assembling seemingly disparate facts in lists; drift is “a hermit crab taking an Avon face-cream tub as its shell”, it “dislikes being made to represent anything, because Drift disapproves strongly of symbolism”, drift is “matter plus motion” and a “Colgate-Palmolive Teeth-Whitening Toothpaste tube, no tub” (19). Caracciolo has asked how narra‐ tive can “elevate the nonhuman - material objects, but also large-scale processes such as globalization or the weather - to the position of a character” (2018: s174). In the chapter introducing it, Ness flaunts this capacity by anthropomorphising natural processes, only to reign in the impulse immediately after as it resorts back to similes and lists. This also continues with the remaining characters coming to disturb The Armourer in his ventures. He, the second form approaching the island, is made up mostly of movement, but “you couldn’t call it walking; this march matches no known gait” (33), He “pours, sets, melts & pours again, in a skipping looping flow, learnt part from otter & part from water” (ibid.). His movement is described as a weaving, which he weaves as much as he is woven by it. Then, after another section of the detonation ceremony, “She nears Ness” (45). She is growth and liveliness, the animacy of the natural world. She “makes green & green fills the air around her & warps hard into objects within her radiance” (ibid.), and she is “committed to redefining decay as a form of verdancy, individuality as a biological aberration & gender as a parallax error or species anomaly” (46). The final two forms expand this experiment in testing the limits of character in narrative even further: They are the passing of time, though not in a linear sense but in the complex and overlapping rhythms of nature; they “have the patience of granite & the ardour of lava & the speed of starlight. / & they are the white band that rings a blue-grey chert stone held in the hand for a minute & for longer in the heart” (59). They also expand the form beyond conventional grammar at the level of the sentence, with each sentence beginning with an ampersand and consisting of a series of subordinate clauses without a main clause. Finally, As, the last of the five forms, fully breaks down grammatical rules: “As is as thin as mist. / As is as fast as gale & as slow as tar” (71), and concludes a few lines later: “As nears Ness. / As is hopelessness. / As is forgiveness. / As is Ness” (ibid.). Morris has observed how the similes of this section straddle both the material and the discursive, breaking down distinctions between the “physically and epistemologically fissile” (2022: 11) that make up the atomic shingle spit that is the Ness. Econarratologists have explored how narrative can move beyond its “an‐ thropomorphic bias” (Fludernik, cited in Caracciolo 2021: 97) by examining 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 278 Hannah Klaubert non-human characters and actors/ actants in narrative; and of particular interest are those who are not simply human-like characters going by another name, as would be the case in a fable, for instance. As Caracciolo notes, the Greima‐ sian actantial model of narrative, which defines actants as those performing “narrative-advancing actions”, can be useful for expanding theorisations of character in and for the Anthropocene - but only by moving beyond the clear subject-object binary which the structuralists sought to uphold, or spoken in more linguistic terms, by moving beyond “syntactic transitivity” (2018: s179). Caracciolo proposes that the “promotion of place to narrative actant” (ibid: s184) is one of the formal strategies employed to break the spell of anthropomorphising and he observes such an “actantial mediation of place” in the storyworld of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, where non-human forces permeating the storyworld infiltrate the human characters’ psychology. Inter‐ estingly, Caracciolo’s framing of this process as a “promotion” (based on his reading of the work of linguist Andrew Goatly) reinscribes a hierarchy into the space/ narrative agent relationship which it initially seeks to complicate. This ordering stands somewhat in contrast to the ontological flatness that Morris ascribes to Ness (2022: 9), and that is certainly also reflected in the ink drawings by Stanley Donwood which accompany the text. The drawings’ investment in the surfaces of the Ness, from ripples in the water to individual pebbles and the overgrown ruins, all portrayed in tight cross-hatching lines, further underlines, if not the primacy of the natural world and the spatial setting of the narrative, at least its dominance over and active engagement with the human-made structures in the landscape. Textually, Ness, helped by its myth-like form, is very explicit about its place/ character conversion by introducing the Ness in the five forms, yet it is also very reflexive about it, thus also playing with a perceived hierarchy between human and non-human narrative agents; with each ‘form’, the level of anthropomorphising is dialled back, each figure becoming less human-like to the extent that grammatical rules are bent in the section on as, essentially making as - likeness to Ness - the subject of its sentences. In doing so, Ness shows the breadth and function of anthropomorphism as well as its boundaries and the weird frictions and expansions of tellability that emerge at those borders. Ness also contrasts its unruly non-human characters with the clearly boun‐ ded, human-like figures in the Green Chapel, characterised only by their profession and fulfilling The Armourer’s orders swiftly and competently: The Ornithologist, The Physicist, The Engineer, and others. After going through a range of preparatory rituals (like describing “the Chapel’s design and position” and “ornament and flourish”, 11, original emphasis), they sing the “firing song” 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 279 in preparation for the detonation: “Song of the bomb, the arming song, / the firing song…” (14, original emphasis). However, already by the second iteration of the firing song, a sort of disintegration begins: One of The Engineer’s pupils, The Physicist notices, “has become oddly mobile, that it seems to be drifting rapidly back and forth across the confines of its iris” (28) whereas the other pupil “is standing out slightly from his eyeball, like a buried plug of old grey metal” (ibid.). A strange green light begins to fill the Green Chapel, and by the fourth iteration of the firing song, bee-like creatures are burrowing in The Ornithologist’s hair, whereas The Physicist’s “skin is scaled with a bright orange lichen” (55) and there are “fine branching white lines growing across his eyes, just below the surface” (ibid.). By the time The Armourer judges everything ready for the firing of the missile, The Engineer can only reply “with a hollowed and hardened voice” and his “speech has both the deep notes of bedrock and the bullety ting of flint flung on flint” (65). Yet, The Armourer insists on singing the firing song one last time; but now it has become the “song of the spores” the “song of the hag, the sea-coal song” (67). In the final scene in the Green Chapel, The Armourer himself finally is transformed, his hair is bracken, his innards are thickening peat, his back is clattered into a row of stones, his prick is soft and gilled as the Death Cap, foxes snarl in his blood, his tendons are all turned to high breaking-strain monofilament, all tuned to the wind-blown note of D flat, swifts scream through him on their hooligan tours, each of his ten nails is amber, his borders shift and re-form in each storm and he is Ness. (77, emphasis added) Here, then, the place/ character conversion is turned on its head, with the human-like characters becoming fully subsumed into their surroundings, char‐ acters becoming place while place has become character. James has commented on the presence of shifting and unstable spaces in Anthropocene narrative texts. She argues that spaces which are “unstable, or inexact in their multiplicity and thus difficult to inhabit” (2022: 119) are inherent to Anthropocene experiences - and that much narrative theory, which constructs space in the text as stable and inactive against the activity and mobility of characters, fails to account for these experiences. Anthropocene narratives can task readers with “inhabiting worlds in which space is not simply a stable background but itself the unstable foreground of narratives” (ibid.: 127). James proposes what she calls “despatialization”, that is, textual strategies rendering it difficult for the reader to fully inhabit the storyworld, as a prominent strategy for figuring Anthropocene spaces. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 280 Hannah Klaubert In Ness, the calls for the reader to ‘Look’ and ‘Listen’ initially create a stable readerly position and call for readers to immerse themselves into the storyworld. Additionally, the first utterance of The Armourer is to ask his congregation to “describe the Chapel’s design and position” (11, original emphasis), to which The Engineer responds by describing the architecture of the Green Chapel, one of the test pavilions on the spit, in detail, as a “perfect marriage of function and form” (ibid.). He also declares its ruination “controlled” (ibid.). However, as the five forms approach from all sides, the space shows itself to be much less graspable and controlled than the congregation in the Green Chapel or the reader may think. As the five forms take over, The Engineer now describes a completely different space, stretching vertically, which is the Chapel but is not: We are down now past the plastic, the sea-coal, the flip-flops, down through the flints, the quartzites, the hags, and down to the imprint-taking, relic-yielding clay. / We are among bracelet clasps, spindle-whorls, a whale-bone table. We are among fossils: the mammoths, the turtles, the sharks, the nautilus, the wing bone of the albatross, the ear bone of the eagle ray. (65f.) Quite similarly to Sebald’s descriptions of the Ness, the environment here becomes perceptible in all its temporal and material depth, reaching from contemporary drift to human history and geology. Ness comments, then, on our tangled existence of what may be called the Nu‐ clear Anthropocene in various ways. By elevating place to character, or rather, to multiple characters, the liveliness, multifaceted-ness and multi-directionality as well as the persistence of non-human beings comes to the fore. Or, to phrase it in more spatial terms, the distinction between the background of the story and the foreground, which is usually where the significant events of a narrative take place, is blurred, as background becomes foreground and ultimately takes over. The strongly centralised storyworld, with the Green Chapel at its centre and the “five forms” approaching from all sides, seems almost geometric in its order. Once the centre is subsumed into the surroundings, though, as The Armourer and his companions have become Ness themselves, the narrative centre itself integrates. “It was all sea once, in a long unbroken line” (83), the text ends. Contrasting the stability and perceived linearity of deep time with the instability and “fissile-ness” (Morris 2022: 11) of the shingle spit as well as the human endeavours taking place on it, Ness’ background is of geologic rather than historical dimension. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 281 4 Deep in Matter and Deep in Language One critical gesture that many contemporary nuclear humanities scholars have in common is an assessment of the work of early “nuclear critics”, a group of scholars who, in the early 1980s, argued that “critical theory ought to be making a more important contribution to the public discussion of nuclear issues” (“Proposal for a Diacritics Colloquium on Nuclear Criticism” 1984: 2). Most prominently, Jacques Derrida’s characterisation of the nuclear threat as “fabulously textual” (1984: 23) has in recent years, after initially being taken up gratefully by literary and cultural critics, been criticised for overlooking the genuine material effects of civil and military nuclear infrastructures across the globe (see for instance Decamous 2018: 201; Wallace 2016: 6f.). Yet, Jessica Hurley suggests that this criticism relies on a slight misinterpre‐ tation of Derrida’s concerns. Hurley argues that he was acutely aware that the “fictionality of the bomb exists only in a dialectical relationship with the technical and social infrastructures that produce it and that it in turn produces” (2020: 8). Reversely, she suggests, criticism which is solely focused on the materiality of nuclear things also remains limited: By only ascribing nuclearity to the bomb, nuclear criticism risks being blinded to the negotiations of power, wealth, status, and vulnerability that are constantly in play around nuclear and contestably nuclear things, from bodies and rocks to highways and international treaties. (2020: 9) It is only through the “fabulous textuality” of nuclear politics and nuclear public discourse, its reliance on entirely non-material fear, risk estimates, and scenarios, that nuclear technologies and infrastructures were made into a material reality. They created large swaths of militarised and often contaminated landscapes, channelled incredible amounts of resources, and rendered certain bodies and communities expendable in the process (see Jacobs 2022; Hamblin and Richards 2023). Reversely, the materiality of nuclear things produces its textuality, a nuclear cultural and political imagination which drives geopolitical decisions. In other words, nuclearity is always both socio-political and material. Ness is, while invested in the lively materiality of the shingle spit, acutely aware of the politics of language and (literary) form in the context of nuclear weapons. The congregation of The Armourer on the “untrue island” is very aware of the “half-truths and full falsehoods”, the “speculation, suppressed revelation” (26) required to maintain a nuclear-military status quo. Ness also alludes to the rhetorical playfulness of some twentieth century nuclear discourse (as portrayed most prominently and critically in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove), with The Physicist praising the “Disney names” of the British nuclear bombs, which indeed 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 282 Hannah Klaubert had names like the “Blue Danube” or the “Yellow Sun”; and even a less poetically named bomb like the WE-177A is described as an “ice-white stork-dropped messenger from heaven, with such a bright future ahead of it” (27). Further playing with the meaning of language in the nuclear realm, The Physicist, who is tasked with the service, announces that he will “speak only in equations, for they are the purest of utterances and they address only the world of matter, and they have no correlate or purchase in the sphere of politics and yet they possess a vast and calculable power to alter the world we inhabit” (13, emphasis added). In this paradoxical announcement, Macfarlane captures the troubled nature of nuclear discourses and politics, which rely on probabilities and risk equations while simultaneously having fundamentally shaped not only the geopolitics of the recent decade but also the material makeup of planet Earth as a whole (cf. Brown 2022), making nuclear materials the most significant marker for the new geologic epoch of the Anthropocene (Anthropocene Work‐ ing Group 2019). Throughout the text, the repeated performance of the “firing song” points towards the importance of a constant reiteration of the nuclear threat for maintaining its effectiveness. The Armourer also asks The Engineer to recite “the detonation sequence, taking care to emphasize its causal beauty and irreversibility once commenced” (51, original emphasis). In the nuclear realm, to recite and to perform, to speculate, to calculate, and to test - to “shock-test, stress-test, temperature-test”, to “test for lethality” and “test for vulnerability” (26) - are as important as the detonation itself. Ultimately, the congregation ends up “deep in matter”, as The Engineer warns, so deep in fact that “Messages can’t make it, signals shatter” (66). “Thought is, language is”, he warns The Armourer, “turning into shingle” (ibid.). However, Ness’ non-anthropocentrism remains overtly and explicitly entrenched in language, and its place/ character conversions straddle the affordances and limits of representa‐ tions of natural environments. The “formal cleavages”, as Morris calls them (2022: 18), between the totalising impulses of nuclear discourses and the liveliness of the Ness are essential to the poetics of the text. In that, it can be thought of as commenting on the predicament of the nuclear age that the nuclear humanities are slowly coming to terms with: We remain both deep in matter and deep in language; and in the nuclear realm, in dealing with imperceptible phenomena like radiation but also risk, fear, and power, we cannot think one without the other. 5 Narrating (Never Quite) Post-Nuclear Landscapes In this contribution, I have argued for a cross-fertilisation of recent scholarship in ecocriticism, and particularly econarratology, and contemporary nuclear 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 Narrating Ness: Econarratology for a Contemporary Nuclear Criticism 283 1 This work is based on research done within the framework of the “Nuclear Natures” project, which received funding from the Swedish Research Council (VR), grant no. 2020-00623. I also want to thank Anna Tabouratzidis and To Uyen Nguyen for their thoughtful comments and editorial work. criticism. On the one hand, econarratology allows for the exploration of the portrayal of non-human agencies in texts, thus providing tools for reading literature in what we may call the Nuclear Anthropocene, an age where the material world forcefully shows itself as agential and resistant to human domination. On the other hand, some early and more recent nuclear criticism has drawn attention to the role of language and (literary) form and narrative in (re-)producing the material and discursive nuclear status quo; it thus engages fruitfully with the observations provided by econarratological readings. Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood, as I have shown, is attuned to both the liveliness and agency of the natural world as well as the power of the nuclear-military realm to shape natural environments through a continuous rhetoric of risk and potential destruction. It plays with the illusion of “controlled ruination” which the National Trust aims at while also acting out the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) - both of which perish under the onslaught of the ‘five forms’, the Ness reconfigured as characters. One could certainly argue that Macfarlane and Donwood’s post-anthropo‐ centric vision of the shingle spit is naively utopian and that the ‘nature taking back’ narrative is potentially not helpful in fully grasping our predicaments of living in a multiplicity of environmental and other crises for which a privileged group of humans are the cause and which humans seem unable to effectively address. Critiques of the “weapons to wildlife” conversions underway in spaces that are too contaminated or otherwise not economically viable to fully rehabilitate (Krupar 2013; Cram 2016), as well as critical engagements with the meaning of military heritage and “rewilding” on the Ness Field (DeSilvey 2014; Davis 2022), certainly make space for such an interpretation. In the face of a changing geopolitical situation, the United Kingdom has recently increased their cap on their nuclear stockpile, making it possible to acquire new nuclear weapons (Mills 2024: 4). In other words, The Armourer and his companions will continue their dark rituals elsewhere, in a different Chapel, and they also do so across the globe. 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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. OPPERMANN, S. (2018) ‘Storied Matter’, in Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. (eds) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Theory Series, pp.-411-14. PROPOSAL FOR A DIACRITICS COLLOQUIUM ON NUCLEAR CRITICISM (1984) Diacritics 14 (2), pp.-2. https: / / www.jstor.org/ stable/ 464753. SEBALD, W. G. (2020) The Rings of Saturn. London: Vintage. WALLACE, M. (2016) Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Available at: https: / / muse .jhu.edu/ book/ 45852. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0012 286 Hannah Klaubert 1 See, for example, a forthcoming issue of Regeneration on Arboreal Humanities: https: / / www .regeneration-journal.org/ issue/ 1686/ info/ or Routledge’s Economics and Humanities book series. Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 1 Introduction Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. (Sontag 1987 [1964]: -98) The humanities have diversified tremendously in the first quarter of the century: From the by now firmly institutionalised Environmental Humanities to the Blue, Arboreal, Energy, Economic, and Digital Humanities. 1 Some have mushroomed out of or grappled with various turns - be they institutional, infrastructural, affective or nonhuman. Already back in 2007, Jennifer Wenzel quipped that “‘British and American literature’ will no longer suffice to describe what English departments do” (Yaeger 2007: 633-634), and while then postcolonialism was the field diagnosed with exhaustion, it appears that today the arts and humanities have gone through another dry spell and are in desperate need of a re-branding. Particularly dynamic in their constant metamorphosis are the environmental humanities which have produced - or sprouted - so many interand transdisciplinary branches within and beyond the humanities that it is beyond the scope of this chapter to rough out these developments in their entirety. I will therefore hone in on energy, aesthetics, interpretation and their value in light of these disciplinary crossovers which have, among other things, produced petroculture studies, a field of research particularly vibrant in Canada, the US, and UK, which I will introduce in more detail below. What 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 2 Suspicious readings incite pleasure: “intense engagements and eager commitments. It is a strange and multifaceted creature: mistrust of others, but also merciless excoriation of self; critique of the text, but also fascination with the text as a source of critique, or at least of contradiction. It is negative, but not only or unambiguously negative” (Felski 2015b: -10). 3 Sontag comments on the limitation of the spatial understanding of form inherited from Greek antiquity (1987[1964]: -103). See also ch. 2 in Felski’s Limits of Critique (2015b). appear to have remained somewhat steady companions throughout all of these disciplinary and institutional developments in the arts and humanities, I argue, are suspicious forms of reading, interpretation, and their still predominantly spatial conceptualisations. A question this contribution asks is to what extent petroculture studies in their engagement with literary fiction have fostered a hermeneutics of suspicion, a form of criticism and interpretation not devoid of but offering “specific pleas‐ ures” (Felski 2011: 216), 2 a way of reading and interpreting that shows “an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: 98). The hermeneutics of suspicion have sidelined other hermeneutic, caring, and loving reading practices as aesthetic experiences (see Felski 2020: 123). Already in the mid-1960s, Susan Sontag criticised the negative effects of a “culture based on excess, on overproduction” which had resulted in “a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience” (ibid.: 104) and, one may argue, this has intensified over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century; a culture in constant overdrive and in desperate search for novelty which also appears to manifest in an ever faster-paced academia as argued above. What was needed back then and is needed more so now is a “recover[y of] our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: 104, original emphasis). What could these “new affective styles and modes of argument” (Felski 2015b: 3) in petroculture studies look like? Can we imagine - and practice - a form of literary and cultural criticism, a method and way of interpreting that does away with the “critic-as-archaeologist” or “sleuth” (Felski 2015b: 7)? How would one read petrofiction, petroculture, or petromodernity in other than spatial terms, i.e. following something other than “a ‘deep-energy’ methodological perspective” (Macdonald 2013: 9)? 3 What does ‘being receptive’ to a text come to mean when we wrest it from the chokehold of negative critique? What of a text - or piece of art - leaves a mark on us? Are we perceptive to the “seductive shimmer” (Felski 2015b: 9) of art, are we still capable of being impressed and animated by the energy literature exudes? In the following I will provide a meta-discursive reading of the hermeneutics of suspicion at work in petroculture studies research. I hypothesise that its 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 288 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 4 In the early 2010s also often referred to as petroculture criticism (see Macdonald 2013: 9), petroculture studies is a subfield of the Energy Humanities in the process of being institutionalised through a biennial conference Petrocultures and an open-access journal Energy Humanities to be published with the Open Library of the Humanities Press: https: / / www.openlibhums.org/ news/ 811/ . The efforts to institutionalise petroculture studies, of course, go beyond these examples. firm grounding in spatial conceptualisations of interpretation are, in part, due to the very materiality of petroleum with which it grapples but also due to its theoretical and methodological positioning in cultural materialism. In this reading I adopt the idea of the impasse which oil as a substance creates and transfer this metaphor into my discussion of the hermeneutics at play in petroculture studies. 2 Petroculture Studies at a Methodological Impasse? The term ‘petrocultures’ refers to the social and cultural imaginaries, “the knowledge, practices, and discourses that result[] from the consumption of and subsequent dependence on oil” (Baptista 2017: n.pag.). ‘Petrocultures’ does not only denote the use of oil for cars which produce “the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere”, as Sontag has it, but also pertains to the refinement of oil, its transformation into derivatives such as polymers and plastics, which are indispensable for our capitalist consumer culture. Petroculture studies 4 may be one of the fields of research which has developed the strongest interdisciplinarity in the humanities. Its main objective “in theorizing energy as cultural is […] to expose and determine reasons for our acculturation to its hierarchy of material (and, increasingly, immaterial) forms and the manner in which they dictate fundamental aspects of social life and organization” (Macdonald 2013: 10, emphasis added). An interdisciplinary approach therefore is particularly apt to even begin fathoming the extents to which petrol has made modern life possible and sustains it still. Such a ‘petromodernity’ is defined by Stephanie LeMenager as “a modern life based in the cheap energy systems long made possible by petroleum” (2012: 60). Fossil fuels are a key driver and component of geopolitics but also a site of contestation and struggle: oil spillages are a recurring event which underscore the destructive force of human-made technologies and their (oftentimes unknown) long-term effects on ecosystems. Despite the spectacle and short-lived medial outrage such accidents create, “we moderns have been almost wilfully blind to its 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 289 5 Concepts such as Rob Nixon’s slow violence (2011) have, of course, aided both the theoretical and political work on making sense of and communicating the temporally and spatially dispersed effects of, for example, oil extraction. 6 This has led Imre Szeman and others to propose the Energy Humanities as “a hub for new ideas and insights about climate, energy, and culture”. See the Energy Humanities website: https: / / www.energyhumanities.ca/ . 7 A premise of petroculture studies’ engagement with literature firmly rooted in its spatial dispersal - or sprawl - is that there is no American, Nigerian or British oil novel since “[n]o oil culture can exist without the self-consciousness of the world energy markets and foreign wars that oil sustains” but there are regional manifestations and variations, “there can be Louisianan and Californian and Texas oil novels, films, poems, and blogs that spill into the world—while at the same time offering scrupulous accounts of material effects and aesthetics” (LeMenager 2014: -14). 8 While petroculture studies is particularly vibrant in North America, it has sparked literary and cultural studies research into the aesthetics of automobility and generic change such as the road or historical novel: see Ivry (2024) or the ERC-funded project “Off the Road: The Environmental Aesthetics of Early Automobility” at the University of Konstanz: https: / / offtheroad.org/ . In an attempt to extend the purview of petroculture studies, the sixth biennial conference by the Petrocultures Research Group in 2024 was hosted in both Los Angeles, USA and in Perth, Australia. 9 Given the interdisciplinary topography of petroculture studies, Balkan and Nandi furthermore align their research with projects in the Energy Humanities as they see economic history and energy as dialectically bound up (2021a: 3). [oil’s] impact on us” (Wilson, Szeman and Carlson 2017: 5). 5 Discourses on petrocultures and petromodernity do not only emphasise the entanglement of our conceptions of sociality, mobility, progress, and flow with the materiality and deep time of petroleum but also always emphasise an ethical and political dimension. In their introduction to On Petrocultures, Wilson et al. as early as in their third sentence stress that “over the course of our current century we will need to extract ourselves from our dependence on oil and make the transition to new energy sources and new ways of living” (2017: 3, emphasis added). Engaging with petromodernity and petroculture within literary studies thus means not only hunting for oil fictions “but also to interrogate the broader relationship between energy, representation, and culture” (ibid.: 6) and their interpretation. 6 Petroculture studies has since its inception been entangled with postcolonial 7 and world literary studies (see Macdonald 2012) 8 but, as Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi have argued, the “glaring lacuna of a sustained petrocultural paradigm in postcolonial contexts” (2021b: x) 9 had to be addressed outright: “the discourse around petroculture has thus far been centered on, and to a great extent mediated by, the resource aesthetics of the Global North, [but] the province of Oil Fictions is instead a world ecology transformed by petrol” (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 6-7). They therefore “do not distinguish between economic and aesthetic production”, but instead “recognize and seek to make visible 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 290 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 10 One could argue that research in petroculture studies on the literary and/ or artistic representation of oil and petroculture(s) is exemplary of what Dollimore and Sinfield described as “cultural materialism”: “a combination of historical context, theoretical method, political commitment, and textual analysis”(1992: vii). The espoused approach “studies the implication of literary texts in history” (viii) and affords examining the succession and/ or simultaneity of dominant energy sources and how they both inspire and make possible their cultural representation. See, for example, Dominic Boyer’s work on Sucro-, Carbo-, and Petropolitics in No More Fossils (2023) or the edited volume Materialism and the Critique of Energy (Bellamy and Diamanti 2018). the evident materiality of petroculture” (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 3, emphasis added). Thus, foundational to petroculture studies is its firm grounding in cultural materialism, i.e. the entwinement of material and symbolic culture and the quest to lay bare how oil - and other energy sources such as coal - “at least partially determine[] cultural production and reproduction on many levels” (Buell 2012: 274). 10 Fredrick Buell therefore argues that “coal capitalism devel‐ oped (appropriately, given its mode of extraction) a sinister cultural geography of depths and instructive descents” (Buell 2012: 279, emphasis added). Analysis of cultural productions such as literature and film therefore rests on a disclosing of their deep structure (Tiefenstruktur) through the cultural or literary critic turned archaeologist, as Buell remarks: “Oil geography suggests fascinating homologies with psychoanalytic theory and modern cultural practice, from therapy to poetry and art” (281). Moreover, the poetics of oil, which developed in the course of the twentieth century, were heavily shaped by excessive use and conversion of oil which “reappeared as an agent of chemical and social metamorphosis”, which entered into all spheres of life as well as the mind and body: “Bodies became literally oily, in what they ate, and in the cosmetics and clothes they put on; pharmaceuticals began doing the same thing for minds” (Buell 2012: 290, original emphasis). It therefore appears only consequential that one would employ a suspicious reading of the oil-trenched deep structures of the cultural representations of this all-pervasive substance. This short survey of petroculture studies research suggests that one of the key concerns was to make visible, to materialise oil and its derivatives. Jennifer Wenzel, in her review of LeMenager’s seminal Living Oil (2014) therefore states that “[m]atter thus becomes method” and “to materialize” denotes the “fundamental task [of] teasing out its various connotations of making material, representing, narrating, making visible, and […] making ‘something (seem to) appear’ (185) - an apt term for the contradictory elusiveness, invisibility, spectrality, and spectacle associated with oil and its relation to human bodies, work, and labor” (2015: 511, original emphasis). Indicative of such a quest to make oil seen and felt - like psychoanalytic readings attempt to do with trauma 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 291 11 She further elaborates that “the transnational, as the fundamental if elusive space of economic globalization, tends to be most visible in regional sites of capital production and transshipment. Commodity regionalism activates vital historical and ecological frames, opening an explicit point of view onto global-scale forces and flows, such that we can see and sense them” (2014: -12-13). - is the notion of oil as “the personal unconscious of modernity” that needs to be made visible: Narratives and visual narrative form can make something visible and make the unconscious conscious so that we can grasp it and perceive it. Thus the fairytale of transformation can be seen as one archetypal narrative that captures the potential magic of oil and its transformative power, acknowledging oil’s seductive qualities. (Petrocultures Research Group 2016: -47-48) Oil - both the material and its imaginary - needs to be made visible, unearthed, drilled for and engaged with cautiously due to its “seductive qualities” which again echoes Sontag’s criticism of interpretation as showcasing an “overt contempt for appearances” (98). Put differently by Karina Baptista: “The emerg‐ ing scholarship on petrocultures has taken on the task of investigating the cultural import of the materiality of oil in society, uncovering it as an ideological substratum in contemporary culture” (2017: n.pag., emphasis added). Could anything other than mistrust and suspicion follow from that? Zeroing in on the juncture of oil and literature, Jennifer Wenzel has similarly argued that to read for oil is to attend to its “simultaneous ubiquity and invisi‐ bility”, to ask “how do different kinds of texts […] either work against or contribute to oil’s invisibility” but also probe the “material aspects of literary production and consumption, […] how oil not only fuels the imagination in a metaphorical sense” but also powers the devices needed for consumption (2014: 157, original emphasis). Petroleum’s dispersal in space, time, and form therefore requires a wide interdisciplinary reading for/ of oil. Stephanie LeMenager, for example, employs a critical commodity regionalism in her work which entangles “cultural geography, arts practice, and architectural history” (2014: 12), 11 but she also attends to the affective dimension of petromodernity, our attachment to oil and the various (im)material possibilities it opens up and our fear of losing them. This petrophilia (LeMenager 2014: 84) and petromelancholia - “an unresolved grieving of conventional fossil fuel reserves” (2014: 16; 2011: 25; Vermeulen 2020: 177-178) - come to figure in theorisations of petro-epistemologies through which Imre Szeman has sought to make sense of how oil as “a concrete thing […] animates and enables all manner of abstract categories, including freedom, mobility, growth, entrepreneurship, and the future” but also how it can be used 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 292 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 12 The story was first published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera before being included in his posthumous collection Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Prima che tu dica “Pronto”) in 1993 (cf. McLaughlin 1998). 13 LeMenager, however, has worked to establish such a post-oil imaginary by repeatedly invoking the mutability and creativity of human imagination (2012: -59). as a heuristic to “interrogate the energy-demanding structures and categories of modernity” (2013: 146). Consider the following quote taken from Italo Calvino’s short story “The Petrol Pump” (La pompa di benzina), written in 1974 12 : “Money and the subterranean world are family and they go back a long way; their relationship unfolds in one cataclysm after another, sometimes desperately slow, sometimes quite sudden” (1995: -173, emphasis added). Doesn’t Calvino already set the tone for our interpretation? Do we not only have to attend to the surface to see the criticism formulated by the autodiegetic narrator? Not latent but in plain sight? We do not have to be suspicious of the text because it is already “doing the work of suspicion for us. Critic and work […] [are] bound together in an alliance of mutual mistrust” (Felski 2015b: 16). But then, what is it that we should or can do with “The Petrol Pump” or other petrofictions if they already perform the critical reading petroculture criticism would otherwise provide? Petroculture studies is firmly invested in examining, scrutinising, and troubling “an energy imaginary beyond fiction [which] underpins fossils as epitomizing a future of security, efficiency, and, even ‘sustainability’” (Macdonald 2013: 11). Scholarly work in the energy humanities has shown that the forms of energy on which our petromodernity rely create a literal impasse: “a situation in which progress is not possible due to entrenched disagreements or deadlocked opinions” (Petrocultures Research Group 2016: -29). This impasse manifests on three inter‐ related planes: Maybe most obviously in the material sense in that petroleum - like all fossil fuels - is a finite resource and will eventually have to be replaced as that which powers our combined but uneven modernities. Second, on a temporal plane, as an impasse which forecloses other futures due to its negative (often detrimental and irreversible) environmental impacts and, third, an imaginative impasse in that its all-pervasiveness given its entanglement with capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) makes another imaginary, a post-fossil imaginary, nigh impossible. 13 As the Petrocultures Research Group notes in reference to Lauren Berlant and in line with LeMenager’s concept of petromelancholia: While many of us remain optimistic that we can sustain our attachment to oil and the good life that it has come to define in the global West, it is increasingly clear that a continuance of the fossil economy is a form of ‘cruel optimism’ that not only carries forward old risks but also introduces radically new risks into our lives. (2016: 15) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 293 The Petrocultures Research Group sees the role of the arts and humanities clearly mapped out as they are “uniquely equipped to help us engage in a full, successful energy transition” as they provide the means to engage with “words, images, and performances” (2016: 41, original emphasis). They offer the necessary critique to lay bare the ideological foundations of our material and imaginative impasse, but also the speculative means through which we can imagine another, more just, sustainable future (42). The arts and humanities therefore fulfil an epistemic function: they “create knowledge that can help us to see the social change [that] is desirable and possible” (ibid.). In short they offer critique, reflection, knowledge, historical consciousness, language (43), and conceptual work (here again critical and generative). More than ten years ago, Graeme Macdonald noted that “an energy awareness has finally begun to spread through the Arts, Humanities and cultural analysis generally” and he highlights “key questions” that thus arise, among them “to what degree […] conventional modes” such as ecocriticism and other approaches have “enough sources and resources to deal with the size and scale” (2013: 12) of the various crises as well as the forms of dependence: our criticism, like our technology and terminology, might not be sufficiently refined. But interpretively skilled cultural practitioners prove crucial - not solely in decoding and countering the signifying prowess of oil capital, but in framing the social and planetary ‘story’ of oil and narrativizing alternative energy signatures and structures in a form and space outside orthodox or vested representations. (ibid.: 16, emphasis added) I therefore wish to inquire into an additional, fourth plane on which such an impasse may come to restrain our imagination and academic practice: The methodological impasse. The study of petrofiction, the reading of/ for oil has yet again set the hermeneutics of suspicion aflame and smothered the faintest flicker of new methods in light of the most recent energy turn. If, as Szeman and Boyer argue, “fossil fuels are saturated into every aspect of our social [and cultural] substance” (2017: 6), is it even possible to read closely but not deeply (Love 2010), to approach petrofiction not in orthodox, i.e. suspicious, symptomatic, and paranoid fashion but in a heterodox, i.e. loving and reparative, reading practice? The form and function of literature and literary criticism has more recently been questioned in petroculture studies: What does it accomplish to continue to attend to the literary using the rationales and orientations that emerged as part of this violent history of energy - to employ critical practices that cannot in any easy way be said to have developed outside of or 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 294 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 14 This thought furthermore resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s take on the impov‐ erished theoretical vocabulary which would afford attending to reparative ways of reading and knowing to which I will return later on (see Sedgwick 2003: 150). See also Heidi Liedke’s contribution to this volume for more on reparative surface reading as well as Stella Butter’s take on (in)consolability in pandemic fiction. in opposition to the history of extraction? Has literature been part of the problem of petrocultures more than we might imagine it to be - a device that, with exceptions, has worked to conceal our resource reality from us? (Szeman 2021: -269) While Szeman’s call to reflect on the suitability of methods employed in an engagement with petroleum, its derivatives and afforded possibilities is laudable, he nonetheless reproduces the petro-diction of depth and suspicion which pervades much of petroculture studies research. Literature as complicit, as veiling reality inspires a suspicion - or paranoia - both a lay reader and literary critic may not be able to resist and which further facilitates a hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a methodological impasse caused, to a large degree, by such suspicious, paranoid, and symptomatic reading in petroculture studies tends to discount an artworks singularity in favour of its sociability (Felski 2015b: 11) - particularly its reading as social critique however defined. Felski compellingly argues that they are not distinct spheres, that one should not “champion aesthetics over politics, talk up the wonders of literature’s radical or intransigent otherness, or seek to tear it out of the sticky embrace of naive or credulous readers” but do away with the false “belief that the ‘social’ aspects of literature […] can be peeled away from its ‘purely literary’ ones. No more separate spheres! ” (Felski 2015b: 11). What I therefore seek to explore are the methodological affordances of postcritical and new formalist approaches with particular emphasis on reparative motives to what is often read as oil or petrofiction. Such a combination, I hypothesise, will provide “a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, vocabulary - for forms” (Sontag 1987 [1964]: -103) 14 which in turn affords “a really accurate, sharp, loving description of the appearance of a work of art” (ibid., emphasis added). Key questions I thus formulate and seek to answer at least tentatively are: How to read those realist, fantastic or speculative stories of ecological injustice, environmental degradation, exploitation and expropriation, of technological, social and cultural infrastructure other than suspiciously or symptomatically? Put differently, by perking up the ears to the reverberance of postcritique, one might wonder how to read for attachment, attunement, and pleasure of energy aesthetics? How to go beyond a form of critique as unearthing the hidden truths from “the fossil record, as a sedimentary script” (Nixon 2011: 69)? What 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 295 15 See work done by the Petroculture Research Group and its subgroup After Oil Collective. lies beyond the confines of “a mindset of mistrust combined with a morally inflected presumption of guilt, a conviction that surface appearances were not only misleading, but deliberately deceptive” (Felski 2011: 221)? In a move to dismantle the belief in an often decried gap between politics and aesthetics (Levine 2023), between singularity and sociability (Felski 2015b: 11), this chapter dwells on that which animates narrative, its energy, that force which pulls us in and its value beyond market logics. It aims to do so by intervening in a discussion about methodology within petroculture studies given its, as I argue, heavy reliance on the marriage of an hermeneutics of suspicion and humanist activist approach to narrative more broadly, and literary fiction in particular. I do so by offering a mid-level reading (Felski 2015a: 741) of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) as a first step in this methodology-minded branch of petroculture studies. While some call for an extension of literary and cultural research on energy, 15 I wonder about the contribution(s) narratology, narrative and literary theory in light of postcritique can make to such a study of energy. What drives - fuels - energises narratives? I here further follow Szeman, who asks what it would “mean to refashion our critical approach to attend to the ontological power and capacities of energy - to make energy more than just a theme of our literary analysis but an animating principle of both its critical apparatus and its politics” (2021: 269) which, I argue, may afford attending to “the moral, affective, and cognitive bonds that infuse it [the text] with energy and life” (Felski 2015b: 28). Which concepts and understanding of value undergirds our readings - whatever form they take - of fiction? Does joy, attachment, attunement, and pleasure play a role here or are they bracketed in favour of a “politically effective” (Macdonald 2013: 1-2) interpretation? What constitutes a critical yet loving practice? Again, none of this is done to dissolve singularity into sociability or vice versa: To ask such questions is not to abandon politics for aesthetics. It is, rather, to contend that both art and politics are also a matter of connecting, composing, creating, coproducing, inventing, imagining, making possible: that neither is reducible to the piercing but one-eyed gaze of critique. (Felski 2015b: -17-18) Thus, for Felski, a caring practice does not substitute the sociality of an artwork for its singularity, does not substitute politics for aesthetics but it opens the possibility to conceive of “critique as an affective stance that orients us in certain ways” (2015b: 18, emphasis added). What I aim to tease out is in how far the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 296 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 16 This could, of course, also be framed in terms of the “business ontology” Mark Fisher described in his seminal work on Capitalist Realism (2009: 17). 17 See also Christine Künzel’s work on ‘barriers of the imagination’ (2024: 76) which are, according to her, to a large extent due to the overwriting of a cultural or social imaginary by an economic imaginary confined by market capitalist blinders (78). Thanks to Marie- Theres Stickel for pointing this out to me. 18 A survey of the whole field of petroculture studies in terms of methods would go beyond the scope of this chapter and I will therefore limit myself to honing in on the methods used in research at the juncture of literary criticism and petroculture studies. Just to be clear, this is not a genre-defining discussion; I do not intend to make a case for or against any of the texts discussed as oil or petrofiction or something else. It is a metadiscursive discussion of scholarly engagements with these texts read as petrofiction and a close - but not deep - reading of the mind style of such work, i.e. their theoretical and hermeneutic underpinnings. Moreover, this is also not to discredit or disparage the work done by scholars in petroculture, literary or cultural studies. “thought style that slices across differences of field and discipline” (ibid.: 2, original emphasis), i.e. deep suspicious reading, has steered much of twentyfirst-century research, but especially petroculture studies, into a methodological impasse. I content that this impasse is inextricably tied in with the legitimation crises mapped out in the introduction to this volume and which Felski traces back to the “sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? ” (2015b: 5). The vocabulary of economics which provides the conceptual metaphors we describe our relation to literature with 16 have left us both in an imaginary and methodological impasse, 17 i.e. left us unable to image, describe, and narrate another story of our love for and attachment to literature and the arts: “Both aesthetic and social worth, it seems, can only be cashed out in terms of a rhetoric of againstness” (Felski 2015b: 17, original emphasis). Do we only read so that we can assign a piece of art to a category of being complicit or resistant (see Felski 2020: x) to any -ism one is currently investigating? Does our mimetic impulse in reading (see Sontag 1987 [1964]: 96) rule out any other understanding and interpretation of a literary text as reflection of the world (see Serpell 2017: 1233)? Does postcritique and new formalism hold the potential to “shake up our mimetic approach to form and ethics” (Serpell 2017: 1234) and, by extension, politics? I would like to dwell on the confluence of politics and aesthetics in postcritical and new formalist readings as I believe this to be a productive combinatory approach to Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were  18 to break the methodological and imaginative impasse outlined above. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 297 19 Henry Ivry’s very dense reading of How Beautiful We Were and Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) in light of the recent infrastructural turn makes a compelling argument for the generic changes the historical novel has undergone in the twenty-first century as an age of crisis: The two novels as “narratives of infrastructure trace an alternative archive of colonial, neocolonial, and contemporary violence while also pointing to an insurgent politics within the contemporary African novel. These books […] rehistoricize the supposed contemporaneity of infrastructural crisis while using the historical novel to build infrastructures otherwise. Serpell and Mbue represent two examples of a nascent genre that I describe throughout this article as the ‘historical novel of infrastructure’” (2024: -151). 20 Nandi also describes this as a “petro-matrix” (2021: 132-133) akin to Aníbal Quijano’s colonial matrix of power (see Mignolo 2007: 156). 3 A Mid-Level Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were Materials resonate - in bodies, theories, aesthetics. Petroleum is one such material that due its shapeshifting properties over large temporal scales but also its residual and derivative forms holds sway in academic discourses from economics, environmental sciences, geology, sociology to literary and cultural studies. When it comes to oil fictions (Balkan and Nandi 2021a: 4) and a critic’s need - or desire - to lay bare the oily deep structures of a piece of art, especially literary texts, metaphors of depth abound in analytical petro-diction. A case in point is Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), which is predominantly read as a cautionary tale about “environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company” as the blurb on the book informs its readers - which may already incite suspicion to be on the lookout for “the stranger,” usually “a sinister corporate interloper, working behind the scenes with local elites to change the destiny of local lives by dragging them and their territory into petromodernity” (Macdonald 2012: 31). Research on Mbue’s novel has focused on the representation of ecological consciousness (Mwaga, Mutie and Gaita 2024), said environmental degradation and its slow violence (Ohagwam and Albert 2024; Tournay-Theodotou 2024), has performed postcolonial ecocritical (Xausa 2023) or infrastructural readings (Ivry 2024). 19 All these studies work interdisciplinarily; yet most read the novel as that which already does the work of the suspicious critic, of the archaeologist who unearths the hidden truths of the neocolonial practices of exploitation and environmental degradation or reads the novel symptomatically as representative of the neoliberal spectre that haunts the ever-growing global precariat. It is also viewed as a case in point of a postcolonial project which seeks to unmask the intricate entanglement of petroeconomies and colonialism. 20 Both tend to rely on a practice of interpretation which “make art into an article for use” (Sontag 1987[1964]: 101) to pursue 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 298 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis or support a however ideologically or politically inflected agenda. A mid-level reading, inspired by both postcritical and new formalist thinking and reading, does not hierarchically order discourse or form over content; it perceives of both as intricately bound up (cf. Sontag 1987[1964]: 96). I will therefore approach the story How Beautiful We Were tells via its formal features and aim for a sharp but loving description of both. The novel is set in Kosawa, a fictional African village, and tells a tale of resistance: The corrupt government of the fictional country has sold the village’s land off to a US-American petro-giant, Pexton. The drilling for and transportation of oil through pipelines has not only left the land altered beyond recognition but it has also resulted in spillages which negatively - or, rather, lethally - affect the village’s people and ecosystem. As readers we enter the story at a moment in time in which the villagers are desperate for answers, reparation, and prevention of future accidents after three decades of drilling. But despite their pleas, the Pexton representatives do not give in. The oil near Kosawa therefore constitutes a resource curse as the novel explores “the repercussions of having mineral belongings that literally undermine a community or society’s capacity to belong” (Nixon 2011: 69) and the role the petro-despotism plays in that. To the people of Kosawa the future is - who would have thought - foreclosed due to an impasse: the nearing end is declared in the opening line and thus the future appears predetermined: “We should have known the end was near. How could we not have known? ” (Mbue 2021: 3). The doom and gloom does not keep the villagers from fighting back, which, however, “will come at a steep price - one which generation after generation will have to pay” (Mbue 2021: paratext). The novel as “extraction literature” (Szeman 2021: 269) in the vast field of “energy art” (Macdonald 2013: 12), read for plot only, ticks some of the boxes of oil or petrofiction outlined by Macdonald: it provides an “extraction narrative” that spans the local and transnational, it stages the “dramatic transformation of space, place and lifestyle,” it adds “tales of corporate corruption and petro-despotism; spill and disaster; the conflict between oil capital and labor” (ibid.: 12-13) to a particular locale. The book’s blurb furthermore immediately steeps the environment(al) in economic terms: “Promises of clean-up and financial reparations are made - and broken” by both Pexton and the corrupt government. When an oil well explodes due to a “broken oil-well head, long overdue for replacement,” Thula as character-narrator asks: “but why should Pexton replace it when the cost of its negligence would be borne largely by us? “ (Mbue 2021: 28). The despot, “His Excellency” (Mbue 2021: 7), 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 299 21 It may be worthwhile to consider the almost Kafkaesque quality of the petrodespotic state apparatus Mbue imagines here, especially in light of what Daniel Hartley has called “impersonality under neoliberalism” (2019). and the government before him “had given us to Pexton” (11) 21 which measures anything and everything in use and exchange value only. The novel opens in the collective voice (“we”) of “The Children,” a group of peers in the village, who introduce the dominant conflict and immediately invoke the tragic nature of the story, i.e. a prefiguration of a future impasse. Tragedy furthermore figures in formal terms as the collective voice can be read as a “‘Greek chorus’ providing interpretations […] and moving the plot forward” (Mwaga, Mutie and Gaita 2024: 169) and as a use of agon which “alludes to the act in classical Greek theatre in which characters debate the play’s dominant conflict” (Osinubi 2024: 16-17): The story begins with a visit of the stranger - here three Pexton representatives - whom the villagers implore to prevent oil spillages which have poisoned both land and people: “We hoped the men would look into our eyes and feel something for us. […] They’d come for Pexton, to keep its conscience clean; they hadn’t come for us” (Mbue 2021: 5). It is the “village madman” (11), Konga, who nabs the officials’ car keys, threatening them to swallow it should they not comply with the demands made by the village. To deescalate the situation, the three representatives are taken hostage and a conflict is set in motion which will spiral out of control as the novel progresses. Alternating between individual character narrators and we-narration, the tragic plot spans several decades in the course of which the village is raided by armed government forces, leaving many dead and wounded, the arrival of the Restoration Movement, which aims to aid the village in its fight for justice, as well as violent vigilante action by The Five - a small part of The Children - who bomb Pexton’s infrastructure. The transnational tragedy, however locally grounded, “deal[s] with affairs of state, revolts against authority, thrusting ambition, court intrigues, violations of justice, struggles for sovereignty” but instead of focussing “on the careers of high-born figures whose lives and deaths have momentous consequences for society as a whole” (Eagleton 2020: 3) as tragic drama would, the novel centres on the village as collective as well as a select few of its members, among them Thula, who is given the opportunity to study in the US and returns to lead a peaceful fight for justice. How Beautiful We Were is polyphonic due to its shifting narration from indi‐ vidual character narrators to we-narration (Bekhta 2017: 165; Xausa 2023: 201), all of which hinge, however, on the Nangi family (Mbue 2021: 25). Natalya Bekhta’s helpful terminological and theoretical differentiation between we-nar‐ ratives and we-narration affords homing in on the narrative form of the novel: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 300 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 22 See for example: “We would have no such chance. Of all the ways we’d imagined on those nights when we’d lain in bed stiff with trepidation, why did we never consider that we’d be away when the soldiers arrived and we’d return to find them waiting for us in the square, nine guns loaded and pointed at us? […] How fast the bullets came. How we stumbled, how we staggered, how we cried, fleeing into the forest. How heavy the blood flowed - the blood of our families, the blood of our friends. Why do we hope on when life has revealed itself to be meaningless? ” (Mbue 2021: 129, emphasis added). How Beautiful We Were uses shifts in first-person narration and we-narration; the latter thus forms only a part of the novel’s overall narrative structure. Nonetheless, the sections narrated by ‘The Children’ in first-person plural are illustrative of “the importance of social minds in fiction and, in particular, of intersubjectivity rooted in socially distributed, situated, or extended cognition” (Bekhta 2017: 171, original emphasis). ‘The Children’ function as “a collective agent - a collective subjectivity which the narrative performatively creates and maintains throughout its course” (ibid.: 177). The collectively narrated sections furthermore combine free indirect and direct speech in dialogue, contributing to “we-narrative’s own set of mimetic conventions, creating the rules of ‘collective realism’” (ibid.: 174). The we-narrator’s language use may appear somewhat paradoxical in that rhetorical questions, syntactic inversions (see also Tournay-Theodotou 2024: 286), repetitions (esp. first-person plural pronoun but also anaphora) 22 and an overall “archaic narrative mode” (Tournay- Theodotou 2024: 287) are juxtaposed with more childish language such as calling the representatives the “Sick One” or the “Round One” (Mbue 2021: 4), which casts them as types or stock figures. In light of the overall narrative structure of the novel, the paradoxical style dissolves in that the story shifts between narrators and tense, between we-narrator and individual character narrators, past and present tense. The repeated use of the conditional - “we should have known” (3), “we would have left,” “would have said,” “would have walked” (11) - can be interpreted as a narrative strategy that creates additional uncertainty about the happenings or events on story level, it marks the events as extraordinary - even in an already extraordinary situation, further igniting a paranoia and suspicion of the text’s surface. It furthermore creates a sense of (un)certainty about the interpretative sovereignty of the narrating instance by which I mean that the level of transmission (discourse) becomes more discernible, granting the narrative a metafictional quality. Additionally, the we-narrator clearly marks their own prejudices and the limitations of their perspective, for example, in terms of Konga’s madness: “We thought him incapable of anger toward anyone but the voices in his head and the spirit that had ruined him. We thought him 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 301 23 Tournay-Theodotou, reading Konga as allegory of resistance, furthermore points to the evocation of “the historical institution of slavery” due to “the use of ‘overseer’ […] which simultaneously points to the new colonisers and the contemporary global order of exploitation” (2024: 293) continuing the symptomatic line of argumentation the novel inspires. unaware of everyone and everything around him besides his mediate needs and the phantoms following him” (17). The novel furthermore probes the boundaries of first-person character narration by making use of scale variance characteristic of contemporary climate (see Caracciolo 2022: 49-50) and petrofiction (see Macdonald 2013: 12-13). In a chapter narrated and focalised by then nine-yearold Thula, one of ‘The Children,’ focalisation suddenly shifts and appears to follow the wails of the village’s women as they learn of the disappearance - and likely death - of six of their men: Wives and daughters and mothers begin wailing, their voices flying through the double doors of Woja Beki’s house, over the apples trees in his compound, along the path that leads to Gardens, through the supervisors’ offices and the school Pexton built for the children there, past their clinic, into the meeting hall where the laborers gather on many evenings to reminisce about the distant homes they left behind to work for Pexton, onto the vast, grassless field on which stand structures of metal spewing fire and smoke, and down into the wells, where they become one with the oil. (Mbue 2021: -47) The women’s wails traverse the space between the village and the oil wells of the euphemistically called “Gardens” where foreign men extract the crude mingled with the pain and desperation of the villagers. The section furthermore juxtaposes the precarious state of the villagers - both materially and mentally - with the prosperity of both the corrupt local Woja Beki as well as the Pexton employees who are provided with an infrastructure the Kosawa residents are in desperate need of. The traversal of scale and juxtaposition drives home the overarching criticism the novel appears to formulate in its symptomatic diagnostic of petro-economics: The prosperity of the West or, rather, the global North more broadly, is based on and continues to rely on exploitation of resources and people in the global South: We wondered if America was populated with cheerful people like that overseer, which made it hard for us to understand them: How could they be happy when we were dying for their sake? Was it possible they knew nothing of our plight? Was Pexton lying to them, just as they were lying to us? (Mbue 2021: 72) 23 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 302 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 24 See also Magdalena Pfalzgraf ’s contribution to this volume. As outlined above, even paratextual elements such as the blurb add to a symptomatic reading and highlight the suspicious work done by the novel for its readers. One could therefore ask if such suspicious texts remain flatter in their didacticism, stultifying rather than enticing (see Sedgwick 2003: 124; Felski 2015b: 34). Moreover, one may wonder in line with Sedgwick about the political effectiveness of such “paranoid trust in exposure […]. What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent? ” (Sedgwick 2003: 141). In the case of Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were as petroor oil fiction, the reader is cast as ally 24 of the environmentally conscious critic - here: the text itself. Text and reader are partners in the trenches in a war on the corporate West, allied forces situated on the right side of history, united in the suspicion of petro-capitalism. Does such a writing and reading practice not evoke a self-righteousness which hinders more than it incites an activist (humanist) stance? Even though the text points to the morally and ethically objectionable practices and entanglements, does a reader as ally not feel like they deserve their indulgence? But what if one were to resist taking “the predetermined paths” (Felski 2015b: 34) of paranoid, symptomatic, and suspicious reading - sticking with the spatial metaphors - and venture into postcritical territory, not following the fast lane dictated by the suspicious text which is bound to end up in an impasse; what if one were to allow for the hermeneutics of suspicion to be accompanied, if not be replaced, by “a ‘hermeneutics of restoration’ [which] is infused with moments of wonder, reverence, exaltation, hope, epiphany, or joy” (Felski 2015b: 32)? Such a “flexible to-and-fro movement” between “paranoid and reparative critical practices” is what I envision a mid-level reading to consist of, “not as theoretical ideologies (and certainly not as stable personality types of critics), but as changing and heterogeneous relational stances” (Sedgwick 2003: 128). Such a middle road would create space for “other ways of knowing, ways less oriented around suspicion” (ibid.: 143) so that the “monopolistic program of paranoid knowing” would be met with reparative motives, “inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’). What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’? ” (ibid.: 144). Here postcritique’s emphasis on attachment and love as well as new formalism’s attention to form offer a way out of “the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure” (ibid.). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 Energy, Aesthetics, and the Role of Interpretation in Petroculture Studies 303 This is not to postulate a naïve reading or to deny “the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (ibid.: 127-128), but inspired by a particular affective, political stance. What is the ethical possibility that is afforded by and in the Energy Humanities? What are the spaces of possibility? ‘We’ all know that oil is bad - don’t we? So what do we read these texts for? Are we stuck in a reading in favour of post-oil economies and futures and reading against petro-capitalism? Such a reparative, loving practice would afford methodologically, ethically, and politically “to surrender” and “to experience surprise,” both good and bad: “Hope […] is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates” (Sedgwick 2003: 146, emphasis added). Conceiving of art and literature as that which imbues such an energy, interpretation approached via a reparative mode casts it in line with Sontag’s call “to make works of art […] more, rather than less” but to not ursurp them (1987[1964]: 104), interpretation thus appears as “additive and accretive,” that which “nurture[s]; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self ” (Sedgwick 2003: 149, emphasis added). Sontag’s vocabulary of form therefore may productively compliment Sedgwick’s vocabulary of affect (2003: 145) so that one may attend to the directionality and efficacy of reading and interpretation which “resides somewhere else than in the relation of demystification to knowledge per se” (ibid.). Recast in such reparative motives, the use of modal verbs and what-if ’s signals the power of storytelling to allow for a dwelling in the possible in How Beautiful We Were: “We’re somewhere else, thinking of Kosawa, thinking of Thula. We’re wondering if Thula would still be fighting if she were alive. It’s such moments that the children of our children come to us and say, please, Yaya, please, Big Papa, tell us a story” (Mbue 2021: 360, emphasis added). Storytelling here thus appears as a reparative, nurturing, caring practice which fosters intergenerational relations - of course not without transmitting injustices and trauma along the way - which goes to show “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture - even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2003: 150-151). The tragic story and its entanglement with its polyphonic form, narrative structure, and poetic qualities may surprise its readers, thus providing glimpses of a seductive shimmer despite - or, rather, amidst - its violent plot. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0013 304 Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis 4 Conclusion This contribution has sought to highlight the methodological impasse which I see petroculture studies steering into and has argued that while the herme‐ neutics of suspicion do offer specific pleasures of exposure, they nonetheless may foreclose being impressed by the positive affect and aesthetics of art and literature. A continued exploration of the affordances of postcritque and new formalism in the field of petroculture studies opens up future avenues of research which 1) could flesh out the more intricate mechanics of midlevel reading, 2) ask what the knowledge generated, to speak with Sedgwick, does, 3) further explore what animates literature, what energises narrative, and, conntected to that, which role narrative theory and narratology play in filling these gaps. While I content that a mid-level reading inspired by postcritical and new formalist work is a step into the right direction, I believe that it will take more to break the methodological stalemate of suspicion and depth. Other oil or petrofictions such as Italo Calvino’s short story “The Petrol Pump” (1974), Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010), Adolphsen and Barslund’s Machine (2007) and Sea State. 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World Literary Dynamics 1 This phrase from an article in the Washington Post ( Joselow et al. 2021) was a central motif in a lot of other news coverage of COP26, too. 2 The latter slogan was part of the stage design at COP26, the former a set phrase in news reporting and political statements about the event. A three-dimensional version of Blue Marble, the iconic photograph taken on the Apollo 17 space mission in 1972, hung from the ceiling at the summit venue in Glasgow. Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South Jan Rupp 1 Introduction: Re-Membering the Planet from the Global South The role of literature and culture in relation to today’s ecological crisis has become a staple of research and wider public debate. Rather than bare scientific fact, scholars and activists alike have highlighted the need for cultural imagina‐ tion and persuasive storytelling in order to mobilise people to work collectively towards ensuring the planet’s future. Arguably one of the most influential images circulating around environmental activism, especially in the West, has been Blue Marble. Typically, it serves to juxtapose the dystopian narrative of climate change with a story of community, hope, and wonder. As a case in point, Blue Marble was omnipresent at the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021, widely billed as the “last and best chance” 1 to save the planet. Another slogan at the event said: “We can do this, if we act now”. 2 In tandem with Blue Marble and its lingering gaze from outer space the suggestion seemed to be that the earth’s beauty might yet be preserved, even at the last minute. Blue Marble does offer a powerful, but also problematic imaginary, glossing over the large-scale and often irreversible environmental damage that the planet has already suffered. While the timeless wonder of Blue Marble might prompt climate action, at best, it will feed an environmentalist nostalgia that will hinder such action at worst. Given these biases and blind spots of Western 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 3 See inter alia, the studies by DeLoughrey (2019), DeLoughrey et al. (2015), and Müller et al. (2018b). environmentalism - a failure to confront extant environmental harm and nostalgia for the earth’s beauty - in the academy and beyond, I suggest that literatures of the Global South engaging environmental themes offer some major spatiotemporal redress and deserve a more central place within new conjunctures and directions of literary and cultural studies. In so doing, I follow a reorientation in Anglophone literary studies and the (environmental) humanities more broadly, which has redirected attention from Western literary practices and epistemologies in the Global North to long-standing but so far often neglected non-Western creative traditions and bodies of thought in the Global South. 3 Global South literatures often reveal an elaborate record of past climate catastrophe, which, resonating with Lawrence Buell’s (2017) concept of ‘environmental memory’, may provide important alternative environmental imaginaries, serve to ‘re-member’ (if not heal) the planet, and prevent further decline. Environmental memory is an “uncommon term with no set definition” (Buell 2017: 96), which seeks to capture “the sense […] of environments as lived experience in the fourth dimension - i.e. the intimation of human life and history as unfolding within the context of human embeddedness in webs of shifting environmental circumstance” (ibid.) of varying duration. To flesh out the fourth dimension, Buell differentiates various “spatiotemporal scales” (ibid.: 97) and frames of memory. They range from the longue durée of biogeological memory, of both human and nonhuman life shaped by place, to the individual and collective uses of environmental memory in communities and nations. The interplay and extension of scales connects Buell’s endeavour to recent concerns with “planetary memory” (Bond et al. 2017) and “memory after humanism” (Knittel and Driscoll 2017), which have likewise pushed boundaries of memory to the planetary expanse of past human impact, as well as beyond the human to explore its relations with other species and biotic systems. As Buell argues, “for the sake of the planetary future of humans and nonhu‐ mans alike” it is vital “to develop robust, shared conceptions of environmental memory that extend much further back in time than the history of homo sapiens itself, let alone the lifetimes of particular individuals” (2017: 97). To confront “the inertial force of […] ‘environmental amnesia’” (ibid.: 96), Buell highlights the role of “expressive media” such as narrative and literature for the retrieval and transmission of “effective environmental memory” (ibid.: 97). Literature can obviously thematise and stage environmental memory at all the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 312 Jan Rupp 4 On this dynamic of hemispheric exchange see also Müller et al. (2018b). four scales outlined, including that of planetary time and space. The further back texts recede into literary history, beyond the scale of individual lives, the more literature can also become a repository of environmental memory. Taking my cue from Buell, I argue for particularly effective environmental memory in literatures from the Global South, which are conducive to projecting environmental memory at a planetary scale indeed. As a concept, the Global South reaches beyond regional, national, even hemispheric frames to include the flow of people, ideas, and goods along South-to-South itineraries as well as to and from the Global North (see Levander and Mignolo 2011). 4 The concept “refers to the geopolitical and epistemological fabric that unifies an area of the world - principally, that which was subjected to colonialism - but which may include the South contained within North” (Müller 2018a: 3). In literary studies and the environmental humanities, discourses on the Global South have come to complement postcolonial paradigms. While a focus on the Global South shares in previous postcolonial interventions, it expands conceptions of what once were called the new literatures in English (in newly independent nations) by linking these to other transnational and linguistic spaces (see Müller et al. 2018b). As a former colonial frontier, present-day mesh of trans‐ cultural entanglements, and site of critical border-thinking, the Global South is increasingly emerging as an important conjuncture for new directions in the humanities and beyond. As I argue, figurations of environmental memory from the Global South offer especially pertinent and persuasive narratives to address and navigate world-encompassing developments, calling for close inquiry in terms of what Erin James (2015) has delineated as a new interdisciplinary approach of ‘econarratology’ (see also Hannah Klaubert’s contribution to this volume). Moreover, they constitute a body of literature as “worldly intervention” (Cheah 2016: 16), as I will specify with respect to different positions in world literature studies below. Global South narratives thus contribute to meeting a central challenge of “ecological storytelling” (Heise 2005: 129) in the twenty-first century: “namely, developing modes of narration that convey a sense of ecosystems not only in their local and regional manifestations, but also in their global reach” (ibid.: 130). Emerging from contexts and climate zones in which the global environmental crisis is most keenly felt, these narratives retrieve fundamental ecological insights that may sensitise readers everywhere to the planet’s precarious present, help to re-member the planet, and thus work towards ensuring a viable future. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 313 2 Econarratology and World Literature Studies: Spatiotemporal and Transgeneric Adjustments It is worth elaborating further on pertinent theoretical perspectives, specifically on the disciplinary intersection between narratology, ecocriticism, and world literature studies as they have all been subject to revision through postcolonial or decolonial perspectives. However, this process is far from complete and requires greater attention still on a broader variety of narratives from the Global South. For one, I want to make a case for including literary historical archives, as a complement to what might be called the presentism or preoccupation with a ‘future anterior’ of climate disaster in current writing and scholarship (see Crownshaw 2017). Environmentally oriented analyses of literature and narrative have largely been focused on speculative fiction - all manner of ‘cli-fi’, petrofiction, or dystopian novels (see Johns-Putra 2016) - that ponders future consequences of climate change. By contrast, narratives from the Global South offer important long-term memories of environmental catastrophe. They extend far back in biogeological time, to speak with Buell, and thus lend urgency to calls for climate action today. Moreover, I argue for an expressly transgeneric approach in a critical landscape where all too often the study of world literature continues to centre around the novel. Greater generic diversity, importantly taking in poetry, stands to redress this balance and to accommodate the central place specifically of performance poetry in literatures of the Global South. These adjustments can certainly build on recent conceptual openings in the fields concerned. Central here are Erin James’s (2015) project of ‘econarratol‐ ogy’, as well as the wide-ranging study of environmental narrative. Environ‐ mental narrative is broadly defined as “any type of narrative in any media that foregrounds ecological issues […], often but not always with the openly stated intention of bringing about social change” (Weik von Mossner 2017: 3). Rather than read at arm’s length, “eco-narratives” (Heise 2005: 129) are understood as engaging the reader intimately, mobilising empathy and affect, and potentially inducing change with respect to the environment and ecological concerns far beyond the page or reading experience. In this light, James (2015) locates a special potential for cross-cultural dialogue in eco-narratives. By comprehending and comparing various storyworlds with one another, a host of local and culture-specific references come together in what she metaphorically envisions as a ‘storyworld accord’. Comprehension and cross-cultural understanding in and through narrative thus play an important role for social change well beyond books, as James’s analogy with the politics of international climate action makes clear. Eventually, getting to know about 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 314 Jan Rupp 5 For this section I have built on my argument in two further publications (cf. Rupp 2019, 2021). and analysing narratives from around the globe stands to serve an important environmental cause. To bring about this dialogue on environmental matters between equal partners, James highlights the potential of postcolonial ecologies and non-realist narratives, in contradistinction to the privileging, long dominant in Western ecocritical perspectives, of realist styles of nature writing by the likes of Henry David Thoreau, the British Romantics, and their modern-day successors. With a view to the Global South, I want to take this emphasis on engaging plural storyworlds further, including literary archives of environmental catastrophe. Works from the Global South tend to elaborate memories of environmental disaster and degradation while frequently presenting alternative ecologies that might be adduced imaginatively to engage and cope with the mounting challenge of climate change. Moreover, arising from a century-long history of colonialism, displacement, forced labour, and successive waves of global migration, environmental imaginaries in narratives of the Global South tend to be dual in nature, at once local and global. Storyworlds in literatures of the Global South are not limited to place, in other words - the referent of their storyworlds is frequently the planet at large. As for world literature studies, I build on a similar dynamic to the range and interplay of postcolonial storyworlds. The study of world literature has also seen an extension from Euro-American canons to explore a plurality of world literatures. This process carries a decidedly postcolonial inflection, with critics like Gayatri Spivak (2012) rejecting Western cultural paradigms of globalisation and comparative literature in favour of the notion of planetarity. In this new planetary expanse of world literatures, regions in the Global South such as the Caribbean play a significant role (see Rupp 2022). 5 From a materialist and ecocritical vantage point, the Caribbean has been ascribed pivotal significance, as a tradition of writing that registers world-ecological developments. Given the Caribbean’s role as a central location and theatre of the capitalist world-system from the time of New World discovery and colonialism onwards, Caribbean writings, however local in outlook, can be seen to have world-literary value in that they speak to larger global developments and their ecological repercussions almost by default (see Campbell and Niblett 2016). While the formative impact of the capitalist world-system can hardly be denied, I follow other scholars in granting literature a more active relation to it. In Pheng Cheah’s (2016) account of world writing from the South, literature’s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 315 relative autonomy and potential for contestation is an important extension. As much as acknowledging the inscription of material conditions, literature’s ca‐ pacity for “worldly intervention” (Cheah 2016: 16), realised in agentic processes of literary worlding and world-making, deserves greater emphasis indeed. The idea of world literature as a ‘subjective genitive’ - literature ‘of ’ the world and circulating across it - is as valid as world literature in the form of an ‘objective genitive’ - literature ‘about’ the world and intervening in it by proposing alternative models of ‘world’ and world-making. To sum up, my conceptual adjustments for studying narratives from the Global South are as follows: As for econarratology, I will expand recent concerns with postcolonial storyworlds to include literary history as well as memories of past environmental disaster. As for world literature, I will reorient attention to foreground a range of understudied planetary literatures and their world-making intervention, as well as so far neglected genres such as poetry. Analysing figurations of environmental memory and world writing from the Global South requires just such a complex spatiotemporal and transgeneric approach. 3 Early Anthropocene Fictions in Caribbean Literary History As for a first case study, I am turning to Caribbean literary history to explore long-term perspectives of planetary change as mediated and remembered in the region’s writing. From a body of mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novels, which often revisit rural post-plantation island communities, I will zoom in on to offer a close reading of Andrew Salkey’s A Quality of Violence (1959) further below. Like other narratives of the decolonisation era, Salkey’s novel shifts back to remember social and ecological transformations in the light of postcolonial nation-building. Opening a broad vista on the history of empire, Salkey adds to a set of historical ‘Anthropocene fictions’ (see Trexler 2015): Anthropocene fictions avant la lettre. It is a novel that not only predates current debates, but importantly complements recent explorations of planetary memory as a future anterior in climate change fiction. Caribbean literary history offers a long memory of past climate change and catastrophe through empire and colonisation. Moreover, a focus on Caribbean writing stands to reroute Anthropocene discourses not only in historical and temporal, but also in spatial terms, filling in perspectives from the Global South which scholars of postcolonial and indigenous literatures have found missing. Remembering the Anthropocene from the tropics thus answers to the “need for reimagining the Caribbean in a world context” (Nanton 2017: n.p.). In 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 316 Jan Rupp his critical study Frontiers of the Caribbean, Vincentian writer Philip Nanton raises the question: “how can a small, increasingly ignored, dependent region contribute to the dominant debate of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries - i.e. the impact and meaning of globalisation? ” (ibid.). Nanton’s major concern lies with the concept of frontier and its ongoing relevance. As a colonial legacy, the frontier demarcates the progress of civilisation, but it has long been challenged by critical border-thinking. As Nanton demonstrates, local Caribbean practices continue to inform alternative epistemologies and thus contribute to reformulating the frontier as a “global production” (ibid.). A range of other recent scholarship echoes this significance of renegotiating borders - whether between civilisation and the wild, history and nature, or the human and nonhuman. Revising such borders and adapting ecological knowledge is widely seen as a key to mitigating climate change and ensuring the planet’s future. The Caribbean and other island spaces are central to this local and global production of knowledge. Enlisting and maintaining environmental memory, as mediated by Caribbean writing, similarly stands to encompass both regional and planetary scales - adding to the Caribbean’s role as a location of ‘world-ecology’, in Jason Moore’s (2003) term, or as a mesh of Caribbean spaces world-wide (see Boyce Davies 2013). Regions in the Global South, like the Caribbean, are also key to redressing cultural knowledge around spatiotemporal borders. In her Allegories of the Anthropocene, Elizabeth DeLoughrey starts out by criticising that scholarship of the “Anthropocene cultural imaginary is focused almost exclusively on the viewpoints of the global north” (2019: 2). A “lack of engagement with postcolonial and Indigenous perspectives”, she observes, has led to a sense of “novelty of crisis rather than being attentive to the historical continuity of dispossession and disaster caused by empire” (ibid.: 2). DeLoughrey shifts emphasis on regions in the Global South, which “have been and continue to be at the forefront of ecologically devastating climate change” (ibid.). More specifically, she focuses on island narratives from the South Pacific to the Caribbean, covering a wide range of texts from the work of Marshallese poet Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner to contemporary Caribbean fiction. In all these examples, DeLoughrey notes, the island serves as an allegorical figure of “a world in ecological crisis” (ibid.). Global South narratives thus mobilise a longer cultural history in which the island has figured as “an analogue for the globe” (ibid.: 6). In the current climate crisis, this metonymic relationship allows for a “scalar telescoping between local and global, island and Earth” (ibid.). If DeLoughrey shifts attention to island regions in the Global South, her re‐ routing of Anthropocene discourses implies a historical as well as geographical 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 317 turn: “Turning to Indigenous and postcolonial island writers and artists, we can see that catastrophic ruptures to social and ecological systems have already been experienced through the violent processes of empire” (ibid.: 7). Reading Global South narratives, this suggests, does not so much yield planetary memories of a future anterior. Rather, it involves remembering the Anthropocene as an “apocalypse [that] has already happened”, and “continues because empire is a process” (ibid.). From this insight arises a concern to “historicize a long history of rupture in small-scale climate systems such as islands” (ibid.). Rather than a future projection, planetary memory here circles back to the history of coloni‐ sation and plantation slavery, as “a remembrance of a violent historical past with ongoing repercussions for the present” (ibid.). This historicizing impulse clearly highlights the role of memory, of confronting empire’s long-standing record of past climate change to mitigate the planet’s present and future. Memory thus has an important political, ethical, and ecological function, as echoed by scholars of environmental memory like Buell. Literature, as we have seen, may serve as an important medium of construct‐ ing and retrieving environmental memory. It may even project or predict a memory of the future, as in much of current climate change fiction. But conversely, scholars have begun to reassess literary archives as a record of past climate change. Indeed, such repositories - literary mediations of catastrophes that have already happened - hold a special potential for the long-term, planetary environmental memory stressed by Buell. It is for this reason that I turn to literary history and an earlier body of mid-twentieth-century Caribbean writing, which itself circles back to explore ecological histories of empire. Salkey’s A Quality of Violence belongs to a body of decolonisation-era narra‐ tives that return to indigenous rural communities to envisage island futures. This body of work has been inventoried as a range of mid-twentieth-century novels which foreground self-sufficient practices and sites of resistance outside of the plantocracy. It is from communal life around provision grounds and spaces of maroonage that novels like Sylvia Winter’s The Hills of Hebron (1962) or Erna Brodber’s Myal (1988) retrieve African and indigenous traditions to build on. Frequently, these are alternative epistemologies inflected in terms of religion and gender. The provision ground mobilises specifically female ecologies, and the cultural practices involved are often informed by African spiritualist forms, such as myalism, obeah, and pocomania. Most or many of these elements recur in Salkey’s novel. The bulk of the text consists in extended rituals of pocomania that escalate into violence and murder. First the cult’s leader is killed as a performance of sacrifice and rainmaking gets out of hand. Having taken his place, his wife is later stoned to death on 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 318 Jan Rupp a procession that resembles the biblical events of Calvary. Biblical references are introduced as early as the novel’s prologue, which compares the material drought fictionalised in Salkey’s novel to a symbolic, spiritual drought causing religious violence. As such, old spiritualist ways do little to relieve the village community in St Thomas, Jamaica, where the novel is set. Rather, they exacerbate commu‐ nity frictions and the existential threat of a prolonged drought ravaging the island. Noting the novel’s poor reception, Victor Chang points out Salkey’s ambivalent portrayal of pocomania and African retentions generally. He also quotes the somewhat unfavourable term “peasant novels” (Chang 2010: 168) - Salkey’s own designation of a trend he believed himself to be contributing to. Salkey’s detached treatment of destructive as much as life-giving folk ways is conspicuous indeed. Yet the novel’s actual concern is far more fundamental and wide-reaching, I would argue. It is directed not at the villagers’ internal conflicts, but at the external climate crisis that is causing their rifts in the first place. Structurally, this becomes clear through the novel’s paratexts, which detail the devastating impact of natural disaster. The book’s primary storyline in 1900 is bracketed by the narrator’s meditation on drought in the prologue, and on an earthquake hitting Jamaica a few years later in the epilogue. These textual frames are significant, constituting a long-term perspective of planetary memory and characterising the novel as an allegory of climate change. The epigraph, quoting Horace, further elaborates on the distant spatiotemporal scales invoked: “They change their climate, not their soul, who run beyond the sea” (Salkey 1978 [1959]: n.p.). Commenting on the retention of African spirituality, the epigraph tells a miniature story of exodus, empire, and diaspora. With its biblical reference, the prologue goes even further back in time, but it simultaneously qualifies a reading of the novel in terms of biblical allegory. It is not a spiritual drought that causes the villager’s violence, alluded to in the novel’s title, but the existential crisis of the island’s material drought. It is worth quoting a longer passage of the prologue in full: When the drought comes to the land, it comes like a carrion-crow, circling at first, circling slowly and far above the water on the land; then it descends frantically at an angle, diving for bounty which it never earned. Naturally the carrion-crow can smell the dying land from a distance and hasten its death; and, when the land is dying those who are nearest to it smell of death also, and, being contaminated by it, resent it. And those whose lives are nearest to it sometimes resent it with a strange violence in the blood. (Salkey 1978 [1959]: 7) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 319 As this passage makes clear, violence originates in the first place from material drought and the overpowering experience of dying land. The island’s environ‐ mental crisis takes precedence over the villager’s social crisis, suggesting that the novel be read not as a commentary on African retentions, but allegorised as a story of climate catastrophe. In the novel’s main action couched between prologue and epilogue, the larger narrative of this catastrophe is filled in. While the villagers are preoccupied with the immediate repercussions of drought and social conflict, Salkey highlights the historical context of their situation by continuing to interweave longer-term temporal frames. The villagers are acutely aware of the momentous time of their conflict, which ominously reflects on the possibility of post-plantation community - or in fact on the prospect of postcolonial nation-building at the time of Salkey’s writing of the novel. As one of the characters states: The days of slavery still sounding in most of we ears. Remember what happen! The land was the only thing that did tie up the master and we into one bundle. Because the master did want to work and make profit out of it, the master had to bring we and put we on the land, same so. And, I say, that if we was the people that was close up to the land from long time, then now we free, we must own the land and never let go, at all, at all. (Salkey 1978 [1959]: 113) This passage revealingly telescopes between past and future temporalities as well as between global spaces of slavery and capitalist world-ecology on the one hand and Caribbean land and soil on the other. The character’s remembering of the past days of slavery draws attention to the ruptures of empire and colonisation, as a history of exploitation of people and the land for the master’s profit. In the novel’s present, the villagers are free, but they have been left exposed to environmental cataclysm and uncertain futures. Their presence and current predicament on the island is still connected to having been tied up in the bundle of capitalist world-ecology, an image that captures the violent nature of imperial land-use and its environmental repercussions. Within the space of Salkey’s novel, any hope of the characters escaping or redeeming their island as a world in ecological crisis remains doubtful yet. The epilogue paints a bleak picture: The drought continued for a long time. Rain threatened, but that was all. The procession and the others drifted apart. Some moved to other parts of St Tomas-in-the-East, some to other parishes, some nearer the coast, and some to other islands. The Marshalls went to Haiti. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 320 Jan Rupp 6 This section builds on material first presented in Rupp (2025). 7 Daley-Ward has used Instagram (@yrsadaleyward) to promote her writing and post poems. She is also on Meta’s (the internet group which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) Threads, a recently founded social media platform which is very similar to X, formerly Twitter. Yet, for those who remained in St Thomas-in-the-East, there was something else to which they could look forward. They had the Great Earthquake of 1907 which somehow would make them forget the carrion-crow. (Salkey 1978 [1959]: 207) This outlook tells a story of exacerbating catastrophe and climate refugees, with little sense of optimism in the trope of Caribbean land and soil so popular in the decolonisation era. The question of a viable political community is elusive yet, as the characters, as well as Salkey’s own imagination at the time of writing, seem to be preoccupied with more immediate challenges of ecological survival and successive natural disasters. If some readers have found Salkey’s novel to be cynical, it bears repeating that its depiction of violence is not a commentary on African retentions or national allegory, but an allegory of climate change. Later editions have recognised this primary focus by using an image of scorched earth as a cover image rather than one depicting social conflict. This emblem, while maybe prescient at the time of writing, encapsulates memories of apocalypse and simultaneously highlights uncomfortable continuities with modern forms of land-use, intensive farming, and precarious labour. Prompting audiences to confront this fateful and ongoing history of exploitation is a distinctive contribution that Caribbean literary history can make to the discussion of planetary memory in contemporary Anglophone literatures. 4 Performance Ecopoetry in International Climate Action Fast-forwarding to contemporary literary production, my second case study will shift gears and genres to deal with performance ecopoetry rather than the novel and begin by closely relating poetic praxis and climate action. 6 Tellingly, at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, the first speaker to take the stage was ‘Instapoet’ Yrsa Daley-Ward. 7 In her especially commissioned poem “Earth to COP” she announced to the auditorium: “The hour that you stand in/ is goldening, already coppering, already fire/ Ancestors of tomorrow/ This is an intervention/ Earth is talking to you today” (UN Climate Change 2021: 00: 15 - 01: 20). Daley-Ward’s “Earth to COP” was not the only poem written for and performed at COP26. The run-up to the summit also featured a writing competition entitled “Poems to 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 321 Solve the Climate Crisis”. A selection of the winners performed their poems at a fringe session in Glasgow, albeit to a much smaller audience than Daley-Ward. It will certainly take more than poems alone to solve the climate crisis. But what does it take for a poem, if not to solve, then at least to contribute to solving the climate crisis? In exploring this question, I argue that recent years have seen a new poetic praxis of climate action, in sync with a wider revival of occasional, spoken word or performance poetry in the twenty-first century. In the wake of her much-noted poem “The Hill We Climb”, read on the occasion of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Amanda Gorman has also been championed for her earlier poem “Earthrise”, written in 2018 and dedicated to Al Gore’s climate activism. Elsewhere, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner has become a prominent voice in international climate action over the past decade. “Tell Them”, written in 2011 and performed to much acclaim at the London 2012 Poetry Parnassus, tells of planetary precarity and environmental injustice in the South Pacific, a region at double risk from nuclear waste and rising sea levels. Vowing to fight for the survival of her home, Jetn̄il-Kijiner performed “Dear Matafele Peinam”, a poem addressed to her baby daughter, at a UN climate summit in New York in 2014. She has since continued her writer-activism, drawing on her personal experience of the Marshall Islands to highlight the communal challenges of climate change as a global public affair. A formative mode already in antiquity, such public poetry has often been discounted on aesthetic grounds. Yet, its combination of subjective lyric expression and communal address holds a distinctive potential for collective challenges like global warming. Moreover, the multimodal texture and the popular, social media appeal as well as instant global audience of many recent poems certainly add to creating a new public sphere for tackling climate change. In what follows, I will look further into the productive though not uncompli‐ cated uses of poetry in the face of the planet’s growing environmental precarity. Poetry clearly stands to serve as a powerful medium to rally support for climate action, thanks to several pragmatic and poetic protocols specific to the genre. At the same time, writers exploring environmental concerns will invariably have to confront a complex legacy of the poetic imagination, including lingering Romantic conceptions of nature. As Timothy Clark (2019) has demonstrated, ecopoetry comprises a highly diverse body of work. While there is no set definition, ecopoetry emerged as a term around the turn of the twenty-first century, referring to texts that attend to accelerating environmental change in what began to be discussed as the Anthropocene. Linked to contemporary developments of environmental change, ecopoetry has also been traced in literary history, as in early ecocritical readings of Romantic poetry as accounts 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 322 Jan Rupp of recuperative nature for modern man. A more expansive and more specific understanding of ecopoetry thus co-exists, allowing for tracing continuities and differences. Current ecopoetry, specifically of the kind circulating around international climate action, tends to be a subset of performance poetry, or performance ecopoetry, characterised by a specific array of pragmatic and poetic structures. It may seem redundant to point out the pragmatics of performance, but it is worth noting Elleke Boehmer’s more fundamental reappraisal of the interplay between poetics, reading, and reception. Shifting attention from questions of representation to interpretation, Boehmer understands poetic structures as a “score for reading” (see 2018: 1-18). Like a musical score, literary texts thus unfold fully only through the recipient’s interpretive activities, their cognitive and affective engagement. This fundamental dynamic is clearly replicated or even multiplied in the performance ecopoetry of international climate action. By definition, this poetic praxis is constituted as text and performance in one, acted out in tandem by the poet and their audience, and pre-figured by the text’s poetic structures. Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Tell Them” (2011) is a case in point. Programmatically, the poem’s title signposts its communicative set-up and rhetoric, as a message conveying the precarious environmental reality of the Marshall Islands. In a video performance of the poem, this sense of urgency is further dramatised through dark ambient visuality and the emotional tone of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s voice (see Studio Revolt 2012). With the title being repeated and echoing as a central motif throughout the poem, “tell them” reminds the speaker of her role as a cultural go-between, while at the same time inviting the listeners or readers to share in her locally grounded experience and pass it on. As Boehmer argues, “shift[ing] the reader between and across different worlds” (2018: 13) is a special potential of postcolonial poetics. Significantly, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s South Pacific world, as one of the regions hardest hit by global climate change, can be considered as emblematic of planetary precarity at large, making her poem a quintessential example of island narratives from the Global South to be read as allegories of the Anthropocene (see DeLoughrey 2019). Placed in this context of Anthropocene time and space, we can ultimately see the poem as employing a rhetoric of communal address, binding the speaker and her audience into a collective effort for the sake of the planet’s future. If performance ecopoetry may hope to afford a larger pragmatics of climate action, it can also build on distinctive potentials of representation. Poetry has variously been found well-placed as a genre of climate change, often in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 323 contradistinction from the novel. For Amitav Ghosh (2016), the novel’s legacy of realism and bourgeois life falls short of accommodating the disruptive and sudden impact of climate disaster, whereas poetry has always remained sensitive to nonhuman actors and environments. As opposed to a concern with individual lives and human lifespans, poetry’s more open and potentially multiperspectival form has also been seen as capable of gauging the scalar complexity of the Anthropocene, as Clark (2019: 97) points out. With its structure of address and its performance to audiences in the global North, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Tell Them” traverses vast spatial distances, underscoring the significance of climate change in the South Pacific for the planet as a whole. Similarly, the poem travels widely in time, straddling two ends of a temporal continuum by telling a creation story of the Marshall Islands alongside an apocalyptic narrative of human intervention and impending disaster: tell them our islands were dropped from a basket carried by a giant tell them we are the hollow hulls of canoes as fast as the wind slicing through the pacific sea […] and after all this tell them about the water how we have seen it rising tell them what it’s like to see the entire ocean__level__with the land tell them we are afraid ( Jetn̄il-Kijiner 2011: n.p.) What emerges from this wide-ranging spatiotemporal account is a precarious yet symbiotic human-environment relationship, which is central to the poem’s design to prompt action. Segueing to a reading of COP26 poetry, it is interesting to see whether the texts submitted to the “Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis” contests live up to the challenge, and how they compare to the successful performance ecopoetry by Jetn̄ il-Kijiner and others. Organised by the Poetry Society’s Young Poets Network, the challenge was indeed directed at younger writers, but many of the prize-winning candidates were already published poets. As per the call, the challenge invited participants “to respond to the UK’s COP26 Presidency theme 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 324 Jan Rupp 8 See this webpage of the Young Poets Network, featuring the writing challenge: https: / / ypn.p oetrysociety.org.uk/ workshop/ poems-to-solve-the-climate-crisis-a-new-challenge-with-p eople-need-nature-louisa-adjoa-parker/ (Accessed: 15 January 2023). 9 See the charity’s homepage: https: / / peopleneednature.org (Accessed: 15 January 2023). of Nature” and “to imagine solutions to the climate crisis inspired by the natural world”. 8 These references to nature and the natural world resonate with the agenda of People Need Nature, a UK-based charity that the challenge was co-organised with. On its website, the charity presents a list of mottos illustrated by photographs of open woodland and green meadows - aphorisms like “Nature Doesn’t Need People, But People Need Nature” or “Nature provides us with solace and a place to escape from difficult times”. 9 While these statements might sound plausible enough, they arguably recall “inherited Romantic assumptions that pit human affairs against a would-be ‘sacralised’ nature” (Clark 2019: 59). They not only fall back on dichotomies long deconstructed in ecocritical thinking, but also tend to ignore the fact that nature has already been irretrievably spoilt by human intervention. Poetry based on such escapist nostalgia would seem to hold little promise for preventing further climate change. The submissions to “Poems to Solve the Climate Crisis” navigate these premises and the overall challenges of ecopoetry in a range of different ways and poetic styles. They have all been published as written texts and video or audio clips online, with some of the prize-winning poems featuring in a live session at COP26. While drawing on an oral, dramatised style to different degrees, the poems were all designed for a mode performance rather than silent reading. Between themselves, the first two prize-winning texts demonstrate the broad range of submissions and solutions to the climate crisis offered. “An Alternative Geometry of the Universe” by Maggie Wang from the U.S. and “A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts” by Jayant Kashyap from India show a very different outlook, as well as a variety of formal and conceptual choices, respectively. Wang’s poem has a very regular form, consisting of nine two-line stanzas. It is accompanied by an audio clip of the author’s reading only, which adds to the text’s calm and meditative quality. The poem opens with the speaker and another character eating cherries in summer, but it soon zooms out from human habitat to contemplate cycles of day and night, shifting weather and the seasons: In June, Ba buys cherries, and we run our fingers along the skins, which gleam like piano keys or the moon after fog. We eat cherries on the back porch, watching the maples turn the last of the sunlight over their leaves. Above, the clouds are gathering again, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 Figurations of Environmental Memory and World Writing in Literatures of the Global South 325 10 Extinction Rebellion, founded in the United Kingdom in 2018, is known for its radical actions based on civil disobedience, such as protesters glueing their hands to paintings or blocking traffic. and the birds are tracing fractals along their edges. (Wang 2021: n.p.) Within that natural rhythm, a self-sufficient economy of salmon, bears, and bees commune. Any sense of a human presence is lost, save for a new summer of ripening cherries at the end. As Wang comments in her recording: “This poem was an attempt to envision what the earth might look like without us, or […] if we took a step back and recognized our place as one link or one stop in the broader cycles of the natural world” (2021, n.p.). Wang certainly succeeds in presenting an alternative geometry of the universe, a biocentric world to be gazed at by humans as silent bystanders. Her soothing voice and the poem’s many tactile images offer the reader a concentrated and comforting experience of a greater whole. However, the idea of human smallness, of cyclical time and the universe running its course, is surprising in view of man-made climate change. Whether it may serve as a solution to the climate crisis, or let humanity off the hook by picturing nature as a noble savage, is clearly debatable. Jayant Kashyap’s second-place “A Positively Violent Poem in Five Parts” takes a very different approach in form and content. The poem employs a fragmented and agitated style, reflecting the sense of violence that the title speaks of. It takes the reader to an unnamed, generic tourist destination of a beach covered in plastics, which becomes the scene of rebellious climate action. The poem’s setting, marked by the slow violence of waste and environmental degradation (see Nixon 2011), is subjected to a positive violence of climate activism in the style of Extinction Rebellion or similar groupings. 10 The poem’s we-narrative tells of a group of young locals who dismantle the tourist infrastructure, such as swimming pools and hotels, plant trees, clean the beach, and try to return the place to a state of nature. While their violence is characterised as positive, it is challenged by the voice of an older generation, who is equally represented by the poem’s disjointed, multiperspectival account. Moreover, the young activists seem to reflect on their rebellion in a rather nuanced way, as their opening self-characterisation suggests: “That day we ruined the swimming pool/ everyone was a hypocrite and angry” (Kashyap 2021: n.p.; original emphasis). Right from the start, Kashyap’s poem pre-empts any idea of easy solutions. Replacing swimming pools with trees will not simply restore nature. Even the young activists must realise that they are implicated in a complex web of human-nature relationality, in which climate action must be negotiated collectively. As text and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 326 Jan Rupp performance, this is a process that Kashyap’s poem helps engender and move forward, capitalising on the pragmatics and poetics of performance ecopoetry. 5 Conclusion Anthropocene fictions avant la lettre and performance ecopoetry in literatures of the Global South offer some much-needed spatiotemporal adjustments for new conjunctures and directions of literary and cultural studies concerned with today’s ecological crisis. As I hope to have shown, Andrew Salkey’s decoloni‐ sation-era novel A Quality of Violence (1959) offers an ominously resonant and instructive account of climate catastrophe by juxtaposing empire’s violent histories of environmental exploitation and their present-day legacies. More generally, Salkey’s account testifies to the potential of reading literary history as a memory of past climate change. Indeed, mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novels and their own retrospective endeavour offer a timely way to historicise the Anthropocene and its sense of ‘apocalypse now’ from perspectives of the Global South. Performance ecopoetry holds a particular promise to inspire climate action as well as further critical inquiry, too. Its dual, personal or intimate and public, character may render abstract notions of planetary change concrete, conveying local experiences as metonyms of global developments to poten‐ tially distant audiences. In addition, the oral nature of this poetic praxis, employing the spoken voice for presence effects and affect, as well as the multimodal texture, popular appeal and social media use of many recent poems all combine to create a global public sphere attending to the planet’s environmental precarity. Its easy transition to a context of new media and twenty-first-century attention economies is another factor in setting poetry apart from the novel and in distinguishing it as genre of climate action, in addition to issues of representation. Needless to say, the potential of literary history or ecopoetry to inspire solutions to the climate crisis as well as productive future scholarship - in the fields of world literature, memory studies, and econarratology as an important new conjuncture of literary and cultural studies surveyed here - closely depends on precisely which concepts of environment are aesthetically mediated and critically amplified. Nostalgia for unspoilt nature, such as informing some of the artistic projects discussed, or such omnipresent images as Blue Marble, seem to complicate rather than facilitate meaningful solutions. 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STUDIO REVOLT (2012). ‘Tell Them’ by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner at Southbank Centre for London 2012 Poetry Parnassus. Available at: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=w9D 88ST9qbw (Accessed: 15 January 2023). TREXLER, A. (2015) Anthropocene Fictions. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. UN CLIMATE CHANGE (2021) Yrsa Daley-Ward at the Opening of the #COP26 World Leaders Summit. Available at: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=-3ilJn3g3vA (Ac‐ cessed: 15 January 2023). WANG, M. (2021) An Alternative Geometry of the Universe. Available at: https: / / ypn.poe trysociety.org.uk/ uncategorized/ an-alternative-geometry-of-the-universe (Accessed: 15 January 2023). WEIK VON MOSSNER, A. (2017) Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environ‐ mental Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0014 330 Jan Rupp Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ A Conceptual Challenge for the Current Theories of World Literature Natalya Bekhta 1 Introduction The idea of world literature - variously understood as a global variety of literary studies, as the texts of the world, or as the world of literature itself (Habjan 2019) - came into the focus of literary theory again in the late 1990s, influentially endorsed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch, among others. Since then, work on the problem of world literature and on the suitable methods for its study has opened up many new research directions, leading, in many cases, to a revision of the boundaries of university disciplines, canons, and publishing practices. Such new areas of research include an ongoing debate on the validity of computational methods for literary studies (Lesjak 2016; Bode 2017), the unresolvable and therefore very fruitful opposition between adepts of reading in translation (WReC 2015) and advocates of untranslatability (Apter 2013), new expansionist (Damrosch 2018 [2003]), and sociologically-informed (Niblett 2012; WReC 2015) theories of comparative study, to name but a few. The idea of world literature today, in the words of Aamir Mufti, exerts “a strange gravitational force on all students of literature” (2016: x). Regardless of whether or not we may want to adopt it, “it hardly seems viable to say in response, ‘Back to national literatures! ’” (2016: x). And yet, the idea and its theories are as appealing as they are contested. An area of ongoing contestation, on which this chapter focuses, is the way various national literatures, or, indeed, world-literary regions, are mapped out in the new, seemingly globalised and decolonised geographies of the international literary field. In comparative terms, these geographies are often organised around the division of the field into the Global North and South, ‘Western’ and postcolonial literatures, or the currently hegemonic Anglophone core and its peripheries. The case of what was known, in times of the Cold War, as 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 the Soviet ‘Second World’ is interesting in this respect: For example, does contemporary literature from Ukraine, Poland, or Estonia belong to the Global North or to the South? These are European literatures, but do they belong to the so-called Western canon? In other words, there exists a post-Cold-War typological challenge in classifying literatures of the former ‘Second World’ in transnational comparative terms. The period between 1945-1989 was dominated by “a particular imagination of the globe, the image of three worlds” (Denning 2004: n.p.), which included the capitalist First, the Communist Second, and the decolonising Third World. The break-up of the Soviet Union has invalidated this fraught but popular typology, leading to a substantial revision of the geopolitical as well as the literary-theoretical views of the world and of world literature. As Debjani Ganguly observes, comparativists of this post-Cold War age have identified many new heuristic chal‐ lenges in undertaking critical studies of ‘world literature’ - global translation, multi-media publications / adaptations, linguistic imperialisms, new humanisms / cosmopolitanisms, and postmodern / ethnic / religious (trans) nationalisms. (2012: 16) Strikingly, however, literatures of the former ‘Second World’ usually do not feature in the discussions of such world-literary concerns. This may be due to the fact that there has been no shortage of replacement concepts for ‘Third World Literature’ - “postcolonial literature, minor literature, minority literature, […] ethnic literature” (Esty and Lye 2012: 270) - but the same cannot be said for that of the ‘Second World’, which contributes to its absence in present world-literary debates. This typological challenge translates into a conceptual difficulty of being unable to spot and theorise formal and aesthetic developments in such ‘invisible’ regions of the international literary field. A reconstruction of the aesthetic and historical distinctiveness of literatures of the former ‘Second World’ within world-literary theory is a complex problem. In this chapter I will focus on one of its aspects - the problem of genre - and the possibilities of tackling it through a combination of approaches from narratology and world literature. My overarching hypothesis is that contemporary literature of the European periphery has a distinctive system of genres in which the novel coexists with forms that resist novelisation (with varying degrees of success) - most notably, satire. But in order to recognise this “struggle of genres” (Bakhtin 2017 [1981]: 5) in contemporary fiction, 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. This is a key challenge for the project of reconstruction of the former ‘Second World’ as a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 332 Natalya Bekhta 1 I use the English titles in cases where a published translation exists; in other cases, a transliteration is given, followed by my translation of the title in parentheses. world-literary region because the majority, if not all, attempts at theorising contemporary fiction on a global, transnational scale are organised around the novel (e.g. WReC 2015; Ganguly 2016; McGurl 2021; Bartoszyńska 2021). This is justified in so far as the novel is the dominant genre of contemporary fiction, following its historical expansion together with the colonial enterprise of Western Europe (Siskind 2010: 338; Scholes et al. 2006 [1966]: 3; Moretti 1994). This is a well-established fact, and I do not dispute it. However, literary theory also actively makes the novel into a genre that more or less contains all long narrative fiction, regardless how formally diverse. And this is the situation that I would like to challenge in what follows, opening up a potential direction for further inquiry in literary and cultural studies. 2 The Novel and Theories of World Literature To put the above claims into context, let me cite a recent argument put forward by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska in Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and the Theories of World Literature (2021). By comparing notable works from Polish and Irish literatures, she proposes “a more inclusive vision of the novel on both geographical and formal terms” (12), so that these texts, previously excluded from the history and theory of the novel, can be considered under this heading. Amongst others, she analyses texts by Jonathan Swift, Ignacy Krasicki, Samuel Beckett as well as Ferdydurke (1938) by Witold Gombrowicz. 1 Bartoszyńska notes: The texts I discuss are anomalous enough that the question regularly arises whether they are even novels. What else would they be? The account of the novel as a genre is an impoverished one if it cannot accommodate books like these, which clearly participate in the work of theorizing the form and exploring its capabilities. (127; emphasis added) I agree with Bartoszyńska that texts like Ferdydurke and others explore the form and capabilities of literature and of narrative, more generally, but the problem is that they may explore it precisely in order to move beyond the generic conventions and readerly expectations tied to the novel (Beckett; Gombrowicz), or that they explore the form of narrative fiction with a utopian and satirical agenda (Swift; Krasicki). A more general problem here - and in other recent studies (e.g. McGurl 2021; Ganguly 2016) - is that the novel seems to tacitly structure not only the aesthetic imagination but contemporary theory as well, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 333 to the point that it is impossible to recognise other genres and aesthetic forms operating on the international literary field. To the point that an idea that some texts might not be novels cannot be developed because we cannot see what else these texts would be. The world-literary dominance of the novel is, thus, a conceptual challenge. Consider how Gombrowicz commented on his Ferdydurke, published in 1938: We live in an era of violent changes, of accelerated development, in which settled forms are breaking under life’s pressure […]. The need to find a form for what is yet immature, uncrystallized and underdeveloped, as well as the groan at the impossibility of such a postulate - this is the chief excitement of my book. (Borchardt 2000: n.p.) This comment echoes an argument put forward by Pieter Vermeulen in his Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (2013). Vermeulen analyses a selection of contemporary novels and the way they dramatise the idea of the end of the novel in order to renew this genre. So, one might see Gombrowicz’s quest precisely as one such attempt to move past those variants of the novel that he sees as settled and immobile in the era of violent changes. In other words, it may well be so that Ferdydurke is a renewal of the novel. One can also recall Mikhail Bakhtin (2017 [1981]: 3-7): The novel is the only genre currently in flux, the only contemporary genre, as it were. In so far as it stays in tune with the social reality it represents, it will continue to morph. At the same time, the novel’s boundless plasticity and ability to absorb any experiment on its earlier forms threatens to become a universal explanation for the kind of aesthetic and social projects mentioned by Gombrowicz. Literary history does involve a great deal of competition between literary tendencies and schools that feed into a formal renewal within the boundaries of one genre, but, as Bakhtin (2017 [1981]: 5) observes, they are “peripheral phenomena and historically insignificant. […] Behind them one must be sensitive to the deeper and more truly historical struggle of genres, the establishment and growth of a generic skeleton of literature”. The question of whether there are forms in contemporary world literature that resist novelisation is thus connected to more general issues of literary history. Furthermore, any significant transformation in the system of genres can potentially signal the underlying world-historical changes in contemporary societies themselves - lasting cultural and sociopolitical shifts that demand new symbolic forms of expression - and thus, constitute an issue of particular interest to literary and cultural studies today. However, given the novel’s world-literary dominance, scholarly and critical discourse seems to have a hard time assessing literary works with help of other generic categories - even such established ones as satire or utopia (see, e.g. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 334 Natalya Bekhta 2 «Стиль роману «Фаршрутка» та його мова нагадують вміст величезного баку зі сміттям, куди довго кидали усе підряд» (Shynkarenko 2016: n.p.). Bartoszyńska’s 2021: 13 discussion of Gulliver’s Travels). For example, in his critical review of Ivan Semesiuk’s satirical novella Farshrutka (2016), writer and literary critic Oleh Shynkarenko is visibly struggling to identify Farshrutka’s genre. He goes through various comparisons - for example, with the picaresque or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Ivan Kotliarevsky’s nineteenth-century trav‐ esty Eneїda - and ends up noting that “the style of the novel [sic! ] Farshrutka and its language are like a huge trash can, into which many things have been chucked in for a very long time” (Shynkarenko 2016: n.p.; my translation). 2 Semesiuk’s text indeed does not work well as a novel because it straddles the line between social critique and fiction, narrative and non-narrative, parody and utopia. In Farshrutka a small bus full of diverse social types - rather than fleshed-out characters - and a talking baboon find themselves in the middle of an epic battle with propaganda clichés and magical debris flying from across the eastern border from self-imploding Russia. This text uses a form of satirical exploration of public discourse, cultural stereotypes, and literary clichés to capture the ultimate absurdity of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Of course, it had the 2014 invasion as its frame of reference.) Judged by the generic standards of the novel, texts like Farshrutka are often described as deficient - stylistically, in terms of coherence of plot, character system, and so on (see, e.g. Brynykh 2015). This has a concrete consequence when it comes to world-literary theory: On which terms do such texts fit into the world-literary discussion, dominated by the prestige of the novel? Their discussion would be necessary for the project of a reconstruction of ‘second-world’ literatures within the contemporary world-literary geographies as well as for a development of a more refined view of the international literary field. To reiterate, the novel continues to be a very productive genre, both for writers and theorists. And the dominant one at the moment, including in post-Soviet literatures in Europe. At the same time, world-literary theory should be able to address the diverse generic distribution, which characterises world-literary regions, as well as the function of non-dominant genres. In order to bring forth the ongoing struggle of genres, I propose to fuse the large-scale perspective of a world-literary approach with the narratological attention to the inherent generic properties of a literary text. The text I shall examine in detail is Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2019) since, unlike Farshrutka, it is also available in the English translation. However, just like Farshrutka, Ferdydurke, or Yuriy Andrukhovych’s Rekreatsii (1992), 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 335 Oles’ Ulianenko’s Stalinka (1994), Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Andriy Lyubka’s MUR (2020), and many others, Rafeyenko’s work provides a fruitful ground for examining the problem of the novel as a preferred genre of theories of world literature. 3 Mondegreen (2019) and the Case for Menippean Satire Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (2022; Ukrai‐ nian original published in 2019) is a text true to its subtitle: The book is 190 pages long - a lengthy, but not long, and oftentimes lyrical musing on language, identity, war, displacement, society, and life. It cannot be convincingly called ‘a novel’ or even narrative for that matter. (Even though the front cover of its English edition sports the label ‘a novel’, possibly for reasons dictated by the book market.) Narrative progression and the building of a storyworld in this text are consistently disrupted because of the multidirectionality of time and multiple digressions from the story and its characters, dictated by a pure exploration of the joys and pitfalls of language. Rafeyenko lived and worked in Donetsk until 2014, when he had to flee the Russian invasion to a suburban town near Kyiv. In 2022 Rafeyenko and his family were lucky to escape - yet again - the Russian attack on the Kyiv region. Having graduated from the Donetsk University with a degree in Russian philology and culture studies, he wrote and published in Russian until 2014. Mondegreen is Rafeyenko’s first literary work in Ukrainian after he himself switched to Ukrainian in everyday life. ‘Mondegreen’ means a misunderstood or misinterpreted word or phrase resulting from a mishearing of the lyrics of a song. Besides being an indication of genre, the full title also foreshadows the logic of the text that follows. There is a clear setting: The text is held together by one protagonist, Haba Habinsky, who flees Donetsk in 2014 and moves to Kyiv, where he works in a grocery shop (called ‘Beautiful and Useful’), located in a huge, maze-like shopping mall (‘Karmatown’), since his journalistic writing and tutoring is not enough to sustain him in the very expensive capital of Ukraine. This clarity is immediately shaken up because Haba-the-character also sometimes coincides with the authorial, heterodiegetic narrator, and the narrator is often not distinguishable from Rafeyenko himself. Haba’s story is continuously interrupted by digressions hinging on individual words or phrases that allude to other texts, iconic quotes, songs, or advertisement slogans in a whirlwind of linguistic exploration: Let’s say, John the Evangelist. I mean, come on, man, if you indeed saw those four horsemen in your dreams, those that flew in to bomb Syria, then why didn’t you write just that? As in, dear people, what I can tell you about Armageddon. You read my 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 336 Natalya Bekhta 3 «Скажімо, Йоан Богослов. Ну дійсно, старенький, якщо ти вже бачив уві сні цих коней вогненних, які прилетіли бомбити Сирію, то чому прямо так не написав? Мовляв, люди добрі, що я можу вас сказати стосовно Армагедону. Ви читали моє «Одкровеннє» чи як там, «Об’явлення» (поїзд далі не піде, зупинка Героїв Дніпра, молоко, молозиво, м’ясо, сало, яйко, синє небо над головою кожної святої неділі, ей матко, моя матко, виховуй мє гладко, від неділі до неділі, як червоне ябко)» (Rafeyenko 2019: 14). 4 Lauren Goodlad has succinctly described distant reading as “a project of studying genre at a supratextual scale” (2020: 494). Since world literature usually implies studying fiction on a scale of transnational, transhistorical comparison with a vast corpus of literary texts, it requires supratextual methods. 5 «Через спогади про неіснуюче минуле, через казки та сновидіння людина-переселенець, а саме його рідкісний підвид — переселенець-поліглот — зустрічається нарешті з буттям. Із тим самим, яка за Парменідом є тільки тепер, ніколи в майбутньому, співвітчизники, ніколи в минулому. […] І вже Apocalypse, or should I say ἀποκάλυψις (the train isn’t going any farther, the stop is Heroїv Dnipra, cream, icy-cream, lima bean, protein, sea bream, sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy, mama ooh-ooh-ooh). 3 (Rafeyenko 2022: 9, original emphasis) A ‘distant’, supratextual reading 4 of Mondegreen reveals striking formal affinities with Menippean satire, a proto-genre from the pre-history of the novel. Monde‐ green offers a rudimentary fantastical plot that is a pretext for an exploration of Haba’s / Rafeyenko’s / Ukraine’s present, past, and future. It is a setting for Haba’s hallucinatory travels through the layers of Kyiv’s topography and history. These travels, in turn, are a way to meet strange people, animals, and characters straight from folk tales which offer an opportunity to draw in parody, travesty, multiplicity of styles, and languages. Mondegreen is written in Ukrainian, with occasional parenthetical notes in Russian or English and a broad play of various Ukrainian dialects. Individual words might give rise to a parodic fun with the literary classics to which these words allude, and random phrases may spark a play of linguistic associations. All this may be described, in a nutshell, as “excessiveness of language”, following an example from Mondegreen: Through the memories of a non-existent past, through folk tales and dreams, the refugee, and even more so this rarified version of him - the refugee-polyglot - finally comes face to face with being. […] And only later, this excessiveness of language, of course, finds very concrete, although not always comfortable or understood, representations. For example, already in those very first months after he began studying the language, this neo-Kyivite began to receive rather regular visits from the mare’s head (or the MR*). *The author knows that formally it should be MH. But let’s just keep it as MR. (Rafeyenko 2022: 17) 5 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 337 потім надмірність мови, ясна річ, віднаходить дуже конкретні, хоч і не завжди комфортні та зрозумілі образи. От, наприклад, із перших же місяців навчання української мови до киянина-початківця доволі регулярно почата приходити кобиляча голова (або КБ*). *Автор знає, що з формального погляду має бути КГ. Але хай уже буде КБ» (Rafeyenko 2019: 23). The Mare’s Head is a figure from a bizarre Ukrainian fairy tale, where the head visits a girl who is in exile in the forest. Yet another hint at the refugee fate of Haba / Rafeyenko, although it seems that the Mare’s Head is here because of the sheer joy of working with this incredible image and the linguistic fun it implies as some of the versions of this folk tale include song-like refrains and alliterations. The Mare’s Head is, furthermore, Haba’s tutor in Ukrainian, a materialisation of language, as it were, that pops up in the least comfortable moments to lecture him on the rules of word usage. How does a text like Mondegreen fit into genre theory? According to Bakhtin’s formulation, “in Menippean satire the unfettered and fantastic plots and situa‐ tions all serve one goal - to put to test and expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots” (2017 [1981]: 26). In Mondegreen, linguistic fun and fantastic, magical, and mythical plot events arguably function to soften the provocation, which boils down to the implicit question to the reader: Given all the grief in the modern history of Ukrainian relations with the Russian empire, how is it that the contemporary Ukrainian society preferred (at the time of Rafeyenko’s writing) to live according to the “catechism of blessed ignorance” of its past (Rafeyenko 2022: 81)? Bakhtin, further: “Menippean satire is dialogic, full of parodies and travesties, multi-styled, and does not fear elements of bilingualism” (2017 [1981]: 26). Mondegreen follows this description one-to-one but, of course, no lists of features can really describe a genre. Additionally, since Menippean satire contributed greatly to the development of the novel, it may be difficult to single it out into a separate genre now. This difficulty is further compounded by the incredible plasticity of the novel. In his Theory of the Novel (2017), Guido Mazzoni observes: What is the novel today? If we were looking for a concise formulation that belonged to neither Schlegel nor Hegel nor Bakhtin but that neatly encapsulated an idea central to their theories, we might say this: Starting from a certain date, the novel became the genre in which one can tell absolutely any story in any way whatsoever. The boundless multiplicity of forms of life, whether real or possible, can be narrated from inside or outside consciousness, and at the same time any style can be adopted, allowing the variety of the subjective imagination to be revealed. (17) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 338 Natalya Bekhta In other words, the novel knows no restrictions in style or content but - and crucially - it does tell a story; the novel is narrative in form. Furthermore, despite all the variety of the novelistic subgenres and the many experiments with its form, the contemporary novel, for the most part, has a well-developed character system, sturdy plot, emotional and psychological depth - these are some of the elements that contemporary readers have come to expect from the novel (see, e.g. McHale 2022). Menippean satire, on the other hand, does not care for any of these, and it is freer than the novel in a formal sense, less regulated by conventions and readerly expectations. In Mondegreen even the narrative progression is secondary, subjugated to the focus on language and the exploration of (historical) memory, as well as the difficult questions of whether Haba / Rafeyenko / Ukraine could have gleaned from its past and present what was to come in 2014. In any case, my purpose here is not to challenge or refine definitions of the novel but to find a way of conveying generic distinctiveness of a certain category of texts that circulate in literatures of Central-Eastern Europe. When judged by the novelistic standards, these texts are often described as lacking - such as Farshrutka briefly discussed above. In his 2015 lecture on the cultural phenomenon of “The Iconic Ukrainian Novel”, Ukrainian literary critic and editor Mykhailo Brynykh describes key texts of the 1990s in a similar manner: Even though books like Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996) or Oles’ Ulianenko’s Stalinka (1994) were published as novels, “there is nothing novelistic about them” (Brynykh 2015: n.p.). Brynykh does not dwell on what comprises a novelistic quality, but he implies that, among other things, these texts are too short (about 100-150 pages) and have no discernible plot. Given the secondary role of story in such works, they are also sometimes described as incomprehensible. Lack of clarity as to what the text is about can nevertheless be viewed as a positive feature: As of the 1st of October 2023, half of the fifty reader reviews of Mondegreen on the book-cataloguing website Goodreads give it a maximum rating and generous comments, although each review summarises the book very differently. In the words of the Goodreads’ user ‘Serhiy’: “Very interesting, absolutely incomprehensible” (August 21, 2021). Curiously, Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love has no additional generic qualifier in the original publication (see Fig. 1). The publication information only adds ‘[Text]’ and the title page features the subtitle in brackets, by way of clarification what the text will be about. This should be a hint for the readers that any genre-related expectations may be put aside, even though the majority 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 339 6 I am grateful to Magdalena Pfalzgraf for this observation. 7 «Неясно наразі, як вивести КБ в ролі центральної постаті цієї повісті, бо ми багато вже говорили про неї, але вона все ще десь там, попереду цього несерйозного та невмілого наративу. І незрозуміло, як нам бути далі. А краще нічого й не розуміти (ми, зрештою, ніякі не Декарти), а просто завітати до Габи в один з вихідних днів, які вже відбулися на момент нашої оповіді або, навпаки, ще тільки of the readers probably nevertheless expect to get something novel-like and story-led in a print book positioned as ‘fiction’. 6 Figure 1. A spread of the Ukrainian edition of Mondegreen. Let us look at one more example relating to Mondegreen’s form: At this point, it is unclear how to make the MR the central character in this story, because we’ve talked about it a lot, but it’s still somewhere over there, up ahead of this flippant and inept narrative. And we don’t know how we should proceed. But it’s better not to know anything (we are, in fact, no Descartes), but instead simply visit Haba on a day when he is off from work, which may have already taken place at this moment in our story, or, conversely, is still to come. With this Kyiv time, you never know which day it is that people live in. (Rafeyenko 2022: 39, original emphasis) 7 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 340 Natalya Bekhta мають надійти. З цим київським часом ніколи не знаєш, який саме день живуть люди» (Rafeyenko 2019: 48). A narrative analysis of this kind of storytelling would be able to note that there is a self-reflexive authorial narrator, who is communicating very explicitly with the reader, that there are many metafictional and metanarrative comments, that the conventional chronology is uprooted - in short, we would be able to quite precisely describe what is going on in this passage on a technical level. We also would be able to single out clear motifs, dominant in Mondegreen, such as unreliability and the ‘reality as a dream’ trope, which manifests itself as Haba’s constant questioning of what is real and imagined, staged, fake, or true. In addition to allegory and personification, the motif of metamorphosis plays here a significant structuring role: Haba’s lover from his previous life as a lecturer in a Donetsk university literally transforms into a huge insect, in an unmistakable re-writing of Kafka. But the description of this literal metamorphosis is interspersed with references to metaphorical ones: “the meta‐ morphosis of the city” with the beginning of the war (109), the transformation of things that used to be laughable into something serious, the changes in people and so on. ‘Metamorphosis’ may even be seen as expanding from the story level into an overarching structuring principle and substituting the principle of ‘development’ of the narrative trajectory (see Bakhtin 2017: 113), where elements build on each other, with an unfolding that is spasmodic, sometimes haphazard, and mythologically motivated. However, as I have already mentioned, going through the features of a text would not necessarily help us define a genre, especially as the motifs and techniques of Mondegreen are nothing new in the history of the novel. What is distinctive about Mondegreen, and contemporary Menippean satire in general, is how these motifs and techniques combine. Their structural function is what distinguishes this text from the novel. As Bakhtin notes, individual motifs are not in themselves new: “they had already been developed in other genres […] - still, when combined in this new chronotope, they become subject to its ineluctable logic and thus acquire an utterly new meaning and special function” (2017 [1981]: 102; emphasis added). Franco Moretti phrased this view of genre transformation as follows: “Literary evolution does not normally proceed by inventing new themes or new methods out of the blue, but precisely by discovering a new function for those that already exist” (Moretti 1996: 20; emphasis added). The distinction between the form of Mondegreen 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 341 8 Susan Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan (2022: 430) have recently noted that this concept has been surprisingly underutilised by narratologists despite its continuing relevance. and that of the contemporary novel can be made on the basis of its distinctive chronotope. 8 Chronotope, or time-space, is the way time relates to space in narrative representations. It is “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Bakhtin 2017 [1981]: 84). According to Bakhtin, it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions, since it allows to describe how old elements connect in a new way and thus produce a new generic form. The emphasis on the structural relationships between features is particularly important for such fluid genres as the novel and Menippean satire, which are impossible to describe if we focus on the features themselves. In Mondegreen - and here I am approaching the core of my hypothesis regarding the genre of Menippean satire - familiar motifs combine in an exploration of social reality which is tangibly material, like the war and its toll in death and destruction, but which at the same time is absolutely surreal. Put differently, Rafeyenko offers us a record of reality that, should you come across it in a novel, would be judged as impossible, absurd, over the top, unrealistic. This paradoxical combination is formally resolved through the chronotope of contingency. Contingency is what structures Mondegreen and what articulates, in this particular text, the formal freedom that characterises Menippean satire. We can see the force of contingency most clearly in the flexible flow of time in this text, which can go backwards and forwards without particular difficulty for the narrator or the storyworld. Linear temporal progression is an essential element of the narrative logic; this is what defines narrative. But in Mondegreen time is subjugated to the logic of language. What seems natural, immutable, given, can also be otherwise: “simply visit Haba on a day when he is off from work, which may have already taken place at this moment in our story, or, conversely, is still to come” (39). Contingency expresses the fact that the narration here is indifferent to whether or not events it narrates are real (in the storyworld), whether they happened or in which order - and thus, whether they are ultimately necessary for its progression. But in the ultimate twist, Mondegreen shows that even language, which dominates other chronotopic elements of this text, is contingent. Recall the example of Mare’s Head abbreviated as MR - for no apparent reason except for why not. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 342 Natalya Bekhta 9 Personal communication with Alexander Scherr. 4 Conclusion A narratological attention to the structural features of Mondegreen and how they combine into a particular chronotope - the temporal-spatial structure of a literary work - makes it possible to single out the particularity of this text, namely, its formal and stylistic freedom. I have suggested that Mondegreen is thus closer to the protogenre of Menippean satire than it is to the novel. At the same time, Menippean satire, it may be objected, is a proto-novelistic genre which contributed to the formation of the contemporary novel. Therefore, Mondegreen may just be the latest experiment with the novelistic form, especially given the novel’s constant fluctuation as a genre that never settles. A case can be made that this text is a satirical experiment with the conventions of the novel or what Alexander Scherr has called an “essay-novel” (2021: 263). Drawing out features of essayism - such as contingency, orientation towards possibility, openness, exploratory rather than narrative progression, lack of commitment to the plot arc - Scherr illuminates a significant subgenre of the novel that has been operating throughout the history of world literature. Examples of essay-novels 9 include canonical classics, such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) or Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930), as well as contemporary novels successful on the international literary field, such Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014) or Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015). In the Ukrainian context, one could cite Maik Yohansen’s Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta (2025 [1932]) as a typical example of the essay-novel. With its contingent chronotope, Mondegreen and my other examples are indeed seemingly very close to essayistic novels, with an added satirical twist. Finally, Mondegreen’s surreal elements suggest a strong affinity also with magical-realist novels. This comparison, however, implicitly suggests that narrative features and generic forms remain identical across time and space. In order to avoid such a universalist claim, my narratological observations about inherent genre properties must be qualified in world-literary terms. Since formal choices are inextricable from the particular world-historical position of a literary text, I propose to add a world-literary orientation to the narratological analysis in order to make a typological decision. Approaching Mondegreen as Menippean satire foregrounds those formal and generic features that are representative of literary processes in the Central-Eastern European fiction after the 1990s. Approaching Mondegreen as a variation on the form of the novel foregrounds its similarity to the canon of works that currently forms the core of world 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 343 literature, such as the well-known examples of magical realism or essay-novels. Both typological decisions have valid theoretical underpinnings, but the latter one would also imply that literary experimentation from the world-literary periphery is simply an engagement with the genre norms and traditions already consecrated by the world-literary core. The aesthetic processes of the world-literary region in which Mondegreen originates would be viewed in provincial terms as ‘coming afterwards’, as an imitation. On the one hand, the habitual currents of literary influence and exchange on the international literary field make it impossible to talk of any national literature or world-literary region as an isolated phenomenon. On the other hand, the absence of literatures from the former ‘Second World’ in contemporary literary theories needs to be first addressed on its own terms, before world-literary comparisons can be drawn so that such comparisons resist assimilatory implications. Ultimately, then, my suggestion to consider the possibility of contemporary re-emergence of Menippean satire is motivated by the formal peculiarities of certain literary texts viewed in a world-literary context. Texts like Mondegreen abound in contemporary Ukrainian fiction (see Bry‐ nykh 2015), which speaks to specific historical circumstances of Ukrainian literature. Since the 1990s each decade in Ukraine’s history has seen tectonic shifts in social reality. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by a spree of restructuring and privatisation; the 2004 ‘Orange revolution’ was followed by another change of ruling business elites, followed by the 2013 Maidan and the Russian invasion in 2014, followed by a full-scale war now in 2022. Literature in these conditions cannot settle, much like in Gombrowicz’s assessment quoted at the beginning of this article. Literature constantly faces pressing and relatively abstract, transindividual social concerns. The artist in these conditions also occupies a politically involved role and directly participates in the social and national struggle (see Casanova 2011 on ‘combative literatures’). The novelistic, predominantly narrative form cannot very easily capture the immediacy of social change or, worse, the chaos of war as it is still unfolding. When it comes to narrative in particular, war destroys one of the key elements of narrative tem‐ porality: the future. And so narrative loses its usual forward-moving trajectory oriented towards a resolution. Contemporary Ukrainian fiction offers a number of ingenious formal solutions to this representational dilemma and (Menippean) satire is one of them. Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen (2019) fits well into this category together with his earlier book, The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad (2023 [2017]), which is structured as a fairy tale with insertions of brutally realist novellas about life and death during war. Contemporary Menippean satires include also Ivan 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 344 Natalya Bekhta Semesiuk’s novellas about the adventures of Thomas the baboon (“Evolve or die! ” 2015 and “Farshrutka” 2016), Oleh Shynkarenko’s Pershi ukrainski roboty (First Ukrainian Robots, 2016) or such iconic works as Yurii Andrykhovych’s Recreations (1998 [1992]) and The Moscoviad (2009 [1993]). Research into other literatures of Central and Eastern Europe confirms contemporary significance of Menippean satire across this world-literary region (e.g. Katkus 2013): from Polish Witold Gombrowitcz and Tadeusz Konwicki to the works of Czech Bohu‐ mil Hrabal and Milan Kundera, Romanian Mircea Cărtărescu, Hungarian Péter Esterházy, Estonians Tõnu Õnnepalu and Paavo Matsin, Belarusian Alhierd Bacharevič, and others. Texts like Mondegreen draw attention to the variety of literary formats that structure contemporary aesthetic imagination as well as social imaginary - a variety that exists alongside the novel, rightly seen as the dominant genre of the contemporary literary field. These other forms and formats productively counter the generic limitations of the novel even if it may be tricky to see them at work. The novel, after all, is extremely flexible. It is a cannibalising genre, according to Terry Eagleton (2005: 1), or, as Bakhtin phrased it, “the novel gets on poorly with other genres”, and when it becomes the dominant genre, “almost all the remaining genres are to a greater or lesser extent ‘novelized’” (2017 [1981]: 5). Given this special status of the novel, it is intriguing to observe that, at this point in world-literary history, there may be a genre resisting novelisation, such as satirical texts in literatures of the former ‘Second World’. At the same time, further work is needed to determine if this is indeed the case. In this chapter my goal was to put forward a hypothesis that, if proven valid, would add nuance to our understanding of contemporary world literature, of the international literary field, of its forms and genres as well as of the social realities they reflect. 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(2021) ‘Serendipitous Events: Failures and Transformations of Projects in Contemporary Anglophone Literature’, in Mukim, M. and Attridge, D. (eds) Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations. New York: Routledge, pp.-258-273. SCHOLES, R., Phelan, J., and Kellogg, R. (2006 [1966]) The Nature of Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press. SEMESIUK, I. (2016) Фаршртука [Farshrutka]. Kyїv: Liuta sprava. SHYNKARENKO, O. (2016) ‘«Фаршрутка» Івана Семесюка: пригоди метафізичного пікаро з буряками’ [Ivan Semesiuk’s Farshrutka: Adventures of a metaphysical piquaro with beetroots]. Chytomo, 17 August. Available at: https: / / archive.chytomo.com/ is sued/ farshrutka-ivana-semesyuka-prigodi-metafizichnogo-pikaro-z-buryakami (Ac‐ cessed: 6 October 2022). SISKIND, M. (2010) ‘The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global: A Critique of World Literature’, Comparative Literature, 62 (4), pp.-336-60. VERMEULEN, P. (2015) Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 Literatures of the Former ‘Second World’ 347 WREC (Warwick Research Collective) (2015). Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0015 348 Natalya Bekhta Transnationalisation and Forms of Mobility, Work, and the Digital 1 For recent work that explicitly seeks to break with the traditional equation of mobility and transnational migration, see e.g. Pfalzgraf (2021) and Toivanen (2021), as well as the contributions in Toivanen and Pfalzgraf (2024b) and Englert et al. (2021). Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology Carolin Gebauer 1 Mobility Studies and Narrative Theory: The Intersection of Two Research Fields When we hear stories about the current ‘age of mobility’, chances are high that these narratives deal with migration or forced displacement. The terms mobility and migration are often treated as synonyms - a practice that can also be observed in many approaches within literary and cultural studies, especially migration studies, diaspora studies, and postcolonial studies (Toivanen 2021: 1-2). 1 While migration undoubtedly deserves a prominent place among the topics covered by “cultural narratology” (Nünning 2009), the concept of mobility encompasses many other notions that define our lives today: We commute to work, we travel when going on vacation or business trips, we change locales for jobs - and we share these experiences in stories we tell each other on different occasions and in various contexts. From the perspective of a cultural narratology which seeks to examine how narrative enables us to better comprehend the nexus between culture and society in the wake of globalisation, equating mobility with migration can lead to practices of fostering “a reductive understanding that erases the holistic, relational, and the local, everyday dimensions of mobilities” (Toivanen and Pfalzgraf 2024a: 2). Rather, we need a concept of mobility which is flexible enough to recognise the different forms of movement that influence societies, cultures, and individuals on a daily basis. The project of a cultural narratology sensitive to mobilities that I would like to propose in this chapter draws on a rapidly growing body of research in the field of mobility studies which acknowledges (and vigorously defends) the ambiguity 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 2 The term new mobilities paradigm was introduced by Mimi Sheller and John Urry in 2006. Although new mobilities studies has since become a well-established field in the social sciences, Sheller and Urry’s term has been repeatedly considered a misnomer for a variety of reasons. Tim Cresswell (2010b: 18), for example, argues that the adjective new is inappropriate, whereas Richard Randell (2020) rejects the term for failing to meet Thomas Kuhn’s definition of a ‘paradigm’. For an overview of further criticism of the new mobilities paradigm thesis, see Randell (2020: 207). 3 It is important to note, however, that the humanities had had a longstanding interest in mobilities even before Urry and Sheller coined the term new mobilities paradigm (see Aguiar et al. 2019: 4-10; Merriman and Pearce 2018: 2-4). of the term mobility. In Sociology Beyond Societies (2000), John Urry suggests that “the diverse mobilities of people, objects, images, information and wastes” (1) should be prioritised in sociological studies concerned with the reconfiguration of social structures within an increasingly globalised and networked world. His programmatic call for a “sociology of mobilities” (2000: 4) initiated the “mobility turn” (2007: 6) in the social sciences, promoting mobility as “a different way of thinking through the character of economic, social and political relationships” (ibid.). This “new mobilities paradigm” 2 has been accompanied by a growing interest in the nexus between human movement, practices of mobility, and space in geography and anthropology (see, e.g. Cresswell 2010a; Salazar and Smart 2011). Together, these developments have led to the emergence of what is today known as new mobilities studies, a vibrant interdisciplinary field which foregrounds the significance of mobilities in the modern age (see Adey 2017: ch. 2). Over the last decade, and thus later than other disciplines (Pearce 2020: 76-7), literary and cultural studies have also started to contribute to the new mobilities framework. The “‘humanities turn’ in mobility studies” (Aguiar et al. 2019: 2) refers to a growing body of scholarship, mainly in the fields of English and postcolonial studies, that seeks to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue by introducing mobility as a productive lens through which to approach literary texts and other semiotic objects (see also Merriman and Pearce 2018: 4-7). 3 The main objective of these studies is to investigate how mobility is depicted and ne‐ gotiated in literature, culture, media, and the arts. They explore representations of different forms of mobility, from migration and forced displacement (Bromley 2021) to tourism (Mathieson 2015), from automobility (Pearce 2016; Stork 2024) and air travel (Durante 2020) to public transport (Toivanen and Pfalzgraf 2024b), discussing the concept in relation to abstract notions of movement and space (Behrensmeyer and Ehland 2013) or transformation and power (Frank and Schreier 2022; Murray and Upstone 2014), as well as to specific phenomena such as cosmopolitanism (Toivanen 2021) and national identity (Mathieson 2015). These studies furthermore examine mobilities in different historical periods, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 352 Carolin Gebauer 4 See e.g. Toivanen (2021) and Pfalzgraf (2021), as well as the contributions in Gebauer et al. (2024) and Toivanen and Pfalzgraf (2024b). spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, and in various disciplinary contexts, including migration and diaspora studies (Pfalzgraf 2021; Toivanen 2021), psychology (Pearce 2019), literary urban studies (García and Toivanen 2024), and the medical humanities (Dinter and Schäfer-Althaus 2023). The field of literary mobility studies is flourishing. Yet, despite the crucial role that narratives play in developing and negotiating concepts of mobility, narrative theory has largely failed to engage with the new mobilities paradigm. The continuing lack of exchange between narratology and mobility studies comes as a surprise, given that approaches to mobility studies often work with the concept of narrative. For example, Tim Cresswell begins his programmatic study On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (2006) by describing mobility as “a fundamental geographical facet of existence” that “provides a rich terrain from which narratives […] can be, and have been, constructed” (1). In the introduction to The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014), Peter Adey and his co-editors invoke popular “[n]arratives of novelty, accessibility and speed-up” that emphasise “the ease and smoothness of globalization” (1), only to dismiss these accounts as products of the imagination of a privileged elite (2). And in her “Foreword” to an edited volume on Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean (2021), Mimi Sheller stresses the potential of literature and other artistic productions to create “counter-narrative[s]” that “open up new ways of thinking about cultural mobilities” by reimagining and thus complicating our understanding of African-Caribbean relations (xiv). The observation that mobility scholars show a strong interest in narrative suggests that the time is ripe, if not overdue, to bring mobility studies and narrative studies into closer conversation. Indeed, both academic fields promise to complement each other, as they reveal different interests in the study of narratives about mobility: While the new mobilities paradigm concentrates primarily on the ‘what’, i.e. the content of such representations, narrative studies also focuses on the significance of the ‘how’, i.e. the ways in which this content is presented and negotiated. Prior work in the field of literary mobility studies has already taken first steps towards addressing “a poetics of mobility” (Toivanen 2021: 19-20) by explicitly foregrounding questions about form in literary and, more specifically, narrative representations of mobility. 4 This research proceeds from the assumption that, “[a]s aesthetic articulations of movement, literary texts not only draw on real-life mobilities and embodied experiences of mobility but also intensify, complicate, and question the meanings that are attached 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 353 5 Postcolonial, feminist, and gender-oriented narratologies, as well as econarratology, are all different thematic branches of a “contextualist or cultural narratology that puts the analytical toolkit developed by narratology to the service of a context-sensitive interpretation of narrative” (Nünning 2009: 50). The concept of “narrative dynamics” has recently been introduced to the field as a category for analyzing the complex relationships between narratives in public discourse (Sommer 2023: 498). to them” (Toivanen 2021: 16). “Literary representations of mobility”, these studies remind us, “allow for a deeper understanding of the complexities and contradictions of ‘real life’ mobilities”, while at the same time “inform[ing] our understanding of the meanings of mobilities” (17). They should therefore be afforded a more prominent position in interdisciplinary debates on the subject. Building on previous studies that foreground the value of narrative for the study of mobilities, this chapter sets out to make a few proposals for a new analytical framework I would like to call narrative mobility studies. Narrative mobility studies integrates approaches from (literary) mobility studies and “contextualist narratology” (Nünning 2009), particularly cultural narratology, in order to carve out clearly the influence of narrative on our practices and, by extension, lived experiences of mobility, as well as on the ways in which we make sense of mobilities in different social, cultural, and historical contexts. On a contextual level, narrative mobility studies aims to link findings from research on a “politics of mobility” (Cresswell 2010b) with insights from postcolonial, feminist, and gender-oriented narratology, econarratology, and a “narrative dynamics” approach (Sommer 2023). 5 On a textual level, narrative mobility studies takes its cue from recent work on the sociopolitical significance of form (Levine 2015; Olson and Copland 2018), as it seeks to develop a narratology of mobility that provides new concepts and categories which allow the formal analysis of narrative representations of mobility to be enriched with cultural, political, power-sensitive, and ideology-sensitive readings. 2 Definitions of Mobility and the Role of Narrative in Mobility Discourses The new mobilities paradigm operates with a very broad definition of mobility. This can be illustrated with the four key meanings of mobility identified by Urry (2007: 7-8) - i.e. the capability of movement, the mob, social or vertical mobility, and geographical or horizontal mobility - each of which has little in common with the others. Urry’s seemingly unsystematic discussion of the meaning of mobility is symptomatic of mobility scholars’ efforts to come up with a definition that incorporates all the nuances of the concept that different 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 354 Carolin Gebauer 6 By “representations of mobility” Cresswell (2010b) actually means narrative, which becomes obvious when he describes constellations of mobility as “historically and geographically specific formations of movements, narratives about mobility and mobile practices” (17; emphasis added). disciplines within mobility studies focus on. Yet, such a holistic understanding of mobility is susceptible to criticism. What, one may wonder, is the benefit of a category that potentially involves phenomena as diverse as social advancement or decline on the one hand, and transnational migration or global nomadism on the other? “If mobility is everything”, as the provocative title of an article by Peter Adey (2006) puts it, “then it is nothing”: The concept loses its purpose (76-77). Adey counters this criticism by arguing that mobility should be conceived of as a relational category which only “gains meaning through its embeddedness within societies, cultures, politics, and histories” (83). Manifestations of mobility, he contends, “are very different, and they also relate and interact with one another in many different ways” (ibid.). That “this relatedness impacts upon what mobilities mean and how they work” (ibid.) is reflected in the wide range of thematic approaches within the new mobilities paradigm, including “gendered mobilities” (Uteng and Cresswell 2008), “imperial mobilities” (Lambert and Merriman 2020), “Anthropocene mobilities” (Baldwin et al. 2019), and “material mobilities” ( Jensen et al. 2020). Mobility, then, is “movement imbued with meaning” (Adey 2017: 63), and this meaning is always produced and negotiated in social and cultural discourse (66). Tim Cresswell (2010b) consequently suggests that mobility is best understood through the interplay of three different aspects: “At any one time, […] there are pervading constellations of mobility - particular patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together” (18; original emphasis). 6 According to Cresswell, the physical reality of any form of mobility is always encoded in narratives about mobility which are not only “based on ways in which mobility is practiced and embodied” (Cresswell 2006: 4), but which also determine how this form of mobility is experienced through practice. Since these constellations are ultimately always “implicated in the production of power and relations of domination” (Cresswell 2010b: 20), they “entail particular ‘politics of mobility’” (19). If narratives about mobility have a bearing on practices and lived experiences of mobility, as well as on a politics of mobility, they can also contribute to reshaping our understanding of the phenomenon. Giada Peterle (2023) has recently introduced the term “narrative mobilities” to foreground the role of storytelling practices in mobilities research. “Narrative mobilities”, she argues, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 355 7 The concept was originally introduced in the context of migration discourses (see Caracciolo et al. 2023); however, the idea can be transferred to any other discursive context. should be thought of as “emergent practices that are situated in space and time and performed in different contexts” (103). Seen from this angle, narrative serves as a “creative means” to produce new meanings of mobility as well as to challenge dominant discourses about the topic (102). Peterle’s reflections strongly resonate with narratological studies that con‐ ceptualise narrative as a means of worldmaking. Narratives, Ansgar and Vera Nünning (2010) remind us, “are at work in processes such as identity formation, ordering experiences, remembering and negotiating values, and fabricating storied versions of ‘the world’” (6). As such, they not only enable us to make sense of the role that mobility plays in our society and culture, but they also bear upon the ways in which we experience different mobilities. The analysis of literary and cultural representations of mobility can provide important insights into how constellations of mobility shape, and are negotiated in, different social and cultural contexts. Contextualist approaches to narratology - particularly feminist, gender-oriented, and postcolonial narratology, as well as econarratol‐ ogy - are concerned with narrative representations of the societal structures and power relations as well as the more-than-human entanglements that form the backdrop against which mobilities take place. They consequently allow us to uncover the power hierarchies underlying certain practices of mobility as well as to identify the worldviews and ideologies informing cultural discourses on mobility. But how, then, can narrative help us to better comprehend the complex ways in which we navigate and move in this world? A good point of departure in approaching this question is the notion of narrative ecology, which will be outlined in the next section 3 The Narrative Ecology of Mobility as a New Conceptual Framework for Cultural Narratology The term narrative ecology describes the complex relationships between cultural discourses, media environments, narrative dynamics, and audiences central to the study of how narratives emerge, circulate, and interact within cultural contexts (Caracciolo et al. 2023). 7 The narrative ecology of mobility can be conceptualised as a complex system structured within by different levels. The most abstract level consists of what can be referred to as ‘narratives on mobility’, i.e. cultural myths that function as attractors or catalysts for storytelling. These include not only conceptual metaphors involving abstract notions of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 356 Carolin Gebauer 8 I deploy the terms narratives on mobility and stories of mobility in analogy to Gebauer and Sommer’s (2024) distinction between “narratives on migration” and “stories of migration”. While the former depict the phenomenon from an outside (i.e. etic) perspective, the latter constitute life stories that present the phenomenon from an inside (i.e. emic) perspective. 9 Roy Sommer (2023) has introduced several analytical categories for the systematic analysis of such narrative dynamics. movement or dynamisation such as LI F E I S A J O U R N E Y O R A W O R L D IN F L U X , but also narrative templates suggesting that people or characters move geographically or change their social status (examples would be phrases like ‘in search of greener pastures’ or ‘from rags to riches’). The most concrete level of the narrative ecology is constituted by stories which reflect personal or collective experience. Such ‘stories of mobility’ can range from cases of conversational storytelling to (auto-)biographies and memoirs. 8 Cultural myths and stories of lived experiences are conjoined by an intermediate level which comprises representations of mobility in both verbal and visual media. Within this narrative ecology, stories interact with each other in various ways. 9 The influence of cultural myths on lived experiences of mobility can be best illustrated with what Cresswell (2006: 55) designates as “metanarratives” - i.e. culturally shaped ideas that inform attitudes towards mobility. Cresswell’s main examples in this context are narratives of sedentarism and nomadism: The former sees mobility “as morally and ideologically suspect, a by-product of a world arranged through place and spatial order”, whereas the latter “puts mobility first, has little time for notions of attachment to place, and revels in notions of flow, flux, and dynamism” (26). While ideas of nomadism have only recently come to the fore in Western culture (43), notions of sedentarism “[pervade] modern thought” (32), with the result that mobile subjects have often been portrayed “as figures of mobile threat in need of straightening out and discipline” (26). As an illustration of the mid-layer of the narrative ecology of mobility, I would like to discuss two randomly chosen examples from news media and literature. The first example is an article in The Guardian, written by Louise Dawson in 2011, about an activist project in Leicester which sought to revive female cycling culture. The article begins by evoking a narrative of gendered mobilities in the early twentieth century, as it recalls Alice Hawkins, a suffragette who cycled around the city to promote the women’s rights movement. The second example is Charles Dickens’s gothic story “The Signalman”, first published in 1866. Inspired by the Staplehurst disaster, a railway accident in 1865 that killed ten and injured at least forty (Cadwallader 2015: 57), it relates the tragic death 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 357 of the protagonist, who is run over by a train. Even though both narratives deal with the rise of new means of transportation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the impact of these developments on different groups within society, their depiction of mobility could not be further apart: While the Guardian article presents the bicycle as “a symbol of women’s emancipation” (Dawson 2011: n. pag.), which allowed the suffragette to extend her radius of mobility within the public space and thus reach a wider audience with her activist movement, Dickens’s story drastically stages the uneven mobilities in Victorian times, given that the working-class protagonist loses his life in his attempt to provide the necessary infrastructure for more privileged groups, as well as goods and materials, to be mobile. In one story, mobility signifies social progress; in the other, it stands for social inequalities. Read against each other, both stories moreover serve to highlight the differences between individual and collective forms of mobility at the dawn of a new era of mass transportation. My juxtaposition of these admittedly very different types of narrative serves to identify some of the premises on which narrative mobility studies builds the study of narrative ecologies: 1. Narratives of mobility can be factual, as Hawkins’s life story, or fictional, as Dickens’s short story; they can be told with the benefit of hindsight or with a view towards the future, as they engage in processes of retrospective or prospective worldmaking (see Nünning 2012; Sommer 2019). Dawson’s article about Hawkins thus looks back at female cycling practices in the past, while Dickens’s “The Signalman” anticipates Victorian fears about technological progress. 2. Even though narratives of mobility emerge at different points in history, they can persist over time. Together, all these narratives can converge and contribute to forming new master-narratives or narrative templates such as ‘mobility as emancipation’ (as illustrated in the Guardian article) or ‘mobility as social capital’ (as implied in “The Signalman”). In this respect, narrative mobility studies discerns a historical dimension in processes of “narrative aggregation”, i.e. the bundling of narratives into clusters (Sommer 2023: 502-3). 3. The same holds for “competing narratives” (503-4), which constitute the converse of narrative aggregation. Previous research has shown that counter-narratives typically emerge in the context of crisis situations when opposing narratives start to vie for discursive hegemony (see Gebauer 2023). The examples of the Guardian article and Dickens’s story moreover suggest that impactful events such as the invention of a new means of transportation or the rise of social movements can serve as another catalyst 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 358 Carolin Gebauer 10 To my knowledge, Alexander Matschi’s doctoral thesis (2016) is the only narratological study that extensively deals with movement and mobility. for “narrative-counter-narrative dynamics” (Lueg and Lundholt 2021), for such momentous developments hold the promise - as well as the threat - to change society permanently, and which perception is ultimately to prevail is a matter that needs to be negotiated. 4. Finally, if we read media and artistic narratives on mobility through the lens of context-oriented approaches such as postcolonial, feminist, gender-oriented, or ecocritical narratology, we can lay bare the diverse relations of power that underlie different constellations of mobility. Such readings can help us also to address issues pertaining to “mobility justice” (Sheller 2018) in the real world - i.e. questions “about how power and inequality inform the governance and control of movement, shaping the patterns of unequal mobility and immobility in the circulation of people, resources, and information” (14) - by encouraging us to scrutinise the metanarratives of mobility that permeate our culture and society. However, these broader implications of narrative mobility studies first require a thorough formal analysis of narratives. Caroline Levine (2015: 3) conceives of form as the sum of “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference”. According to her, the notion of form is more than just an aesthetic feature; it also comprises patterns of sociopolitical experience, the study of which “allows us to rethink the historical workings of political power and the relations between politics and aesthetics” (xiii). Acknowledging that “[f]orms do political work in particular historical contexts” (5), narrative mobility studies proceeds from the assumption that the power structures that influence real-life mobilities are reflected in narrative representations of mobility not only on a content level, but also on the level of narrative form. Yet, so as to unpack the “politics of form” (Olson and Copland 2018) that underpin narratives on mobility, and thus point to the “ideological ramifications of narrative strategies” (Alber 2017), we need new analytical categories that allow us to adequately and accurately describe the ways in which mobility is negotiated through narrative form. 4 Elements of a Narratology of Mobility While previous narratological models have emphasised both the aspects of time and space, movement or mobility has only played a comparatively minor role in the analysis of narrative form. 10 In the remainder of this article, I 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 359 11 On the distinctions between ‘static vs. dynamic’ as well as ‘flat vs. round’ character conceptions, see Neumann and Nünning (2008: 53). will identify some elements of a narratology of mobility which expand the narratological toolbox with categories and concepts introduced by the new mobilities paradigm. These elements relate to both the story and the discourse levels of narrative. 4.1 Categories for the Analysis of Mobility on the Story Level A useful grounding on which to think about representations of mobility on the story level of narrative is Seymour Chatman’s (1978) distinction between existents and events (19). With regard to existents, Chatman differentiates between characters and setting. From the perspective of a narratology of mobility, the most important question relating to characters is whether they can be described as “figures of mobility” (Salazar 2017) such as the flâneur, the migrant, the nomad, the pilgrim, the tourist, and the vagabond. While figures of mobility qualify as stereotypical conceptualisations of a specific group of mobile subjects, ‘mobile’ characters do not necessarily have to be presented as flat or static. More often than not, narrative fiction depicts ‘mobile’ protagonists as round and dynamic characters that develop as the narrative progresses. 11 The category of setting does not exhibit any sense of mobility, as it provides the space within which characters move. In mobility studies, however, the dynamics of the ‘mobility/ fixity’-divide is a central analytical variable which typically finds expression in binary opposites such as ‘mobility vs. moorings’ (Merriman 2023). Constituting what mobility scholars would identify as “the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities” (Hannam et al. 2006: 3), the category of setting therefore plays an important role for the analysis of representations of mobility in narrative. Postcolonial studies and mobility studies provide narratology with two estab‐ lished concepts that foreground the ways in which narrative space is informed by notions of mobility: the contact zone and the meeting place. The concept of the contact zone was introduced by Mary Louise Pratt (2008 [1992]: 26) to designate “the space of imperial encounter […] in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict”. The meeting place, by contrast, imparts a sense of place that Doreen Massey (1991: 28) describes as “extroverted”, for it “includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 360 Carolin Gebauer 12 Although Augé’s concept has often been criticised by mobilities scholars (see Merriman 2012: 52-58), and the author himself even revised his position on the concept in later publications (see Merriman 2004: 150), the original definition of ‘non-places’ may prove fruitful for the analysis of representations of transit spaces in narrative texts. way the global and the local”. Whereas the contact zone suggests a power imbalance between the different ethnic groups that interact with each other in this space of intercultural collision, the meeting place conceptualises these encounters on a more equal basis. Both concepts have important implications for character constellations, as they provide the basis for central conflicts. As such, representations of contact zones or meeting places in narrative fiction can serve as effective strategies to negotiate notions of cultural hybridity which emerge in what Homi Bhabha (2004 [1994]) designates as “Third Space” (53-55) - that is, the “contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation” that challenges “hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures” (55). Types of narrative setting like the contact zone or the meeting place need to be distinguished from so-called “non-places” - that is, “space[s] which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé 2008 [1992]: 63). Cases in point are airports, hotel rooms, or shopping centres, all of which constitute places of transit, where people typically pass through without forming any significant attachment to space. 12 In narratological terms, it is thus tempting to think of these settings as semantically empty. Yet, taking the example of the airport, Lena Mattheis (2021: 167) demonstrates that this space may very well constitute a non-place for travellers who are only passing through, but not for security guards, vendors, custodial personnel and other staff working at the airport, for whom this space forms an integral “part of [their] social network, livelihood and everyday routines”. The question, then, is how narratives depict settings that qualify as alleged ‘non-places’: Do they present them as spaces without any social or cultural meaning, or do they stress their ‘placeness’ by foregrounding their significance for the characters? With respect to events, it is important to note that character movement plays an important role for the development of plot. According to Yuri M. Lotman (1977 [1971]), the fictional worlds depicted in narratives are typically made up of two distinct subspaces that are topologically distinct (e.g. top-bottom, inside-outside), semantically polar (e.g. good-evil, familiar-strange), and that concretise in specific topographical opposites (e.g. town/ safety-forest/ danger, heaven/ good-hell/ evil) (218-29). A boundary separates both these subspaces, creating a spatial division which Lotman considers a structural prerequisite of narrative plot. For the “smallest indivisible unit” (232) of any plot is “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” (233). Lotman 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 361 13 For a more detailed discussion of Lotman’s semantics of space, see also Gebauer (2022). construes narrative texts, then, as plotted texts that feature at least one mobile character, the “hero-agent” (240), who crosses the boundary separating the different semantic spaces established by these texts (238). 13 Such boundary crossings can take various shapes. In Literature on the Move (2003), Ottmar Ette distinguishes five movement patterns that can typically be observed in travelogues and travel literature (38-48): (1) the circle, which constitutes “a circular travel movement in which the traveler returns to the place of departure” (39); (2) the pendulum, which can be thought of as a back and forth movement between two or several locations; (3) the line, which visualises a one-way journey from a starting to a destination point; (4) the star, which can be described as movement departing “from a definite center, which serves as a starting point for more or less circular journeys and leads to a stellate expansion of the traveled and registered space” (45-6); and (5) the jump, which can be characterised as movement “of a rather diffuse nature” (47). Ette’s categories help us see that character movement is also invested with meaning in narrative. As Matschi (2016: 18) explains, [t]he central point Ette makes with all of these movement patterns is that the deep-structural geometrical figure (such as circle, line or star) performed by the protagonists on the topological level of a literary text’s narrated world frequently resembles the hermeneutic movement of understanding the reader must perform in order to grasp (at least the essential of) its meaning potential. Whereas the fixed boundary divides the storyworld into topographical sub‐ spaces, it is the mobile character’s movement between and across these sub‐ spaces that ultimately enables us to make sense of their meaning. With recourse to Lotman’s and Ette’s theories, one can thus state that a text can only develop a plot if the protagonist crosses a boundary, and that this movement can take various routes and directions. However, as Matías Martínez and Michael Scheffel (2009 [1999]) point out, Lotman regards as narrative not only “revolutionary” text types in which the protagonist’s boundary crossing is successful but also “restitutive” text types in which this act of movement fails or is eventually reversed (142). According to Martínez and Scheffel, the occurrence of the border crossing itself does not qualify as a distinctive feature of narrative in Lotman’s model; instead, it is the existence of a semantic field, divided into two subsets by a conceptual boundary, which makes a text a narrative (140). This modified version of Lotman’s model shifts the analytical focus from narrativity to tellability, with the result that the protagonist’s transgression of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 362 Carolin Gebauer 14 On the relation between the concepts of narrativity, tellability, and eventfulness, see Hühn (2014). this conceptual boundary no longer determines a narrative’s eventfulness, but rather its quality as a narrative that is ‘worth being told’. 14 Combining these considerations about Lotman’s semantics of space with insights from mobility studies, one could argue that literary narratives evoke fictive mobility regimes which govern the characters’ radius of mobility: Essentially, the narrative configuration of the spatial dimension of a novel’s story‐ world […] always produces repercussions on the characters’ freedom of movement, either by inviting them to move about freely, or by restricting or even preventing movement through its presence as external friction. (Matschi 2016: 196) We can thus think of Martínez and Scheffel’s distinction of revolutionary and restitutive text types in terms of the differentiation between mobility and what mobility scholars refer to as “motility” - that is, “the way in which an individual appropriates what is possible in the domain of mobility and puts this potential to use for his or her activities” (Kaufmann 2016: 37, original emphasis). While revolutionary texts feature mobility to the effect that characters cross a boun‐ dary, hence performing an act that leads to some kind of transformative change within the storyworld, restitutive texts only display the characters’ motility within the structural and systemic constraints at play in a given storyworld. The reasons why a character may fail or refuse to realise their potential of movement are manifold, of course, depending on their specific circumstances. These circumstances, in turn, are not only inscribed in their character conception, but also determined by character constellations that reflect specific power structures underlying the storyworld the character inhabits. 4.2 Categories for the Analysis of Mobility on the Discourse Level When it comes to the analysis of mobility on the discourse level of narrative texts, the categories ‘time’, ‘mood’, particularly ‘perspective’ and ‘focalisation’, and ‘voice’, provided by Gérard Genette (1980 [1972]) prove helpful. With respect to time, it seems promising to begin with the spatiotemporal configu‐ rations of the storyworlds evoked by narratives. In his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (2014 [1981]), Mikhail M. Bakhtin argues that literary texts produce unified “chronotopes” whose temporal and spatial properties are inextricably interwoven. There is both a textual and a contextual dimension to Bakhtin’s concept, for “created chronotopes” always emerge 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 363 “[o]ut of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation)” (253; original emphasis). After having long been ignored in narratological research (Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan 2022: 430), newer work in the field has begun to emphasise the value of Bakhtin’s concept as a tool for narratological analysis. Most recently, Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2022) have introduced what they designate as “the postclassical chronotope” - a model that operates within the framework of “a situated narratology”, which “recognizes the critical place of contexts, identities, and locations […] not only of narrative but also of narrative form” (431). Their readings of various examples from Anglophone literature, including, among others, Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), “conjoin Bakhtin’s delineation of social spaces with Genette’s categories of temporal arrangement” (ibid.) to uncover the functional interplay of plot development and narrative space. More importantly, however, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s considerations additionally highlight that the analysis of the ways in which narrative events unfold against different spatial backdrops always involves questions about the movement of characters and other narrative existents. This becomes obvious in their analysis of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” (1894), which revolves around a wife’s coming to terms with the supposed loss of her husband, who is said to have died in a train accident. The short story follows the widow through the stages of mourning as well as the realisation of her new-found freedom, until her husband reappears, alive and unharmed, causing the wife to die of shock. The temporal dynamics of the narrative, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan argue, is accompanied by a continuous shift in setting, which they conceive as movement through narrative space: While temporality marks the story’s title, spatiality shapes the hour. In terms of story order, the narrative moves from the road (or, in this case, the train track) to the drawing room to the private chamber, and then back to the drawing room with another intrusion from the road. (433; emphasis added) Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan show that the ways in which the characters move between different spaces within the storyworld do not match the order of narration, for the events of the road are presented by instances of analepsis, whereas the drawing room constitutes the narrative present. The shifts between the different settings furthermore coincide with variation in narrative tempo: In the relatively public space of the drawing room, summary dominates: discourse or narrative time (NT) is far shorter than story time (ST). In the privacy of the chamber, however, narrative time slows toward story time as Louise undergoes the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 364 Carolin Gebauer transformation from grief to the liberating recognition that she can ‘live for herself ’. (433) Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s close reading of Chopin’s narrative offers some interesting insights for narrative mobility studies. First, it demonstrates that notions of movement and mobility inform their analysis not only on a spatial level (think of the continual changes in the narrative’s setting), but also on a psy‐ chological level (i.e. Louise is moved emotionally by the death of her husband, and these feelings change over time). Second, the fact that their analysis of the narrative’s progression through different spaces of the storyworld foregrounds variations in narrative pace reveals that Genette’s categories - i.e. pause, scene, summary, ellipsis - are well compatible with categories introduced by critical mobilities research - e.g. speed, flow, friction, pauses, stillness, and turbulence (Sheller 2014: 795). Finally, Lanser and Rimmon-Kenan’s interpretation that Louise’s experience of liberation is restricted to the private sphere - “in late nineteenth-century America, a respectable married woman’s passion for free‐ dom has literally nowhere to go” (2022: 434) - illustrates that the combination of these categories can be fruitfully applied to investigate how “textured rhythms are co-produced, practiced, and represented in relation to the gendered, raced, classed mobilities and forms of dwelling and ‘grounding’ of particular others” (Sheller 2014: 795). The need to include the ideas of movement and mobility in the analysis of narrative chronotopes has already been emphasised by literary and mobility scholars alike. According to Matschi (2016: 70), it is the “mobile character” that links the different semantic spaces evoked by narratives: Their movement across the boundaries separating these spaces “brings about their mutual inter‐ twinement” (ibid.), which may result in effects of translocality, transnationality, and transculturality. Matschi therefore calls for a “dynamization of Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’”, stressing “the agentive dimension of human motion” (47) that transforms otherwise static spatiotemporal configurations (see also 70-3). Peterle (2023: 109) similarly maintains that the concept of the chronotope should be reconsidered from the perspective of mobility. Her approach complements Matschi’s reflections in that she suggests “explor[ing] the possibility of not only considering static places - for example, the city, the crossing or the road […] - but also, the moving elements and practices as possible narrative chronotopes”. In her understanding, narrative existents like the car, trains and trams, or the underground qualify as “mobile chronotopes”, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 365 15 Drawing on insights from an enactivist approach to narratology, Peterle (2023) is interested not so much in representations of characters’ experiences of mobility as in the experiences that these representations elicit within the flesh-and-blood reader. It is in this respect that she argues that the concept of the chronotope “serves as a ‘bridge’ between the real and fictional worlds”, for it has “the capacity to configure the real world […] through a mutual exchange between pages and places” (108). 16 Matschi (2016: 184) has coined the term “traveller-focalizer” for this scenario. 17 For detailed discussions of representations of animal minds in narrative fiction, see e.g. Caracciolo (2022: ch. 3) and Herman (2018: ch. 6). i.e. narrative spatiotemporal configurations that bridge the act of narration and the experiences of movement evoked by this act (109). 15 Matschi’s and Peterle’s arguments about the dynamisation of the chronotope also raise important questions about narrative perspective, in particular about focalisation. For the ways in which subjects and objects move across the time‐ spaces evoked by narratives are always represented from a specific point of view from within these narratives. Drawing on Rimmon-Kenan’s (2002 [1983]: 75-6) distinction of external and internal focalisation, this centre of consciousness can be either the narrator on the discourse level or a character on the story level, the choice of which has consequences for the mode of representation. In the case of external focalisation, the movements of characters and objects are typically depicted from an external perspective, with the modes of narration or description dominating, whereas in the case of internal focalisation, these movements are presented from an internal point of view through the use of representational strategies associated with the mode of showing. More specifically, this means that a narrative gives readers an idea of what it’s like to be ‘on the move’ by taking one or several mobile characters as focalisers. 16 Forms of representation that are typically used to convey these different perspectives on movement through narrative space are the “map strategy” and the “tour strategy” (Ryan et al. 2016: 27), the latter of which is sometimes even used as a plot theme whenever a narrative as a whole follows the journeys of a protagonist (31-2). Focalisation is not constrained to human characters, however; this category can also serve to question anthropocentric perspectives by taking, for instance, animals or plants as mobile focalisers, instead. 17 In this way, narrative fiction can provide imaginary entryways to nonhuman and material mobilities that otherwise remain largely inaccessible. The final category that is central to the analysis of representations of mobility in narrative is voice and its concomitant distinction of different narrative levels. According to Marie-Laure Ryan (2014: 805-6), narrative space is not only horizontally divided into subspaces, as suggested by Lotman, but narrative can also display vertical partitions into different ontologies, which create, among 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 366 Carolin Gebauer others, the different levels of fictionality in narratives with embedded stories. The narratological category of metalepsis has already taught us that character movement can also take place across and between these different narrative planes (Matschi 2016: 266-7). I would argue that, from the perspective of narrative mobility studies, such metaleptic transgressions not only serve as a violation of the structure of narrative; in most cases, these movements also constitute what Magdalena Pfalzgraf (2021: 248) describes as “countermobility” in that they challenge the social hierarchies and power structures represented in these texts. Seen in this light then, character movement within both the vertical and horizontal dimensions can serve to reflect, substantiate, or undermine the politics of mobility underlying specific narratives. 5 Conclusion Although mobility studies often draws on narrative in various contexts, and cultural narratology similarly addresses issues and concerns that are related to mobility, there has so far been very little exchange between the new mobil‐ ities paradigm and contextualist narratology. In pointing out some important overlaps between both research fields, this chapter has made a case for a new analytical framework that integrates findings from mobility studies on the one hand and cultural narrative studies and interdisciplinary narrative research on the other. My argument in favour of narrative mobility studies has first foregrounded the value of narrative in cultural discourses on mobility, introducing the notion of the narrative ecology of mobility that enables us to better fathom the ways in which narrative affects mobilities on cultural, societal, and individual scales. As a second step, I have introduced some elements of a narratology of mobility which integrates categories from both mobility studies and narrative theory for the analysis of the ideological operations of form that are at play in narrative representations of mobility. While this chapter could not offer a comprehensive overview of all the intersections between mobility studies and narrative theory, I nevertheless hope to have shown that further research in narrative mobility studies could be beneficial to both research fields. Given that mobility scholars and narrative scholars concur in the view that narrative is not only informed by, but also shapes social, cultural, political, and historical ideas of what it means to be mobile, the narrative ecology of mobility demands further examination. How do narratives of mobility interact with each other, forming clusters of master-narratives and counter-narratives that influence the ways in which we move in a globalised and networked world? In how far do narratives contribute 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 367 to the formation of cultural imaginations of mobility and to what extent have these narratives changed over time in light of social and cultural transformations such as colonialism and decolonisation, industrial and technological progress, as well as the growing threat of climate change? How do narratives of mobility shape cultural identity and intercultural encounters? What impact do they have on our understanding of how human practices of mobility change the spaces and environments we inhabit on this earth? And how do all these narratives inform politics of mobility, thus affecting lived experiences of being ‘on the move’? In addition to synchronic and diachronic research into the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of the narrative dynamics of mobility, narrative mobility studies could further explore the relevance of movement to the analysis of narrative form. Dynamisations of the chronotope, for example, could be used to systematically analyse the spatial semantics of narrative fiction by revisiting conventionalised binary pairs such as the public vs. the private spheres, centre vs. periphery, and interiority vs. exteriority to name but few examples. Another interesting endeavour would be an investigation of the link between represen‐ tations of mobility and multiperspectivity (see Nünning and Nünning 2000). How, for instance, do the different perspective structures in narrative fiction bear upon the ways in which mobility is depicted and negotiated in these texts? 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London and New York: Routledge. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0016 Narrative Mobility Studies: A New Analytical Framework for Cultural Narratology 373 1 The German original was published in 2021 by Carl Hanser Verlag. In the following, all citations pertain to the 2022 English translation. Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective Anna-Lena Eick 1 “‘Where Do You Come From? ’ ‘I’m from the Internet. I live online’.” In a scene from Mithu Sanyal’s novel Identitti (2022) 1 , the protagonist, Nivedita, is introduced in a radio interview as one of the “must know POCs [people of colour]” (Sanyal 2022: 8) and is asked to define the term people of colour: “POCs are the folx who always get asked, ‘Where are you from? ’” (Sanyal 2022: 8). Nivedita’s response does not prevent the moderator, Verena, from repeating the same question. Nivedita’s reply, though subtly framed, highlights the underlying tension in the phrasing - particularly with the unspoken yet clear implication of “really” (i.e. Where are you really from? ). Her response is emblematic: “I’m from the Internet. I live online” (Sanyal 2022: 8). This moment exemplifies the exploration, reception, and integration of digital media in the context of a postmigrant perspective within Identitti, and, I argue, in transcul‐ tural contemporary literature more broadly. This trend opens a previously undertheorised area of research that links the impact of the ‘digital revolution’ with the application of postmigrant and postcolonial approaches to the analysis and interpretation of literary texts that engage with transcultural phenomena. These include the reflection on migration and integration, the negotiation of individual and cultural belonging and related generational differences, as well as the question of whether concepts of home and origin can be tied to any particular place at all. The increasing reflection and integration of digital mediality within the outlined corpus of transcultural contemporary literature demonstrates an orientation towards the textual integration of a postdigital perspective - a nexus that has not yet been sufficiently theorised. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 This contribution therefore examines the intersection between the impact of the media transformation after digitalisation and transnational issues of cultural belonging and identity. Contemporary literary texts across languages, I contend, are increasingly grappling with the cultural, social, and media-related consequences of the digital transformation of our cultures and societies - or what might be considered a postdigital reality - and its epistemological implications, both in terms of content and form. This reflection on digital mediality in a postdigital mediascape often intersects with a socially critical stance adopted (whether implicitly or explicitly) by these texts, encouraging engagement with issues such as belonging, cultural identity, as well as racism and discrimination within current social structures - particularly in postmigrant societies. Literary texts situated at this intersection (transcultural phenomena in combination with postdigital insights) furthermore open an aesthetic space for the metadiscursive negotiation of these thematic and formal entanglements. In the following, I will present the nexus of transcultural phenomena (from a postmigrant perspective) and the radically changed mediascape of the postdigi‐ tal era, as an emerging area of research. The introductory section (2) elaborates on conceptual parallels and content correlations between the post-digital and the postmigrant (and, in direct dependence, the postcolonial), as well as their discursive formation. The third section (3) situates the intersection of postmigrant societies and cultures with a postdigital mediascape shaped by the fundamental impacts of the digital transformation within existing frameworks of inter-, trans-, and hyper-culturality. This is followed by a section (4) that showcases the various impacts of the postdigital on literary texts as a spectrum, and contrasts my approach with other propositions, such as electronic literature or ‘literature born digital’, to explore potentially new questions in literary and cultural studies. The subsequent sections (5 and 6) propose foundations extend‐ ing existing frameworks to include the media-transformative components of the postdigital, and illustrate possible points of departure in the context of a post-migrant perspective on contemporary literature. A brief exemplification of how three selected contemporary German-language texts published between 2016 and 2022 incorporate the postdigital in different ways into their narrative negotiations of cultural identity is intended to identify possible starting points for further research. My closing remarks (7) will point to a broader perspective on the postdigital in post-migrant contexts. This chapter thus demonstrates that the evolving intersections of digital transformation, identity, and cultural belonging not only highlight but also open new avenues for future research on how these dynamics reshape social as well as media structures and narrative forms in an increasingly, yet unevenly, interconnected world. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 376 Anna-Lena Eick 2 As Stengel, van Looy, and Wallaschkowski point out, the technological innovation underlying the digital revolution or digital transformation is primarily the ability to transmit and store information in binary code: “There is some evidence that this is the beginning of a digital revolution, following the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions - the third great revolution in human history. The Neolithic Revolution was based on the cultivation of food and the Industrial Revolution on the use of machines to do work. The digital revolution is being driven by computers - the transmission and storage of information, rewritten in combinations of 0s and 1s, and sent to any location at high speed. This may sound unimpressive, but the results are world-shaking” (2017: XII, my translation). 2 Conceptual Parallels - Substantive Correlations? The terms postmigrant, postcolonial, and postdigital all serve as markers for transformative processes that similarly affect socio-cultural coexistence and underlying self-understandings. These terms open new epistemological perspectives in comparable ways. The following section lays the foundation for a triangulation of the post-phenomena invoked. It will examine the concep‐ tual parallels and substantive correlations between the postmigrant (in direct discursive dependence on the postcolonial) and the postdigital, as well as their implications for social dynamics and cultural narratives. 2.1 After The Digital Revolution: Postdigital Google Maps instead of folded paper maps, emails instead of letters, Zoom meetings instead of face-to-face communication - this list could go on, yet the outcome remains the same: digital media and technology have become integral to our society, culture, and communication (see Barthelmes and Sander 2001; Van Eimeren and Frees 2013). They have seemingly replaced, transformed, complemented, or extended the functions of analogue media, leading to a “radically changed overall mediascape”, as Irina Rajewsky aptly puts it (2023: 193; my translation), in which established positions and proportions have been - and continue to be - renegotiated. The revolutionary moment of the underlying technological developments has long since passed. 2 As early as 1998, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, declared “the digital revolution is over” (Negroponte 1998: n.p.), ushering in a postdigital “status quo” in Western culture and society. While Negroponte addressed the phenomenon in question as “Beyond digital” (1998), it has been discussed in recent decades under the term “post-digital” (see Jandrić, MacKenzie, and Knox 2023; Thon 2025; Lindberg 2025). The term postdigital does not mean ‘after the digital’ in the sense of overcoming or surpassing the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 377 3 In this regard, Florian Cramer states: “From a strictly technological or scientific point of view [most] uses of the word ‘digital’ were inaccurate. […] Something can very well be ‘digital’ without being electronic, and without involving binary zeros and ones. It does digital state of development in media and technology. Rather, postdigital refers to a situation in which digital communication and networking processes have become so ubiquitous and normalised that they are no longer remarkable, as Alessandro Ludovico notes in the blurb of his 2013 monograph Post-digital Print: “In the post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon, but a normal part of everyday life”. Postdigital thus describes a collective process of familiarisation: a permanent embedding of digital media in the reality of everyday life, to such an extent that, as Negroponte suggests, it is more noticeable in its absence than in its presence: “Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence” (Negroponte 1998). The term postdigital has emerged in a variety of academic disciplines to describe an era in which digital media and related technologies have become the dominant aesthetic, social, and epistemological paradigm. The widespread discourse on the postdigital (since 2000) is inextricably linked to the techno‐ logical developments that have shaped this shift and that form the basis of the material reality of the postdigital age. Stephen Abblitt identifies three components that have significantly influenced and conditioned the digital paradigm, which, through its technological developments and innovations, forms the foundation for the postdigital era: “the mechanisation of calculation, the storage and retrieval of information in coded form, and the automatic execution of a sequence of operations critical to the advent of the computer age” (2019: 98). The tangible markers of the postdigital age, as well as possible abstractions of them in cultural-theoretical terms, will be discussed in more detail below. Without burrowing further into the intricate debates surrounding the defini‐ tions of digital and analogue, I would like to highlight what is significant for my conceptualisation of the postdigital. As Florian Cramer rather bluntly puts it, it is “a term that sucks - but it is useful” (2015: 13). Nontheless, it is worth noting the terminological and conceptual ambiguity surrounding the terms digital, postdigital, and their related compounds (e.g. digital mediality, postdigital aesthetics), as “the digital in ‘post-digital’ should not be understood in any technical-scientific or media-theoretical sense, but rather in the way the term is broadly used in popular culture” (2015: 15). When discussing digital media in an overall changed mediascape, the focus is not solely on the precise technical conditions of the “digital”, 3 but rather on the secondary developments associated 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 378 Anna-Lena Eick not even have to be related in any way to electronic computers of any other kind of computational device” (2015: 17). This conceptual fuzziness is vividly illustrated by an example from the field of music: “The fingerboard of a violin is analogue: it is fretless, and thus undivided and continuous. The fingerboard of a guitar, on the other hand, is digital: it is divided by frets into discrete notes” (2015: 18). 4 The term “postmigrant” [in German: das Postmigrantische] originates primarily from the socio-cultural context in Germany (cf. Foroutan 2019; Yildiz and Hill 2018). While the concept of a society in which migration and related phenomena are no longer new or alien can undoubtedly be applied to other national and cultural contexts, it is important to note that the situations in (mostly Western) immigration countries can differ significantly, even in terms of classifying a post-migrant social composition. These differences are due to specific historical circumstances, for example, the respective ways in which different countries have dealt with the colonial past and the varying degrees of active engagement with it. By taking these factors into account, we can develop a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of the postmigrant condition in different national contexts, recognising both the commonalities and the particularities shaped by each country’s historical experience. 5 Shermin Langhoff, former artistic director of the Gorki Theatre in Berlin, points to the subversive and critical potential inherent in the concept of postmigration, which (at least initially) is not a fact but rather a “social vision” that has yet to be realised (Langhoff 2018: 301). The postmigrant paradigm aims to provide “cross-ethnic explanations for core socio-political conflicts over recognition, equality of opportunity and participation in pluralist democracies” (Foroutan et al. 2018: 15; my translation). Such a state of affairs must be seen as a vision for the future and a goal to be strived for - and not as a social status quo that has already been achieved (cf. Hodaie and Hofmann 2024: 3). with the digital revolution: the widespread availability of digital technologies (e.g. smartphones, Big Data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence) and the accessibility of digital spaces (e.g. the Internet or social media). Therefore, the attributions and characteristics linked to the digital are primarily grounded in individual experiences with digital media in everyday life. These “(post)digital” possibilities - especially in the colloquial sense - have increasingly become routine in both their presence and application. This connection is encapsulated in the concept of the postdigital. 2.2 Post-Migration Alongside the process of familiarisation with the impacts of the digital trans‐ formation, another ‘post-concept’ has been circulating since the turn of the millennium: post-migration or the post-migrant. 4 This concept also aims not only to just identify or address a changed overall situation but to describes processes of familiarization. Central to this are migratory movements and the socio-cultural negotiations they entail, which have become ubiquitous, at least in theory. 5 In this context, the concept of the post-migrant signifies 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 379 that migration and spatial mobility are no longer novelties in an increasingly globalised world. Here, too, the prefix ‘post’ is not used to suggest the end of migration (see Foroutan 2019: 54); rather, it challenges binary categories of (non-)belonging in favour of embracing ambiguities and hybridities within migration societies. A purely temporal interpretation of the ‘post’ prefix is therefore inadequate in the case of the post-migrant (as well as the postdigital), since it “misjudges the critical potential that is originally inherent in the postmigrant”, as Hodaie and Hofmann aptly point out (2024: 3; my translation). In the case of the post-migrant, the prefix refers to the “overcoming of a dichotomous paradigm based on natio-ethno-culturally constructed dimensions of difference and belonging” (Mecheril 2010: 14; my translation). The critical (and sometimes activist) potential of the post-migrant, as invoked here, is to radically deconstruct “migration as an explanatory variable for alterity” (Foroutan et al. 2018: 15; my translation). In this sense, the ‘post’ in post-migrant presupposes an active questioning of existing discourses and demands a critical positioning towards hegemonic world and social orders. Following this line of thought, Yildiz and Hill identify the post-migrant as a concept that “requires overcoming thought patterns, rethinking the entire field in which the discourse of migration is embedded, [in short: ] as a contrapuntal interpretation of social conditions” (2018: 89; my translation). Descriptive categories that have frequently been used to classify texts in a transcultural context, such as “migration literature” or “refugee literature” risk promoting a special status and marginalisation of the phenomena in question, ultimately leading to the perception that authors writing from a “migration background” operate outside the national literary canon. To overcome these pit‐ falls of binary dichotomies, Moritz Schramm proposes adopting a postmigrant perspective, particularly when analysing contemporary literary texts. Migration and its consequences can be experienced and perceived by all members of an immigration society and by dissociating these issues from any special group affiliation, a broader examination of the topic becomes possible “just beyond binary logic” (Schramm 2018: 83; my translation). Regarding the post-migrant era, Petersen and Schramm note that the ha‐ bitualisation of migration in our societies leads directly to the need for a fundamental re-conceptualisation and reconfiguration of some deeply rooted and often unquestioned foundations of society and social coexistence. They argue that assumptions such as the idea of a homogeneous national identity, the clear-cut division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, the notion that migration is a deviation from the norm, and the belief that mainstream society sets the standards to which minorities must adapt, are outdated and need to be re- 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 380 Anna-Lena Eick examined to reflect the realities of a globalised and (post)migratory world (see Petersen and Schramm 2017). Accordingly, Hodaie and Hofmann emphasise that any “reductionist knowledge production about migration” and the closely related “hegemonic readings of migration” (2024: 3; my translation) must be proactively suspended in terms of the post-migrant paradigm and replaced by a social and cultural normalisation of the phenomena in question (i.e. migration and a post-migrant state of society). The new ways of thinking addressed here - in line with the affordances of the post-migrant paradigm - aim at normalising of post-migrant compositions of societies and include, for example, institutional reforms that promote inclusivity, updated education policies, and frameworks for more diverse societal participation. Such processes of adaptation primarily seek to integrate diversity into the fabric of the (now post-migrant) society while explicitly addressing the complexities of a heterogeneous demographic structure. The homogeneity and singularity of the assumption of a dominant culture (in German: ‘Leitkultur,’ see Tibi 1998), the constitution of societies as nationally or geographically limited entities, and the underlying questions of so‐ cial belonging as restrictive mechanisms of exclusion can thus be fundamentally overcome and rethought of as heterogeneous, fluid and, above all, pluralistic concepts. These perspectives are in turn intrinsically linked to altered logics of representation and adapted terminologies. This includes the need to critically examine the extent to which it is still appropriate, in terms of wording and nomenclature, in a post-migrant society, to distinguish, for example, between migrants and natives or, at the level of literary production, between a national and a so-called ‘intercultural’ canon. Altered literary forms of representation in post-migrant contexts fundamentally reject binary categorisations, for example by employing narrative methods of multiperspectivity and polyphony, or by textually exploring liminal spaces (i.e. the virtual space as a supposedly secure realm or one of negotiation). In doing so, they challenge established notions of homogeneous societies and cultural identities, foreground marginalised voices, and reinterpret discriminatory stereotypes (including those deeply embedded in institutional structures). 2.3 Triangulation of the Postdigital, Postmigrant, and Postcolonial Perspectives These calls for profound changes in adapted terminology, innovative cogni‐ tive and/ or narrative scripts, and new mindsets can similarly be applied to our ‘media condition’ following the digital transformation of our cultures 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 381 6 The term “media condition” used here to describe the overall mediascape “after the digital transformation” is a conceptual and terminological borrowing from the “postmedia condition” [in German: “post-mediale Kondition,” or “postmedialer Zustand”] outlined by Peter Weibel (2004, 2012). Weibel describes the influence of “old” and “new” media (here: non-technical versus technical media) as a so-called post-media condition: “Consequently, this state of current art practice is best referred to as the post-media condition, because no single medium is dominant any longer; instead, all of the different media influence and determine each other. The set of all media forms a universal selfcontained medium. This is the post-media condition of the world of the media in the practice of the arts today” (Weibel 2012). The following insight from Weibel can be productively applied to the media condition “after digital transformation” (or: a postdigital media condition), including the new - and constantly changing - post-digital media mix: “With the experiences of the new media we can afford to take a new look at the old media. With the practices of the new technological media we can also embark on a fresh evaluation of the practices of the old non-technological media” (Weibel 2012). 7 In this respect, both concepts can be said to advance epistemological innovations to a certain extent. Following Foucault, the episteme can be described as “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalised systems” (Foucault 1973: 191). This notion is particularly applicable to the concepts of the post-migrant and the postdigital, as both operate as frameworks that reconfigure existing discourses and knowledge systems. In their epistemological dimension, both concepts illustrate how and societies into a postdigital condition, 6 especially in its epistemological dimensions. These epistemological shifts include, among other things, the decentralisation of (authoritative) knowledge and (hegemonic) power, the firm anchoring of alternative interpretations of cultural identities, and a focus on the marginalised experiences of migration beyond mechanisms of exclusion. However, the possibilities inherent in digital platforms, for example, challenge the mechanisms of hegemonic gatekeeping as much as they risk reproducing them. Digital media potentially allow marginalised voices to reshape dominant discourses on migration, identity, and belonging. In the course of the digital transformation that has led to our current postdigital age, fundamental and epistemological shifts have occurred that have not yet been fully theorised in the context of (conceptual) reconfigurations, (terminological) reformulations and socio-cultural repositionings, especially from a post-migrant perspective. The entrenchment of both migration and digital mediality presents a signif‐ icant challenge to established schemas and socio-cultural assumptions (e.g. the assumption of a fixed notion of identity or belonging directly tied to the place of birth). Both the post-migrant and the postdigital condition serve to discursively demarcate processes of negotiation, as well as to initiate or potentially interrupt them. They promote the redefinition of contemporary epistemologies by challenging established binaries and power structures. 7 The 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 382 Anna-Lena Eick epistemes shape and transform the conditions under which knowledge is produced, legitimated, and practised in contemporary contexts. 8 Florian Cramer proposes the equation as a heading: “postdigital = postcolonial” (2015: 14). He states: “Postcolonialism does not in any way mean the end of colonialism […] but rather its mutation into new, less obvious but no less pervasive power structures that have a profound and lasting impact on languages and cultures” (15). 9 With Yildiz (2005: 327-329), Castro Varela and Dhawan (2015), and Terkessidis (2019), it should be noted that the concept of the post-migrant was also established in the context of postcolonialism and even more as an “analogy to the discourse on postcolonialism” (Yildiz 2021: 71; my translation) and is therefore historically and genealogically rooted in the postcolonial discourse from the 1990s onwards, the issues addressed (Eurocentrism, hegemonic historiography), and the challenges identified (irritating hegemonic orders, opening new horizons of experience). postmigrant perspective, for example, conceptually diminishes the distinction between ‘foreign’ and ‘native’, and rejects Eurocentric and exclusive notions of belonging, while the postdigital perspective questions the boundaries between digital and analogue as well as the notion of a place of origin in a globalised and digitalised world (and in contrast to a geographically detached virtual space). These conditions foster new ways of conceptualising identity, social relations, belonging, and communication. This, in turn, creates an inextricable link between the concepts of both the post-migrant and the postdigital and the antecedent concept of post-colonialism, 8 which, in terms of discursive history, directly precedes the emergence of the post-migrant framework. 9 As Bartels et al. observe, the ‘post’ in post-colonialism marks “a critical perspective and forms of ideological positioning that are ‘post’ colonial in that they question, critique, refract, subvert, or offer alternatives to colonial trajectories of ordering the world” (2019: 2-3). The attributes and goals ascribed to post-colonialism can partly be translated into the post-conceptualisations discussed above. The intertwining of postmigrant, postdigital, and postcolonial concepts reveals complex power dynamics in contemporary discourses. All three conditions share ongoing transformative effects rather than marking definitive endpoints. In all three cases, the prefix signifies - among other things - the inevitable consequences of the new intellectual traditions (in the case of the “post-digital,” Murray 2020: 448). A postcolonial perspective is, for example, inherently tied to the effort of exposing and undermining the reproduction of epistemic violence, which sustains colonial legacies and their associated inequalities. This impact is particularly amplified within the postdigital era, as digital media can extend the scope of structural inequalities through, for example, digital platforms and algorithms privileging dominant narratives, and potentially obscuring resistance due to information and data asymmetry (see Grünberger 2021: 219f.). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 383 The postdigital mediascape hence presents both opportunities and challenges for postcolonial and postmigrant contexts, necessitating a critical analysis of how digital mediality and its underlying technologies reshape established con‐ cepts, terminology, and theoretical frameworks. For instance, the postcolonial dichotomy of ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’, traditionally shaped by geographic and power-based hierarchies, is confronted by the virtual space, which is often perceived and described as open and decentralised. Similarly, Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the ‘Third Space’ (Bhabha 1994: 54), originally rooted in cultural hybridity, can be reinterpreted in the postdigital realm as a digital (i.e. virtual) space where new forms of identity and interaction emerge, altering its charac‐ teristics and terminological implications. This possible interplay underscores the need to rethink such concepts in light of the transformative impact of digital transformation. Postmigration, postcolonialism, and a postdigital status quo influence sociocultural coexistence, underlying self-understandings, and their epistemological implications with comparable intensity. Thus, these three concepts not only exhibit conceptual parallels but also share content-related correlations, thereby inscribing themselves, through their terminology, into a tradition of postconceptualities. Having established the relevance and interconnectedness of these three post-conceptualisations, the following section delves deeper into the emerging research field that examines postdigital dimensions in contemporary literary texts from a post-migrant perspective. This exploration will focus on the field’s connections to existing cultural theories, particularly those that integrate digital mediality. By doing so, I intend to develop a theoretically grounded foundation for the subsequent cursory insight into contemporary German literature through a postmigrant lens. 3 Digital Transformation and Culture To combine the postdigital age with a postmigrant perspective, while continuing and transcending postcolonial thought, cultural studies approaches offer the most promising way forward. These approaches, which examine (cultural) exchange through the lenses of mobility, migration, and digital mediality, provide a solid foundation for integrating these interrelated concepts. The former have been explored under the headings of ‘interculturality’ (see Lescovec 2011; Heimböckel and Weinberg 2014), ‘transculturality’ (see Welsch 1994, 2001; Waldenfels 2006), and ‘hyper-culturality’ (see Byung-Chul Han 2005), all of which share a fundamental departure from the notion of culture as a closed 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 384 Anna-Lena Eick 10 Herder’s “sphere ideal” characterises cultures as self-contained systems and “selfcontained spheres” (Schachtner 2014: 228), constituted internally by postulated homo‐ geneity and externally by explicit demarcation (cf. Welsch 2012: 27). Regardless of which orientation and conceptual contours within cultural theory one wishes to follow, the current state of research and consensus is that culture is to be understood as “permeative and not separatist” (Welsch 2012: 26; my translation), and that metaphors of networking, interweaving, and rhizome are more suitable as guiding principles for culture than the metaphor of the metaphorical sphere (cf. Welsch 2012: 28f.). sphere. 10 The latter, in its omnipresence, has frequently been identified as a potential factor influencing phenomena of cultural change and exchange. Addressing digital transformation alongside transcultural negotiation efforts, particularly in the context of migration, concepts such as transculturality and transnationality are used to make sense of socio-cultural developments intricately linked to the rise of digital media (cf. Schachtner 2015: 228). Similarly, media theorist Friedrich Kittler, as early as 1986, advocated for the integration of cultural studies and media transformation, emphasising the transformative effect of culture on media change: “One can only know as much about people as the media can store and transmit” (Kittler 1986: preface; my translation) thus pointing to the fact that “culture is [always] a product of its technologies” as Hartmann concisely puts it (2008: 254; my translation). This perspective is reflected in concepts of interculturality, transculturality, and hyper-culturality, which offer various points of contact with a postdigital condition and map possible interactions. In the edited volume Von der digitalen zur interkulturellen Revolution, Ursula Reutner poses the crucial question of whether “the digital revolution […] actually leads to an intercultural revolu‐ tion” (2012: 25; my translation). She focuses primarily on the possibilities for intercultural dialogue between two cultures by drawing on a concept of interculturality, and thus examines the juxtaposition of self and other, which allows her to highlight the process of boundary-crossing. In her analysis of interculturality and alterity, Ortrud Gutjahr also concludes that, from an intercultural perspective, cultural exchange often crosses borders in such a way that the “inter itself ” (Gutjahr 2002: 353; my translation) becomes the central focus. This interstice - a concept that shares its prefix with the most prominent representative of digital mediality, the Internet - facilitates the negotiation and shifting of boundaries (cf. Hofmann 2006: 12). Digital mediality, too, is characterised by boundary-crossing, or more precisely, by a state of increased permeability (both materially and conceptually). Virtual spaces, for example, greatly expand and simplify opportunities for communication and participation for individuals - at least in theory. Consequently, culturally specific processes of negotiation and exchange are also fostered in the digital realm, which functions 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 385 as a resonant and projective environment with unique potential for addressing polysemy, hybridity, and ambiguity. Transcultural approaches furthermore offer points of contact with digital mediality, particularly under the auspices of fluidity, dynamism, and interde‐ pendence - qualities inherent in various cultural representations and sociopolitical negotiation processes. Kimmich and Schahadat, for example, argue that globalisation and the digital revolution are transforming cultures so radically that they can no longer be understood in purely territorial terms or tied to homogeneous communities (see Kimmich and Schahadat 2012: 8). The resulting “mutual permeations” (Kimmich and Schahadat 2012: 8; my translation) - or, as Wolfgang Welsch calls it, “transculturation” (Welsch 2012: 29; my translation) - in turn have implications for the use, integration, and understanding of digital mediality. The research outlined in the relevant interand transcultural theoreti‐ cal approaches shows that these frameworks engage with medial transformation processes, partly reflecting their significance. In many cases, they suggest a fundamental and dynamic interrelation between what has to be identified as a postdigital mediascape and transcultural dynamics. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han takes this a step further with his concept of hyper-culturality, explicitly positioning the nexus between cultural transfer and digital transformation at the centre of his research. While one may not agree with all of Han’s techno-positivist positions, it is significant that he identifies the developments of globalisation and the associated worldwide digital networking (i.e. the Internet) as a culturally revolutionary moment. According to Han, the process set in motion by globalisation and digitalisation “more or less abolishes for us the concept of culture with all its fundamental coordinates - space, time, identity, memory”, as Weertje Willms aptly summarises (Willms 2016: 65; my translation). Han describes contemporary society as an Internet-based, globally networked hyperreality that is directly linked to the digital revolution in its constitution and development: “Hyper-culturality presupposes certain historical, socio-cultural, technical, or media-related processes [such as digital transformation]” (Han 2005: 60; my translation). While the concepts of interand transculturality primarily treat the digital transformation as a symptomatic and marginal phenomenon, the implications of digitalisation for culture and society are centrally anchored in the concept of hyper-culturality. However, this interrelationship has not yet been sufficiently theorised or systematically investigated within the fields discussed so far (especially from the perspective of literary and cultural studies). The link between digital transformations and transculturality, while occasionally vague 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 386 Anna-Lena Eick 11 However, this development does not sufficiently differentiate the various parameters of influence (in terms of mediality on the one hand and culturality on the other) of this increase in complexity. In the research discourse, the undifferentiated coupling of transculturally relevant topics with the effects of the postdigital status quo has often led to a conflation of the concepts of the digital transformation of society and culture and globalisation or to the assumption of an arbitrary relationship between the two developments. This is problematic, as it allows the parameters of influence on a changing social and media situation, which are initially addressed by both concepts - each separately - to become mixed and thus blurred. 12 For example, in their work Doing Digital Migration Studies, Leurs and Ponzanesi (2024) provide clarification on how deeply the impacts of the digital transformation have influenced migration studies. The anthology explores the intersection of digital technologies and migration, offering insights into how digital practices shape migrant experiences and belongings. 13 It has often been pointed out that art and literature, in particular, can be understood as both reflections of and reactions to changing media situations. Kittler (1999), Bolter and Grusin (1999), and Hayles (2008), among others, argue, albeit from different perspectives, that media changes are steadily reflected in artistic practice (e.g. literature) and unspecific, allows for addressing the increasing complexity of modern societies in a highly globalised world. 11 At this point, it can be concluded that the relationship between the digital transformation and cultural development calls for - and indeed produces - new ways of thinking and perceiving, thus having a significant impact on processes of negotiation in terms of cultural identity, nationality, culturality, and the establishment or disruption of socio-cultural orders as represented in art and literature. 12 4 Approaches to the Postdigital Condition: A Literary Spectrum? The lasting impact of the digital transformation of culture and society on contemporary life is reflected in the postdigital condition in literature, not only through thematic explorations but, more importantly, through a fundamental renegotiation of literary production, distribution, reception, and, crucially, narrative representation. AI-supported processes, for example, are expanding the range of creative writing possibilities, while new digital platforms are revolutionising the dissemination of literary works - transformations that, in turn, influence reading habits and foster more interactive forms of literary reception (cf. McGurl 2021). However, and this is the central focus of the delineation of the emerging field of research presented in this contribution, literary representation also functions as a mirror of the evolving mediascape. 13 This is evident in the integration of, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 387 in a variety of ways, and that this reflection affects both the content and the form of, for example, literary works. It is crucial to understand the reflection of media changes in literature as a continuous process, which further emphasises the close connection between media development and cultural production. 14 Since the early 2000s, the postdigital condition has attracted the interest of a wide range of disciplines. To illustrate the breadth of the postdigital debate in existing research, I would like to mention a few studies as examples: Ludovico’s Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894 (2012) examines the evolution of publishing from a media history perspective and concludes that there is no one-way street from analogue to digital, but that couplings occur in both directions. In Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing (2016), Matthew G. Kirschenbaum provides a digital humanities perspective in his examination of the introduction of word processing software and how this transformed literary production and writing as a cultural practice. Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2002) examines the aesthetics of digital media from the perspective of media and film studies. In Radiant Textuality (2001), Jerome McGann’s literary studies focus on how digital technologies and the World Wide Web are transforming traditional methods of textual analysis and literary studies. Sy Taffel’s Perspectives on the Postdigital: Beyond Rhetoric of Progress and Novelty (2016) is devoted to various attempts in cultural and media studies to define the term ‘postdigital’, concluding that the concept goes far beyond a mere rhetoric of progress and allows for a critical examination of the embedding of digital technologies in social, economic, and political contexts. or reference to, multimedia constellations, characteristics of digital mediality, and the innovative aesthetic strategies associated with them. Literature, as a seismograph, can thus serve as an indicator of the effects of the ‘postdigital condition’. It is important to emphasise again that this condition is not new but has long since become an established reality of the mediascape surrounding us. A growing body of cultural, media, and literary studies since 2000 has explored the changing relationship between culture and a postdigital media‐ scape, since “digital media and worldwide networking […] have significantly changed and are significantly changing the perception and reflection […] as well as the possibilities and status of contemporary literature” (Kreuzmair and Schumacher 2022: 1; my translation). This phase following the digital revolution is characterised by “far-reaching, irreversible social change [and] an enormous diversification of cultural possibilities” (Stalder 2016: 10f.; my translation), making it particularly relevant to transcultural questions. The diverse disciplinary approaches to the postdigital phenomenon reflect its wideranging impact, and this heterogeneity is similarly evident in literature and the arts, where engagement with the postdigital condition manifests in multiple ways. 14 The digital transformation - and the affordances of the postdigital age - have undoubtedly reshaped all aspects of the literary field (cf. Bourdieu 1992). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 388 Anna-Lena Eick 15 While studies such as Postdigital Storytelling (Jordan 2020), Digital Modernism (Pressman 2014) and The Aesthetics of Net Literature (Gendolla and Schäfer 2002) focus primarily on texts whose concrete constitution depends on machine codes, hypertext structures, and networks, Elias Kreuzmair and Eckhard Schumacher’s Literatur nach der Digitalisierung (2022) and Anna Weigel-Heller’s Fictions of the Internet (2018), for example, convincingly show that non-web-based texts also increasingly reflect and negotiate medial transforma‐ tions. The habitualisation to digitality has created a new context in which aesthetics, strategies of representation, and modes of literary production are redefined, alongside shifts in reading practices and critical reception. The fundamental transformation of the literary system is driven and conditioned by various components: Gendolla and Schäfer, for example, highlight a complex and dynamic “coexistence, juxtaposition and interweaving of media-technological, social, economic and, not least, aesthetic developments and radical upheavals” in what they describe as a postdigital “paradigm shift in literary communication” (Gendolla and Schäfer 2002: 1f.; my translation). The possible effects of this shift - observable in literary works that emerge in a state after the digital transformation - can be understood as part of a fluid spectrum. At one end of this spectrum lies electronic literature (cf. Hayles 2008) or net literature (cf. Hartling 2002), which refers to a form of literature that is digitally “born” - or, to put it less dramatically, created and encoded within a digital environment (cf. Pressman 2014: 2; Alexenberg 2011). At the other end are those literary works that engage with digital practices, comment on them, or explore their cultural implications, yet remain firmly rooted (both materially and programmatically) in the analogue medium of the printed text or intentionally non-networked forms of literature. Contemporary literary texts in a postmigrant context increasingly demonstrate that even a textually indexed - and thus non-web-based - engagement with digital mediality is becoming more relevant. 15 These texts reflect and negotiate medial transformations by applying what I term postdigital poetics; they engage with the postdigital condition through textual strategies, meta-reflexive commentaries, or hybrid aesthetic forms. This engagement influences, challenges, and reshapes both medial and literary structures, as well as modes and logics of representation beyond mere utilisation as a narrative backdrop for the storyworld. In this way, a decidedly non-web-based literature can critically and productively engage with the phenomenon of digital mediality and with the broader shifts within the postdigital media landscape - particularly in the realm of fiction. Accordingly, a non-web-based, text-immanent approach to the forms, func‐ tions, and characteristics of digital mediality can furthermore, or perhaps even 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 389 more effectively, challenge “contemporary culture and its reigning aesthetic values” (Pressman 2014: 2) - an achievement that Pressman, for her part, attributes ‘only’ to electronic or digital literature. My approach, however, shifts the focus to the manifestations of the postdigital in analogue print literature and thus raises a crucial question: How does the postdigital manifest in contemporary analogue literature, and to what extent can this perspective be linked productively to a post-migrant perspective? 5 Expansion of Existing Frameworks: Media-Transformative Components of the Postdigital An examination of contemporary literary analysis in the postmigrant context reveals that its conceptual foundation is often rooted in postcolonialism (cf. Göttsche, Dunker and Dürbeck 2017; Felbel 2012; Yildiz 2022). This reliance is reflected in an orientation towards, and the adoption of, postcolonial terminol‐ ogy, frequently drawing on the works of Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said. Concepts originating in postcolonial studies, such as hybridity, Third Space, and the dichotomy of periphery and centre, have undoubtedly facilitated, if not enabled, a productive engagement with culturally relevant developments, advancing both literary analysis and postcolonial knowledge production (see Bartels et al. 2019). However, the intersection of postcolonial and post-migrant approaches (cf. Yildiz 2022; Hodaie and Hofmann 2024) has thus far largely overlooked the fact that the digital transformation has brought about not only technical and economic but also profound epistemological and perceptual shifts. These shifts extend beyond technical and economic dimensions to influence cultural discourse, social structures, and knowledge production, fundamentally reshaping the very frameworks through which we analyse literature. A triangulation of these post-dynamics - post-digitalisation, post-migration, and prior: post-colonialism (see Flick 2011) - offers a long-overdue expansion of perspectives on transculturally relevant issues. Within the framework of the postdigital, it becomes particularly important to examine how digital transformation processes shape the perception, contouring, and representation of key concepts, terms, and phenomena in the context of global cultural developments. Thus, I ask: how does the omnipresence of digital mediality influence the logic of literary representation, particularly in relation to the pre‐ sentation and negotiation of transcultural challenges? This perspective remains an underexplored research area and suggests that a post-migrant perspective on contemporary literary explorations of culturally relevant phenomena could 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 390 Anna-Lena Eick 16 The specific nexus of temporality and postdigitality has already been explored by Kreuz‐ mair and Schumacher in their volume Literatur nach der Digitalisierung: Zeitkonzepte und Gegenwartsdiagnosen (2022), especially in Schumacher’s essay: “Gegenwartsverge‐ genwärtigung: Über Zeitdiagnosen, literarische Verfahren und Soziale Medien.” 17 Jessica Pressman, for example, describes electronic literature as necessarily “compara‐ tive” (2017: 248), arguing that literary approaches no longer “compare only language and text, but also the media formats and ecologies that support them” (2017: 248). In my view, this understanding can also be applied to texts that engage with digital mediality outside of the digital space. Analyses of texts that refer to postdigital mediality (without necessarily being tied to web-based structures) can support a paradigm shift within comparative literature that links and expands the understanding of literary texts to include a postdigital medial component. benefit from incorporating a - yet to be fully defined - postdigital dimension into literary analysis. The formal and aesthetic influence of digital mediality on literary texts, often reflected by an increasing presence and relevance of digital media in metafictional or meta-poetological engagement, highlights the need for such critical evaluation. Established analytical and narratological frameworks, which hardly account for a radically changed mediascape and thus cultural develop‐ ments, are becoming increasingly inadequate. For example, in view of the growing relevance of virtual spaces and the detachment of culture from a purely territorial location, it is worth questioning whether geographical and local origins still influence identity-forming processes to the same extent. Given this interweaving of topics, it is therefore ever more important to examine which of the established analytical tools reach their limits in addressing the effects of digital transformation and to consider how they might be adapted to emerging cultural and media-linguistic paradigms. Such a re-conceptualisation could, for example, engage with a reflection on the following dichotomies through a postdigital lens: proximity/ distance, self/ other, periphery/ centre, here/ there, belonging/ exclusion, origin/ residence, and past/ future versus simultaneity. 16 Given literary studies’ recent critical engagement with the categories dis‐ cussed above, one may wonder how literary studies can address the multiple challenges posed by the triangulation of postdigitality, postmigration, and - by extension - postcolonialism in analysing literary thematisations of the cultural status quo. Beyond examining net literature that has migrated to the digital space, it remains crucial to consider, from a media-comparative perspective, how the mediascape of the postdigital era necessitates adjustments in methodological approaches and analytical frameworks, particularly in (transnational) studies of literary engagements with post-migrant realities. 17 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 391 18 On the plurality of the concept of origin in literary and cultural studies, see Rössler and Zink (2025). The transposition of digital aesthetics and formal language into literary texts reflects central aspects of the culture of digitality. Characteristic features of digital culture, in which “more and more people, across an increasing range of fields and with the help of ever more complex technologies, [are required to] participate in the negotiation of social meaning” (Stalder 2016: preface; my translation), include “referentiality”, “algorithmicity” and “communality” (Stalder 2016: 13; my translation). Moreover, Christina Schachtner identifies “flows, differences, hybrids and belonging” as central paradigms of the digital, which can help “relate social development to technological change in the form of digital media” (Schachtner 2009: 4; my translation). Across the spectrum of these characteristics (from literature born digital to non-web-based engagements with digital mediality), we find numerous references to characteristics, attributes, and features of a specifically postdigital condition, or digital mediality. The systematic study of the transposition, references, and interrelations between postdigital, post-migrant and postcolonial contexts in contemporary literature thus presents promising research avenues. An in-depth analysis of these inter‐ relations not only deepens our understanding of the interplay between digital transformation and literary production but also creates a productive connec‐ tion with the post-migrant perspective in contemporary literary discourse - ideally extending beyond a restrictive national canon. This approach therefore promises innovative insights into the literary representation and negotiation of identity, belonging, and cultural exchange in the postdigital age, thereby complementing and enriching existing research and nomenclatures. A potential starting point for this exploration is the reconceptualisation of possible notions of (cultural) identity within a postdigital framework. This will be illustrated by spotlighting three examples of contemporary German literature that explicitly engage with or reflect on digital mediality, offering brief but telling insights into the intersection of cultural identity and postdigital contexts. 6 Points of Departure: Digital Spaces and Identity Negotiation in Postdigital Literature Notions and negotiations of cultural identity appear to be particularly influ‐ enced by media transformations in the context of digital change, especially in their inherent plurality. 18 A fixed and geographically anchored concept of home and origin, seen as directly shaping identity and personality development, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 392 Anna-Lena Eick stands in stark contrast to the notion of digital space as a hybrid, virtual realm characterised by fluidity (cf. Schachtner 2009) and projection. The negotiation of identity therefore no longer takes place solely through direct confrontations (e.g. with family members, the country of origin, or the parents’ mother tongue), but increasingly shifts to the Internet and the sphere of social media. Mithu Sanyal’s Identitti - as an exploration of cultural identity and its manifestation through the cultural practice of tying the sari - examines this kind of identity search 2.0: “A few short online tutorials [on how to tie a sari] later, Nivedita paraded alongside Priti [her cousin] down Kettwiger Straße with a bag of french fries in her hand and a whole new world of possible identities in her heart” (Sanyal 2022: 100). In addition to the explicit positioning of digital mediality in relation to transcultural explorations of cultural identity, belonging, and the appropriation of cultural practices relevant for the individual sense of self, digital mediality is structurally embedded in Sanyal’s text. Both the blog posts of the protagonist Nivedita, in which she critically engages with postcolonial theory and practice under her pseudonym Identitti, and the fictitional Twitter messages concerning a scandal surrounding her professor, Saraswati, are directly dependent on digital mediality. The scandal erupts when Professor Saraswati, a renowned scholar of Postcolonial and Race Studies who presents herself as a Person of Colour, is revealed to be a white German woman. This revelation sends shockwaves through the academic community, especially via social media, forcing Nivedita to re-evaluate her beliefs and confront complex questions about race, identity, and authenticity. Twitter [now known as X], as well as her blog, in this context, serve as possible (critical) echo chambers, reflecting the dynamics of public discourse in the postdigital age: It was all so far beyond comprehension that, for one wild moment, Nivedita was thrilled to not have to think about [her ex-boyfriend] Simon, as the throbbing vein of tweets flowed like a veritable river, following her meandering path deeper into the labyrinth. But no matter how many livid twists and turns she scrolled through, it seemed the Monster [the online mob] was always waiting right around the corner […] (Sanyal 2022: 42). While Identitti, as a novel in prose, textually plays with the adoption of set pieces from simulated Twitter messages, which conform to the typographic form and character restrictions of Twitter, Senthuran Varatharajah’s Vor der Zunahme der Zeichen is presented, according to Anna Weigel-Heller as an example of a “fiction of the Internet” or, more precisely, as a postdigital adaptation of an epistolary novel in Facebook dialogues. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 393 19 Based on the timestamps, which are in the novel right aligned to the sender’s name (as was common on Facebook Messenger in 2016), the recipient can estimate the intervals between each communication and draw conclusions about production, reflexivity, and intensity of the shared content as well as about the course and flow of the conversation. Furthermore, the symbols integrated typographically into the text allow conclusions to be drawn about the device used for communication (computer or smartphone) and thus about the location and situation of the respective sender. The presence of a smartphone icon at the edge of the text therefore indicates that a message has been sent from a mobile device, explicitly distinguishing it from PC-based communication (which presumably affects the length and quality of the communication). Varatharajah’s novel consists solely of dialogues via Facebook messages, and virtual space here is used to explore the protagonists’ background and to negotiate the sometimes negative experiences associated with fleeing to and arriving in Germany (e.g. racism, discrimination, and generational conflicts). The instant messaging service creates and maintains a virtual space that functions as a non-binding, communicative place of exchange. This enables different life realities and cultures to converge - detached from specific places and times - in the form of nearly simultaneous events localised in virtual space. The supposed distance between two strangers is textually transformed into an identity-forming proximity and intimacy in the virtual realm: Valmira Surroi (18 : 43) “I don’t know why I am writing to you” Senthil Vasuthevan (18 : 45) “The things we touch, touch us back in places where we are numb to them. The things we see, see us in places where we are blind to them […] I have written into the void and you write back in places where I am blind and numb to you.” (Varatharajah 2016: 49f.; my translation) In Varatharajah’s novel, the temporal lag that is otherwise characteristic of textually mediated communication is reduced by the formal-aesthetic orienta‐ tion of the conversation as depicted in Facebook messages. While the classical epistolary novel suggests “immediacy because the distance between experience and narrative seems small” (Clauss 2007: 99; my translation), the illusion of immediacy in the sense of communicative synchronicity is even more intensified in the realm of the Internet. Virtuality, non-locality as well as the increased speed and efficacy of the digital communication result in a conversation that perpetually remains in (communicative as well as medial) limbo. An artificial, textually produced status emerges at which the recipient can participate on various levels. 19 The depicted quasi-synchronous interaction allows the two protagonists, Valmira and Senthil, to respond and react directly to each other. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 394 Anna-Lena Eick Their exchange is formally anchored in digital space and, through the specific configuration presented by Varatharajah, opens an intimate platform for ex‐ change on shared questions of origin, identity, and life in Germany. However, the aforementioned aspects of communication, intimacy, simulta‐ neity, and non-locality represent only one side of the implications of a postdigital condition in a global cultural context. Digital transformation encompasses not only the positive attributes associated with added value and utility but also its downside: low-threshold surveillance options by repressive state apparatuses, media manipulation (e.g. through AI or algorithmic control), and information regulation. This aspect is central to Anna Schentke’s novel Kangal (2022), in which the Turkish state’s app-based surveillance of dissidents enters the postmigrant reality of an activist who has fled Istanbul for Frankfurt. The supposed safety of the protester, who goes by the pseudonym Kangal, in the shelter of the Internet turns out to be a dangerous illusion: “Kangal intervenes. She knows no change of location; she lives in the electronic memory” (Schentke 2023: 59; my translation). Even digital space, in its dimension as a hyper-archive and international network, is not immune to surveillance and denunciation, since, despite its seeming openness, it is used for surveillance purposes: “We were being watched even before we knew it. When they made us feel it, we logged in via other countries” (Schentke 2023: 68; my translation). This exemplary sketch of manifestations of the postdigital in contemporary German literature, read from a postmigrant perspective, hints at the profound presence and ambivalence of a postdigital condition - a fluctuating dichotomy of possibilities and dangers, potentials and limitations. This overview suggests that the role of digital dimensions in literary texts is both expansive and varied, while, of course, numerous other phenomena also come into play in these works of which only a few examples can be highlighted here. 7 Conclusion The postdigital age emerges as a field rife with ambivalence, where opportu‐ nities and risks are intricately interwoven. On the one hand, digital spaces offer new possibilities for solidarity, participation, and democratic processes. On the other, they harbour the potential for increased control and exclusionary mechanisms that can reinforce or even exacerbate existing social and cultural inequalities. The supposed universality of digital technologies contrasts sharply with the persistence, and in some cases the intensification, of these inequalities. The postdigital condition, as outlined in this contribution, is particularly important within post-migrant social structures and can be engaged with aes‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 Dimensions of the Digital in Contemporary Literature from a Postmigrant Perspective 395 20 Textually mediated reactions to medial shifts in the sense of the postdigital paradigm in the context of transcultural negotiations can also be found, for example, in Exit West (2017) by Moshin Hamid, in Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023), or, implicitly, in works by Faïza Guène such as La Discrétion (2020) and Shida Bazyar’s Nachts ist es leise in Teheran (2016) and Drei Kameradinnen (2021). To further establish this research desideratum, it would be necessary to clarify the extent to which postdigital aesthetics or the manifestation of postdigital mediality can be abstracted for literary analyses and thus be even more detached from the (explicit) thematic consideration of (post-)digital mediality. This desideratum will be addressed by my habilitation project provisionally titled: “Postdigital Poetics of Belonging: Narratological and Intermedial Approaches to Contemporary Analogue Fiction”. 21 The combination of post-migrant and postdigital perspectives offers fruitful connec‐ tions to memory studies, especially in the context of the Internet as a digital archive. Astrid Erll, a leading voice in memory studies, emphasises the importance of media in cultural memory processes. In the postdigital age, this concept is extended to digital mediality. Digital spaces and web-based archives can be used to store, construct and disseminate memory content. This is also increasingly important in transcultural contexts and beyond specific digital medialities (e.g. beyond the Internet), for example thetically, medially, and discursively within the realm of literature. In addition to formal-aesthetic explorations of digitality and the incorporation of digital forms into literary texts (such as hybrid, mixed-media formats), one can identify a substantive examination of the functions, potentials, dangers, and relevance of digital media in literary texts with a post-migrant orientation. The constitution of the digital sphere within these texts, for example, enables the creation and thematisation of digital network structures, which can act as communitybuilding elements, facilitating the exchange and accessibility of information and (cultural) knowledge. Cultural production, and literature in particular, can no longer be considered independent of digital transformations. Changes in structure, perception, pro‐ duction, and reception - shaped by the digital - are leading and will continue to lead to a rethinking of literature, its role, and its functionality. Adopting a postmigrant and postdigital perspective enables us trace these structural and perceptual shifts across contemporary literary texts in various languages. 20 This, in turn, allows for an exploration of literature’s transcultural potential within the context of ubiquitous media change. This potential is realised as digital spaces enable the intersection of diverse cultural experiences, creating new forms of cultural and medial exchange within literature. This emerging field of research, which combines digital transformation, postmigrant perspectives, and the transcultural potential of literature, offers new insights into the production, reception, and development of literary prac‐ tices in the postdigital age. It also provides promising connections to related fields in cultural studies, such as memory studies and techno-criticism. 21 As the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0017 396 Anna-Lena Eick when memory narratives are shown to be shaped and reshaped by the specific properties of digital media. Studies such as Memory in the Digital Age by Storm and Soares (2024), Cultural Memory in the Digital Age by Thylstrup (2018) and Erinnern im Internet by Sommer (2018) are examples of the emergence of this tendency and point to the transdisciplinary orientation of the topic around the postdigital condition. digital mediascape evolves, so too must our understanding of literature’s role in navigating this transformation. The intersection of postdigital, postmigrant, and postcolonial perspectives opens new avenues for critical inquiry, prompting a rethinking of how cultural narratives are created, interpreted, and understood in the postdigital era. Works Cited ABBLITT, S. 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Aaron Dignan has condensed insights from this series into the book Brave New Work: Are You Ready the Reinvent Your Organization? (2019). Both the podcast and publication focus on how organisations can shape happier, more fulfilling futures of work. “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 1 Elizabeth Kovach 1 Introduction Of the many aspects of contemporary life upon which the pandemic has left an indelible mark, work is one of the most prominent. During its initial waves, white-collar knowledge workers quickly transitioned to home-office arrangements, while Covid-19 infections and deaths disproportionately affected less affluent, non-white populations who make up the majority of the essential working class. This generated widespread public awareness and debate about socioeconomic, racialised divisions and disparities related to kinds of work, which in many cases became matters of life and death. Non-essential workers who switched to remote work adopted new daily rhythms and digital forms of interaction, hastening a flexibilisation of workspace and time. As Aaron Dignan writes in the foreword to Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? , “[d]igital transformations that were meant to take years were rolled out in a matter of weeks” (2023 [2019]: xii, original emphasis). Brave new approaches not merely to how to organise work but also to what meaning work should have in life are underway on a global scale as a result. The pandemic did not create but rather amplified ongoing developments and discourses on values, injustices, opportunities, and anxieties related to work of the past few decades. Well before Covid-19 spread across the globe, there had already been a surge in academic research, popular nonfiction, journalistic accounts, and manifesto-style social theory about the meaning and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 2 To name just a few: Critical Social Theory and the End of Work (Granter 2009), The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Weeks 2011), The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (Berardi 2009), The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (Frayne 2015), The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself and The Death of Homo Economicus (Flemming 2015, 2017), The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty- First Century (Avent 2016), Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (Cohen 2018), The Job: Work and Its Future in Times of Radical Change (Ruppel Shell 2018), The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Cass 2018), The Robots Are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation (Oppenheimer 2019), and The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (Baldwin 2019). future of work in the face of economic disparity, precarious labour conditions, digitalisation, and automation. 2 David Goodhart, for instance, claims in Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21 st Century (2020), that the votes for Brexit and Trump revealed “not so much a shift in values as a value divide based around different attitudes and institutions” stemming from different kinds of work, particularly in Britain and the United States (8, original emphasis). This divide is between a university-educated class of knowledge workers (head workers) and a class of manual and care workers (hand and heart workers), known as essential workers in the pandemic. Goodhart documents the ways in which the latter have become increasingly undervalued since the economy’s neoliberalisation in the 1980s, not just in terms of pay but also social standing, dignity, and recognition, which he claims led to the protest votes of Brexit and Trump - “an understandable reaction to a […] status shift that has been gathering pace for over fifty years” (ibid.). Sociologist David Frayne similarly remarks in his book The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (2015) that: The social construction of work as a key source of income, rights and belonging is unswerving. Yet what is also clear is that, for vast numbers of people, work is becoming an increasingly unreliable source of these things. This is a profound crisis, requiring an equally profound re-evaluation of work and its place in modern society. (2015: 43, original emphasis) Both Goodhart and Frayne shed light on a growing gap between cultural ideas about what work should offer - “social standing, dignity, and recognition” (Goodhart 2020: 28) as well as “income, rights and belonging” (Frayne 2015: 43) - and what the social and economic realities for many hard-working people have become. According to these narratives, certain values and advantages surrounding work that were once given have been lost. They refer to a change 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 404 Elizabeth Kovach that has specifically affected the middle class, which as a social formation has itself fissured in the widening gap between rich and poor. If such ongoing developments, exacerbated by pandemic conditions, have generated a need to re-evaluate the meaning of work in contemporary society, what might such a re-evaluation look like? For one, a reconsideration of the meaning and values surrounding work should take into consideration a spectrum of work ethics and experiences that include those for whom work has historically never been a reliable source of ‘income, rights, and belonging’. The idea that work can and should lead to social and economic advantages has always been carried and perpetuated by privileged classes whose way of life was created, and continues to be maintained, by forced, illegal, or exploitative forms of labour. When questioning and rethinking the meaning of work in life, it is worth looking beyond privileged, prevailing notions of work as an essential source of ‘social standing, dignity, and recognition’ and asking what kinds of attitudes about work do those in states of dispossession carry with them and how are these erased, integrated, and brought into conflict with privileged ideas about work and its meaning in life? Kathi Weeks pursues this line of questioning in The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (2011), in which she interrogates theoretical and political challenges to the value and meaning of work, including Marxist-autonomist strategies of the refusal of work, feminist critiques of unpaid domestic labour, and political campaigns for shorter workdays. She identifies “dissident” approaches to work in “laborist, antiracist, and feminist” movements of the twentieth century, which she understands as “powerful weapons for change” (68) that nonetheless centred on inclusion into a system of waged labour and thereby often reinforced rather than disrupted traditional values and conceptions surrounding work. In other words, efforts were made to include those previously excluded from privileged value systems about work rather than disrupt and reinvent such value systems. Literary expression has been overlooked within this discussion, even though it has continuously and in various ways contributed to moments of re-evaluation and challenging of the meaning and values attached to work over the course of capitalism’s history. Little attention has been paid within literary studies at all to what I will call ‘literary fictions of work’, despite growing interest in the topic of work across disciplines within the study of culture. My contention is 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. They also demonstrate how dominant forms of and attitudes about work, on the one hand, and literary expression, on the other hand, are 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 405 3 I have developed this argument in a previous article, in which I also include an analysis of Herman Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids”, to which I will refer in section 2. See Kovach (2021). engaged in a relationship of mutual influence. 3 I use the phrase “negotiating the meaning and value of work with literary fiction” in the title of this chapter to emphasise literary fiction as both a tool for reflecting upon as well as an active contributor to discourses about the way work is organised and conceived. To elaborate these claims, I will first provide a definition of and suggest a framework for the analysis of ‘literary fictions of work’. I will then discuss specific ‘literary fictions of work’ that pertain to the U.S.-American cultural context, discussing three texts that challenge and/ or absorb dominant ideas about work within their respective historical moments in U.S.-American labour and capitalist history. Moving from literary expression of the mid-nineteenth century to the 1930s and, finally, to the early 2000s, I demonstrate how ‘literary fictions of work’ have continuously challenged prevailing notions and value systems surrounding work precisely when societal conceptions of and dominant kinds of work enter phases of rapid transformation. Such literary texts also negotiate the meanings and potentials of literary expression, which I will refer to as ‘the work of writing’. The meaning of the work of writing is negotiated in relation to the kinds of work that it portrays. This contribution thus proposes, delineates, and analyses the dynamics of a specific thematic category of literary fiction, ‘literary fictions of work’. The aim in identifying this category of literature and exploring various examples is to argue that it has functioned as a cultural tool for (and active contributor to) thinking through changing meanings and values surrounding work at various historical junctures. In light of rapid re-evaluations and reorganisations of work that have been underway since the pandemic, this category is of particular relevance today. There are new and expanding subfields of literary studies that are relevant for exploring the relationship between societal values surrounding work and literary fictions of work. While positioned most generally within a Marxistliterary, cultural-materialist tradition of approaching literary expression as both a social and material cultural process, analyses of ‘literary fictions of work’ are particularly enriched by newer trends in sociological approaches to literature, such as an increased interest in “open[ing] and extend[ing] the very concept of literary culture together with the understanding of who produces it” - i.e. with the institutions and actors such as gate-keeping critics, editors, and publishers (English 2010: viii). Another is an increased interest in the “social and institutional bases of literary value”, a topic often explored under the umbrella 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 406 Elizabeth Kovach 4 For discussions of newer sociological approaches to literature, see English (2010). For more on New Economic Criticism, see Woodmansee and Osteen (1999). See Brouillette (2014) for an exciting example of literary criticism that explores the nexus of literary expression and the logic of the (creative) economy. of New Economic Criticism (2010: ix). As my analyses demonstrate, such approaches are relevant to literary fictions of work, because literary fictions of work self-consciously position the work of writing in juxtaposition with the forms of work that are portrayed in their stories. In this way, they raise questions about the economies of creative production in relation to economic production in general as well as the value of literary expression within the broader economic and institutional frameworks that they depict. 4 2 Towards a Definition of Literary Fictions of Work I suggest defining ‘literary fictions of work’ according to three main criteria. Firstly, they are fictional narratives whose subject matter focuses predominantly on working lives. As simple as this first criterion seems, it requires a precise delineation of what is considered to be ‘work’ in the first place, which is no easy task. When used ubiquitously, work can mean all kinds of activities: anything having to do with a profession or how one makes a living, domestic work, emotional/ affective work, physically working out, artistic pursuits, etc. For more specificity, work can be limited to meaning an activity carried out for a wage, salary or other form of monetary renumeration. This is what social philosopher André Gorz has specified as “work in the economic sense” (Frayne 2015: 19; see Gorz 1989). Literary fictions of work, according to this sense of work, focus on experiences, values, and emotions surrounding waged or salaried employment. This understanding of work in an economic sense has rightly been contested, most prominently within feminist discourses, for the way it excludes unwaged labour that is essential for waged activities to be carried out in the first place. The wage relation that formed the proletarian and bourgeois classes continues to this day to depend on systems of oppression and exploitation - recent revelations by The New York Times on the prevalence of child labour in the United States are a case in point (see Dreier 2023). But this does not mean that the study of literary fictions of work defined in an economic sense would need to disregard the realms of unwaged, forced, or unfree labour, creative pursuits, and personal callings (artistic and otherwise), or even hobbies practiced during leisure time. By locating portrayals of work in the economic sense, these other realms of activity function as points of contrast and constitution for discussing the ways in which the values and meaning of work as waged relation is potentially 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 407 transformed by the criticisms of those disillusioned by its oppressions and by the entrances or exits of those excluded from its purview. By defining work as such, the pool of potential primary texts that classifies as literary fiction of work also narrows considerably. As Nicholas K. Bromell, the author of a book on antebellum literature and labour, observes, “when one considers that work is the primary mode through which adult identity is constructed […], one cannot but notice that very few novels or plays or films actually explore the work experience” (Bromell 1993: 2). Perhaps this is because, as Theodore Martin states in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2017), “[t]here is a fundamental tension between the grind of work and the grip of narrative, between what novels strive to be (interesting and eventful) and what work is - plotless and monotonous” (163). A narrative that chronicles the minutiae of a given working day without any dramatic plot points or compelling storytelling devices built into it does indeed sound tedious. This reveals the cultural expectation that a literary text not simply mirror the tedium of our own lives but add a spin to it that at least entertains and, at best, incites reflection. The second criterion for my definition is that literary fictions of work negotiate prevailing ideological ‘fictions’ - that is, myths and prevailing cultural (mis)conceptions about work. In other words, they are not simply fictional texts about work but literary texts that address cultural narratives pertaining to work. They function as interventions in or problematisations of prevailing ideas, expectations and assumptions about ideologically charged subjects such as the role that work should play in life, the value and rewards of hard work, and so on. In the U.S.-American cultural context, dominant work ethics and prevailing myths about work have, since European colonisation, always been closely tied to the prospect (or fantasy) of realising the American dream - of achieving a successful, happy life through hard work. They have also evolved over time. In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks classifies dominant U.S.-American work ethics according to three major historical phases. The first phase is that of the Protestant work ethic so famously analysed by Max Weber as a spirit that fuelled the onset of capitalism. While the Puritans believed that individuals’ salvation or damnation was predestined and could not be changed in the course of a lifetime, they identified tireless devotion to work as a character trait of the pious and proof of one’s salvation. With the onset of industrialisation at the end of the nineteenth century, this colonial ethic had yielded to a secular, “industrial work ethic that dominated US society through the culmination of the Fordist period in 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 408 Elizabeth Kovach 5 Fordism refers to the break-down of factory labour into segmented tasks pioneered within Ford Motor Company at the beginning of the twentieth century; the term was coined by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935). Henry Ford’s methods of factory organisation were an outgrowth of Taylorism, which refers to the science of management developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s-90s to maximize efficiency and productivity. 6 See also Kovach (2021). the years following the Second World War” (Weeks 2011: 38). 5 Throughout this period, “the promise of social mobility” functioned as “the most recognizable rationale of this official ethos of work” (ibid.: 46). The third and current phase of the “official ethos”, which Weeks calls the “postindustrial work ethic” and is often also referred to as post-Fordism, emerged and has persisted since “the middle of the twentieth century” (ibid.). In this current phase “another element, present but not as stressed in the industrial discourse, came to the forefront of the new postindustrial work ethic - an element that characterised work as a path to individual self-expression, self-development, and creativity” (ibid.). This conception of work draws the rewards of work close to those typically associated with the work of artists, because work is positioned as an activity that should not be alienating but rather a path towards self-realisation and expression. In the next section of this chapter, I discuss three U.S.-American literary fictions of work that critically address different phases of this evolution. The third and last criterion I would name is that, in their thematisations of work on the level of story, literary fictions of work also draw attention to the work of writing and how it stands in relation to the work that it describes. 6 Maintaining the definition of work as an activity carried out for a wage or salary, the work of writing refers specifically to literary fictions produced by professional writers who publish and thereby monetise their work. Nicolas K. Bromell describes a dialectic relationship between writing about work and the work of writing that he also finds is central to defining and analysing literary fictions of work: a writer’s encounter with work as a subject seems to turn the writer back on himself or herself, to lead the writer into an exploration of the nature of his or her writerly work. That exploration, in turn, returns to the subject of work and informs the way it is represented. At the same time, […] the writer’s understanding that writing is work, and the writer’s engagement in the dialectical relation between representations of work and making those representations, can have the effect of shaping the writer’s actual work practice - why or how she writes. That is, a considerable part of both the content and the form of some literary works can be understood best as the outcome 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 409 of a writer’s negotiations with the relation between writerly work and other kinds of work. (Bromell 1993: 179) Bromell suggests that when writers choose to write about work, the subject matter of the work influences the very process of writing. Because the topic of work inherently raises questions about how the work of writing stands in relation to it, literary fictions of work tend to display high degrees of self-reflexivity. I will even suggest that the stylistic and formal choices that shape fictions of work can be read as the self-conscious positioning of the work of writing in relation to the work it describes. The work of writing has since its beginnings been most predominantly understood and positioned as an unalienated, creative pursuit emanating from an autonomous individual, which thereby often stands in contrast to forms of alienating labour it portrays. With the onset of the postindustrial work ethic, however, in which the rewards of blueand white-collar work are equated with those formerly reserved for artistic practice, the distance from other forms of work and the autonomy of literary expression lose sway. These propositions will be further elaborated via the case studies presented in the next section. 3 From ‘cogs’ to The Circle: Exemplary U.S.-American Literary Fictions of Work The history of the work of writing within the U.S.-American cultural context is unique, as it took quite some time after the country’s founding for a U.S.-American literary market to develop and the writing of literary fiction to become a viable profession. The main reason for this slow development was that, before an international copyright law was passed in 1830, regulations allowed American booksellers to print large numbers of English books and sell them cheaply without paying royalties. There was little incentive for publishers to produce books by American writers and pay them the required royalties when pirated British books yielded high profits. (Elliot 2010: 9) Once the copyright law was passed, it did not take long for U.S.-American authors such as Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe to establish readerships worldwide (see ibid.). The period of literary history often referred to as the American Renaissance of the mid-nineteenth century was a moment in which prominent white, male authors of the middle class (Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau), many of whom belonged 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 410 Elizabeth Kovach 7 On the American Renaissance, see Matthiessen (1968 [1941]). to the transcendentalist movement, set an agenda for establishing a uniquely U.S.-American literary tradition. 7 The professionalisation of writing was also enabled by a shift away from Puritan to industrial work ethics. Because the New England Puritans believed in hard work as proof of one’s salvation, reading and writing were strictly limited to the consumption and production of devotional texts: “Within Calvinist logic, the only important book was the Bible, and the words of humans were of little consequence except to explicate the truths of the scriptures and instruct others in Calvinist theology” (Elliot 2010: 19). By the mid-nineteenth-century, however, the meaning and value of work were aligned with secular, material aims. As Daniel Rodgers chronicles in The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (2008), “[p]raise of work in the mid-nineteenth century was strongest among the middling, largely Protestant, property-owning classes” (14), who had a “hold over the strategic institutions of economics and culture. Business enterprise was theirs. […] So were the institutions of learning: the schools and colleges, the nation’s publishing houses, and the major journals of opinion” (ibid.: 16). In popular culture, the nineteenth-century notion that “work was the highroad to independence, wealth, and status” found “endless repetition” (ibid.: 12); “[i]t would be difficult to exaggerate the ubiquity of this hireling-tocapitalist formula in the popular literature of the North”, emblematised by the fictional tales for young boys by Horatio Alger (ibid.: 35, on Alger see ibid.: 39). Rags-to-riches narratives supported a belief in hard work as the key to social mobility - a central tenet of the work ethic of the industrial period. The work of writing was thus not only made possible due to copyright law but also by an accompanying cultural shift in dominant attitudes about the meaning and aims of work, including the work of writing. It was no longer limited to devotional practice but open to secular subject matters, thereby becoming a viable form of production with a growing market and a powerful vehicle for perpetuating the very work ethics that made its rise possible. While industriousness was celebrated by popular fiction for the masses, the mechanisation and alienating effects of emerging forms of industrialised work also became subjects of concern amongst public intellectuals and writers of literary fiction. In Walden, for instance, Thoreau worries that “men have become the tools of their tools” (1996 [1854]: 36). His retreat to a cabin at Walden Pond was an experiment in living a life in which one finds immediate satisfaction and fulfilment in the fruits of one’s labours. Writing is positioned as a prime example of such an unalienating form of work, whereas new “tools” threaten peoples’ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 411 8 This argument was first presented in Kovach (2021). 9 The narrator says of his business: “Having embarked on a large scale in the seedsman’s business (so extensively and broadcast, indeed, that at length my seeds were distributed through all the Eastern and Northern States, and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas), the demand for paper at my place became so great that the expenditure soon amounted to a most important item in the general account” (1986 [1855]: 272). humanity, turning them into mechanised parts of the factories and economies to which they contribute. Concern about the effects of brave new forms of mechanised work on human bodies and minds, as well was the meaning of the work of writing in relation to them, was also a prominent theme within literary fiction of this period. A striking example is Herman Melville’s short story “The Tartarus of Maids” (1855), in which a middle-class business owner decides to visit a paper mill to see where the envelopes, upon which his business relies, are produced. When touring the factory, he is shaken by the misery readable in the pale faces of row upon row of “blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (1986 [1855]: 277), who “did not seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (278). Watching the machinery spew out its final product, he thinks: It was very curious. Looking at that blank paper continually dropping, dropping, dropping, my mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets eventually would be put. All sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things - sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death warrants, and so on, without end. (1986 [1855]: 284) While Melville does not include the writing of literature in his listing, he draws attention to the story’s material production and the work that made its circulation possible. As Nikolas K. Bromell argues, the work of writing in “Tartarus” is framed as “a privilege that requires the exploitation of others. Writing takes place in a realm that is independent of, though covertly dependent on, the manual labor of others” (Bromell 1993: 74). 8 In crafting a tale about a naïve businessman - a figure of success in the brave new economy of the time 9 -, who is shaken to discover the exploitations that underly his business, Melville draws attention to the position of professional writers, also part of the rapidly expanding white-collar economy that is fully implicated in the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession that were accelerating at the time of the story’s writing. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 412 Elizabeth Kovach What is more, “Tartarus” is comprised of a juxtaposition between the work of the girls with the work of writing. For any work of literature, form and style can never be merely regarded as compositional aspects designed to convey the story. The vector of influence goes in the opposite direction as well. That is, the form and style of a literary text do not merely give shape to its subject matter but are also shaped by the subject matter they communicate. There are quite straightforward instances of this in “Tartarus”, such as the repetition of the word “dropping, dropping, dropping” to mimic the rhythm of the machines being described. But I would also suggest that, even more significantly, as a literary fiction of work, “Tartarus” exhibits choices in form and style that are specifically designed to position the work of writing. Melville positions the work of writing as an act of intricate craftsmanship that could not be farther removed from the mechanised labour of the girls it describes. Long sentences full of stops and starts forced by subordinated clauses, precise and poetic diction, and a high degree of (often cryptic) symbolism demand a slow, reflective reading and a consciousness of the text’s composition. The work of writing is displayed as a skilled, intricate, intellectual endeavour. Consider, for example, the passage in which the narrator describes his reaction to watching the state-of-art machine standing at the heart of the factory, which turned pulp into paper within precisely nine minutes: Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy veil of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine. A fascination fastened on me. I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. (1986 [1855]: 284) The unusual phrases - “metallic necessity”, “unbudging fatality”, “unvarying docility”, “autocratic cunning” - used to describe the machine and the source of the narrator’s “strange dread” are just a few of many examples of intricate craftsmanship on display. While the style of writing indicates a concerted effort on the part of the narrator to capture his reaction to the machine, it is also a demonstration of how poetic devices and methodically constructed sentences can vividly render a complex cognitive and emotional response. In its depictions of a relentlessly precise nonhuman and the blank human subjects it produces, the story implicitly champions human production via its own style. The brave new white-collar businessman who narrates the story is rendered as a naïve 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 413 10 The Works Progress Administration was a New Deal programme designed to provide work to the unemployed during the Great Depression. It mostly employed workingclass men in infrastructural improvements but also included employment programmes for artists and writers. middle-class subject previously blind to the exploitations upon which his own success and standard of living depend. He reports being eluded by the machine. Yet the text makes the experience of this elusion vivid and palpable. It is ultimately a show of human literary craftsmanship that stands in full contrast to the blank work and workers it is employed to render. Now I will shift attention to a literary fiction of work that in many ways functions as a counternarrative to “Tartarus”, not simply by giving the girls a voice but also in terms of its positioning of the work of writing - namely, proletarian activist and author Meridel Le Sueur’s manual for writing and short story “Biography of My Daughter”, published together as Worker Writers, a project Le Sueur completed as part of the Minnesota Works Progress Admin‐ istration in 1939. 10 In the 1930s, with the exploitations of industrial factory work reaching unprecedented heights, “a new militancy and solidarity among American working people appeared” (Denning 2010 [1997]): xiv), resulting in strikes of unprecedented sizes in major cities throughout the country. At the same time, a new radical culture was taking shape, made up of “a new generation of plebian artists and intellectuals who had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis” (Denning 2010 [1997]): xv). Proletarian literature had its moment during this era. This was literature focused on precarious working-class experience of the Great Depression, written by members of the working class fully disillusioned of the promise of the American dream. It often programmatically encouraged a raising of class consciousness and featured downtrodden protagonists rejuvenated by the prospect of social revolution as well as culminating scenes of a large-scale worker strikes. However, it would be a mistake to characterise all proletarian fiction as being only programmatic, didactic, primitive, or uninteresting from a literary standpoint. Especially if we read it as literary fiction of work. Meridel Le Sueur began in her late teens to portray the experiences of the working class, the unemployed, and particularly women for left-wing newspapers and magazines. She also wrote fiction, all of which was based on the stories of real people. Like most proletarian fiction of the era, Le Sueur’s writing is picaresque and episodic, lacking smooth transitions between chapters, scenes, times, and places. Laura Hapke, a literary scholar who has worked extensively on the subject of literature and labour, claims that such “constant presentism […] is a commentary on the conditions of the time. In such a world, working-class 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 414 Elizabeth Kovach authenticity means to keep moving and expect little” (2018: 134). She reads the structuring of proletarian fiction as a means of conveying the meal-to-meal, jobto-job itinerance that characterised Depression-era working-class life. I suggest pushing this reading further to include what such a form says about the work of writing. From this perspective, Le Sueur becomes a particularly interesting example, because in addition to her fictional and non-fictional accounts of the working class, she also published a manual on writing. Her advice for workingclass writers is to record the raw material of their daily experiences: You must not be afraid to write simply because you are not a University student or quit school when you were ten. The English language is to be used. Those fighting for their daily lives today are the ones that are going to need to have that strong, sturdy language for their use. They are going to be the great reporters, the great writers of the future. (Le Sueur 1939: n. pag.) Writing is to be done without any concern for its artful crafting. Its form and style are to reflect the colloquial, everyday language used in daily, working-class life. It is to be written intermittently, in short breaks from waged and domestic labour or job searching. A notebook should be kept close at all times for quickly jotting down the stories of the peoples’ lives. This work of writing is positioned as an act of reappropriation: Our literature which has been the possession of only handful of people, a small group whose experience has become more and more limited and parasitic, is changing to become something created by those who participate first hand in productive life. We are learning that the word as a tool is likely to be used best by the worker, the producer. (Le Sueur 1930: n. pag.) If Le Sueur were writing to the characters of “Tartarus”, she would clearly address the girls, empowering them to tell their stories that remain invisible to the ‘limited’ perspective of its narrator. As she movingly writes in the introduction to her book Women on the Breadlines, “These are not stories, but epitaphs marking the lives of women […] at the bottom of the social strata, who are trampled on, leave no statistic, no record, obituary or remembrance” (1977: 1). The work of writing functions as an act of witnessing and making visible lives and experiences that would otherwise be erased from cultural memory. This approach to the work of writing stands in radical opposition to what the work of writing that Melville puts on display. The work of writing according to Le Sueur should have nothing to do with intricate craftsmanship - with demonstrating the human ability for artful literary expression -, nor must it emanate from creative geniuses sitting in rooms of their own. It is a communal, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 415 collaborative recording of dispossessed lives, written by their subjects as they are being lived. The time and resources for reflection, distance or poetic rendering are not given nor desired. The worker writer need only basic writing skills to commit the raw materials of life to paper. Writing is not a rarified craft reflecting the individual writer but a basic learned skill that can give voice to the collective. In contrast to the example of “Tartarus”, which highlights an insurmountable distance between the work rendered in the story and the work of writing, Le Sueur aims for zero distance as a demonstration of solidarity. The language and experience of the worker writer is to be identical with that of the workers portrayed. Form and style are mechanical rather than painstaking. The work of writing requires the same skill level as the uneducated workers it portrays. In Worker Writers, Le Sueur concludes her manual with the analysis of her own short story “Biography of My Daughter”. The short story is presented with comments on its organisation and the functions of its component parts in the margins, to show prospective writers how to tell their stories. In “Biography of My Daughter”, a female narrator describes how her friend Rhoda came to her untimely death, after struggling for years to receive a university degree and become a librarian: She wanted to be a librarian. The first year she worked as a maid for only room and board, because her father paid the university fees, but the next year he couldn’t pay them, so she got a job at Coffee Dan’s and worked there as a waitress from six o’clock in the evening until two in the morning. From where she went to the Zaners, where she worked for her room and board. She got up at six, prepared breakfast, cleaned up, straightened the house and got to the university library school. Sometimes she got in some sleep in the rest room. She did this for four years. She was graduated. There was no library to work in. She worked as a maid, cook, waitress, then there was not even that. She was on relief. To get some kinds of relief you have to be examined by a doctor also. They found she had tuberculosis. (n. pag.) Rhoda dies shortly thereafter in a sanatorium. The narrator and a mutual friend meet Rhoda’s mother, who talks about how ambitious her daughter was - always working to be successful. The friend of the narrator reacts emotionally, diagnosing Rhoda’s demise as the result of a work ethic not to be emulated: don’t work too hard. If you get tired, you know what to do […]. Listen, Rhoda worked for a bitch, did all the washing, ironing, cooking, cleaning, eight people…Listen honey, if you feel tired, listen for God’s sake, if you feel tired you know what to do…there isn’t any success. Listen, there isn’t… (n. pag) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 416 Elizabeth Kovach Here the prospect of realizing the American dream through hard work is exposed as a farce. For the women workers staring in Le Sueur’s fiction, there “isn’t any success”, no matter how hard or relentless the labour. With the prospect of social mobility obliterated, it is rest, not harder work, that becomes a defiant act of self-preservation that directly challenges dominant work ethics of the industrial period. Literary scholarship on Le Sueur’s work focusses mainly on the themes and narrative devices in her texts. I would suggest that her most radical contribution to U.S.-American literary expression is her intervention in what the work of writing can and should entail. The work of writing does not contrast with the work it portrays but aims to stand in seamless solidarity with the labouring subjects it renders. Its aims are more political than artistic, and it is performed in the trenches rather than from an ivory tower. Melville’s text generates distance between the inspired work of writing that it features and the mindless, alienated work it describes. Le Sueur’s text collapses this distance, suggesting that worker writers communicate on the same plain as the subjects they describe. The work of writing in the first case celebrates writing as a uniquely human achievement that is nonetheless full of blind spots and problematically relies upon exploitative structures for it to exist. In the second case, a mode of writing is proposed in the struggle to overcome such blindness and exploitation. Now I will turn to my third and final example, Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (2013), a dystopian literary fiction of work that, along with its film adaptation, is so well-known it likely requires no introduction. It chronicles the professional assent of a young woman in a tech company which could perhaps best be described as an Amazonian-Metaverse. Since the novel’s publication, the world it imagined has become so like our current reality that it can barely be classified as futuristic. This is the most confounding of the three cases in terms of how the work of writing is positioned. The novel describes a historical moment and a working milieu that has fully absorbed what Weeks refers to as the postindustrial work ethic, in which hard work is believed to lead to personal satisfaction and self-realisation in addition to the social mobility and material gain celebrated by the industrial work ethic. The workplace featured in The Circle is not merely an office space but an entire campus upon which its employees’ work and private lives merge. From athletic facilities and organised parties to dormitories for those who wish to work (or socialise) late and cut commute times, the company lives by the ethos that the work-life relation should not merely be balanced but dissolved. The company lives by the belief that, when work is positioned as a fulfilment and extension of the self, it no longer feels like work but becomes an activity that 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 417 flows seamlessly within an entire way of life. The idea at first glance seems quite utopian - even like a fulfilment of the Marxist dream of a post-capitalist world in which work returns to an embodied, intentional, immediate, and satisfying expression of the self as opposed to the alienated activity of producing value for others via divisions of labour within classed societies. However, the model of The Circle represents the pinnacle as opposed to an obliteration of capitalist development. Both represent a completion, or totality, but are diametrically opposed. Mae, the novel’s protagonist, is dazzled by the seemingly utopian conditions presented to her. She begins at entry-level, within the customer service de‐ partment, replying to customer questions and comments with prefabricated answers. Her tasks are gamified, showing her ranking amongst colleagues and offering continuous rewards for achievements met. She becomes addicted to maintaining and improving her ranking, increasing both her hours and hourly output to a high level of intensity. Soon she catches the attention of the higherups, becoming the poster child for The Circle’s newest gadget and pilot project: SeeChange, a device that livestreams Mae’s entire life. She amasses viewers and talks to her global audience throughout the day. The goal is to ultimately create a society that is fully recorded to, according to the company, reach a state of maximum transparency and accountability. This of course bestows a chilling degree of power upon the company’s leaders, who can and do frame and destroy the lives of those who threaten their project using the data they have on these individuals. The novel is a cautionary tale about big data, corporate ownership, and privacy, while it is also a commentary on dominant work ethics of the postin‐ dustrial era. Work began to be positioned as an expression of individuality, creativity, autonomy and flexibility within management discourses of the 1970s. The U.S.-American economy had begun to slow as early as 1965, when low-priced German and Japanese goods entered the global market (Bernes 2017: 16). Companies responded by demanding that workers move faster and more intensely without pay raises and, as the crisis continued into the 1970s, by “beginning to attack wages and defang the unions that were reluctantly pushed into the fray by an increasingly combative workforce” (Bernes 2017: 16). When workers continued to push back, it became increasingly difficult for management to revert to methods of simply exerting more pressure and maintaining the hierarchical structures put in place since the industrial period. A transformation was in order, which, as Jasper Bernes writes in his book The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (2017), is predominantly referred to as the period of: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 418 Elizabeth Kovach “post-Fordism” (a term meant to emphasize both its difference from and continuity with Fordist and Taylorist methods), or alternatively “neoliberalism,” “flexible accu‐ mulation,” and “postindustrial society,” where each of these terms stresses different aspects of transformation. What matters for my argument is that […] aspects of the artistic critique, such as the critique of work from the standpoint of participation, became essential parts of the restructuring undertaken by capitalists to improve profitability. (17) Bernes suggests that artistic discourses that championed participation (for instance in participatory art of the era) generated the vocabularies and set the stage for the appropriation of such discourses within the corporate world. With the onset of post-Fordism, company management responded to worker complaints by introducing flatter hierarchies, encouraging employees to play less one-sided and more multifaceted roles in developing company ideas and cultures, increasing opportunities for participation, allowing more flexible work hours, etc. As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello succinctly state in The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), the “themes” that were first generated within artistic circles and transferred into worker complaints were appropriated by corporate management discourses in an effort to placate unhappy workers; in doing so, they were absorbed by and used to strengthen the “forces whose destruction they were intended to hasten” (97). The ideal worker came to embody the characteristics (flexible, creative, critical) formerly associated with artists and writers. By framing the workplace as a creative, participatory environment in official company culture and communication, employers found a way to con‐ ciliate workers without losing productivity. As the plot of The Circle suggests, such brave new ideals of work often function as sly forms of exploitation. The following passage describes the moment when Mae begins to find her footing in the company: Mae looked at the time. It was six o’clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending four zings and thirty-two comments and eighty-eight smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by eight o’clock, after joining and posting in eleven discussion groups, sending another twelve zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for sixty-seven more feeds, she’d done it. […] She felt a profound sense of accomplishment and possibility that was accompanied, in short order, by a near-complete sense of exhaustion. It was almost midnight and she needed sleep. It was too late to go all the way home, so she checked into the dorm availability, reserved one, got her access code, walked across campus and into HomeTown. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 419 11 I have made a similar argument about the writing style of Eggers’s earlier novel A Hologram for the King, see Kovach (2015). When she closed the door to her room, she felt like a fool for not taking advantage of the dorms sooner. (192) Mae’s feeling of “accomplishment and possibility” after seeing herself rise in the social media rankings of the company have her hooked. After working herself to a state of exhaustion, she is grateful for the immaculate dormitory provided by her employer, a seemingly luxurious amenity that works to company advantage by encouraging overtime. Mae has no supervisors breathing down her back, yet this absence of hierarchy and freedom to work when she wants is replaced by a pressure generated by social-media-style measurements of performance. A system of alerts and rewards makes Mae feel as if she is intrinsically motivated to perform, though she is conditioned by the gamified structures the company has put into place. As the novel continues, the reader is led to believe that Mae will join a small group of employees attempting to subvert the leaders’ power from within. In a dystopian twist, the story’s last scene reveals that Mae has ratted these individuals out to the leadership and stands in full alignment with their promise of a world devoid of privacy, “replaced by a new a glorious openness […] Completion was imminent” (497). “Completion” refers to full societal absorption within the surveillance of The Circle - to the erasure of any kind of ‘outside’. This would include the absorption of artistic and literary expression as well and, in the world of The Circle, make critique that disrupts the status quo a thing of the past. Yet what does the novel communicate about the work of writing that envisions this absorption? As a cautionary tale and dystopian vision of current trends, it prompts critical reflection on the themes it describes, thus positioning the work of writing as a potentially consciousness-raising activity. In terms of form and style, the novel is comprised of plain language and simply constructed sentences. The reading experience is not arduous but flows. Its style allows for an efficient, neutral, and inconspicuous delivery of content. This plain language is the same kind of language employed in corporate literature and communication - easily accessible, immediately understandable, clearly structured (a mode of expression that AI chatbots have begun to demonstrate par excellence). In this sense, the novel exhibits the same communicative register as is employed by the white collar, creative class that it depicts. 11 This has been a source of criticism, most recently in a review of The Every (2021), the much-anticipated sequel to The Circle, which tells the story of a young woman entering the company with the hope of infiltrating and sabotaging its operations. In her review for The New York Times, Chelsea Leu writes, “for a 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 420 Elizabeth Kovach defense of nuance and unpredictability, “The Every” exhibits a startling lack of both. […] I wished, often, to be allowed to come to my own conclusions, exercise my own subjectivity - that same endangered faculty the novel mourns” (2021: n. pag.). Leu finds the story’s delivery to be too didactic and explanatory rather than achieve a subtlety and ambiguity that might better engage readers’ own critical faculties. In The Every, Mae has risen to become the company’s CEO and resorts to ruthless measures to maintain the company’s stronghold over contemporary life. While the novel offers a scathing depiction of the tech industry, it is also a vision of the dangerous directions in which postindustrial work ethics can be carried. Mae becomes motivated to rise in the company’s ranks, because she strongly believes in the company’s mission. Her work is much more than how she makes a living but her whole life, the extension and implementation of her personal beliefs. Her commitment to the job is not merely a commitment to developing state-of-the-art technologies but rather the devotion to an ideology and its global implementation. The novel imagines how total identification with one’s work can have horrific consequences. Perhaps this is why the work of writing that tells this tale avoids zealousness at all costs. 4 Conclusion: Brave New Work (of Writing) Literary fictions of work are rich resources for thinking about shifts in values and meanings that have surrounded work throughout capitalist history. I have suggested that the three examples of U.S.-American literary fiction of work presented here exemplify the ways in which the work of writing is negotiated in relation to the work it describes. This negotiation is readable via markers of form and style. Melville’s intricate language and complex sentences turn his tale about a middle-class man’s trip to a brave new paper factory into a show of human literary expression that stands in stark contrast to the dehumanising, repetitive work it describes. The self-reflexive elements of the story implicate the work of writing in the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession that were growing in magnitude at the time of the story’s writing. The work of writing is positioned as an inspired, unalienated, ideal form of human production whose very existence nonetheless increasingly depends on structures of exploitation. Le Sueur’s agenda for worker writers voids literary expression of highbrow poetics in an effort to recruit the working class in production that is from the people, for the people. The work of writing need not require imagination, inspiration or education but should rather speak the truth about working class lives and struggle, for whom work has never been a source of mobility or self-realisation. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 421 Eggers’s novels imagine the potential dangers of present-day trends fuelled by the tech elite. His stories focus on workers who have become the agendasetters of our day - whose tech products have profoundly affected the realms of attention, information, politics, and truth. While such elite workers might seem to be those who are lucky enough to turn their passions into true vocations and pursue careers intrinsic to their personal beliefs and talents, the story suggests that the fulfilment of such ideals can be perversely misguided. The work of writing that makes this suggestion is accordingly modest, telling a tale in simple terms rather than flaunting its own expressive potentials. Brave new conditions and forms of work are surely on the horizon, as postpandemic flexibilisation continues for white-collar workers and automation and artificial intelligence reach unprecedented levels of sophistication and implementation. In a dystopian scenario, disparities between a privileged, agenda-setting elite and powerless laborers will persist or widen - as narratives about the promises and rewards of hard work maintain a stronghold within cultural imaginations. In a far-reaching utopian scenario, trends in flexibilisa‐ tion and automation could result in shorter working days and policies for ensuring universal income, reducing socio-economic disparities and perhaps even relativising the value of work in life, releasing ideas about work from potentially oppressive fictions, and enabling new sources and models of social and cultural capital. 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. Works Cited AVENT, R. (2016) The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century. New York/ London: Allen Lane/ Penguin. BALDWIN, R. (2019) The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. BERARDI, F. (2009) The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). BERNES, J. (2017) The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization. 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(eds) Emergent 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 “Brave New Work”: Negotiating the Meaning and Value of Work with Literary Fiction 423 Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses. Trier: WVT, pp.-199-214. KOVACH, E. (2021). ‘Towards a Framework for Reading U.S. American Literary Expres‐ sion in Terms of Conditions, Values, and Emotions Related to Work’, in Ramírez, J. J. and Quassdorf, S. (eds) Work: The Labors of Language, Culture, and History in North America. Tübingen: Narr, pp.-17-34. LE SUEUR, M. (1982 [1939]) Worker Writers. Minneapolis: West End Press. LE SUEUR, M. (1977) Women on the Breadlines. Minneapolis: West End Press. LEU, C. (2001) ‘In Dave Eggers’s New Novel, the Problem With Big Tech Is Us’, The New York Times Oct. 5, 2001. Available at: https: / / www.nytimes.com/ 2021/ 10/ 05/ books/ re view/ dave-eggers-every.html (Accessed: 28 December 2024). MATTHIESSEN, F. O. (1968 [1941]) American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MARTIN, T. (2017) Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press. MELVILLE, H. (1986 [1855]) ‘The Tartarus of Maids’, in Busch, F. (ed) Billy Budd and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books, pp.-271-286. OPPENHEIMER, A. (2019) The Robots Are Coming! The Future of Jobs in the Age of Automation. New York: Vintage Books. RODGERS, D. (2008 [1974]) The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920. Chi‐ cago/ London: University of Chicago Press. RUPPEL Shell, E. (2018) The Job: Work and Its Future in Times of Radical Change. New York: Currency. THOREAU, H. D. (2008 [1854]) Walden, Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. Rossi, W. (ed). New York: W. W. Norton and Company. WEBER, M. (2002 [1904-1905]) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Penguin. WEEKS, K. (2011) The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press. WOODMANSEE, M. and Osteen, M. (eds) (1999) The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London/ New York: Routledge. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0018 424 Elizabeth Kovach List of Contributors Liza B. Bauer is the scientific manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University Giessen and coordinates the university’s interdisci‐ plinary research section “Human-Animal Studies”. Her work combines critical and literary animal studies with interdisciplinary research on human-planet relationships. Her doctoral thesis engages with the potential of speculative narratives to foster cultural imaginaries on living well with so-called live‐ stock animals and was awarded with the “Research Award for Sustainable Development” by the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) and the “Dr.-Herbert-Stolzenberg-Award for Excellent Dissertations in Cultural Studies”. A revised version was published in 2024 under the title Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species (Palgrave Macmillan); other relevant works include a co-edited special issue on Ecocriticism and Narrative Form (SubStance, 2021), a co-authored chapter in Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), and a collaborative, German-language article on planetary forest politics (PVS, 2022). Natalya Bekhta is Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University (Finland), where she directs a research project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989”. Her recent work focuses on contemporary Ukrainian fiction and develops a world-literary theory of the “second-world” literary region. She is the author of We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (2020). Stella Butter is Professor of English Literary Studies at the University of Kai‐ serslautern-Landau (RPTU). In her research, she is interested in how literature engages with processes of modernisation. She has published on representations of home in contemporary literature, literary reflections on reason and rational‐ ity, and contingency and literature. Among her publications are the co-edited special issues on “Imaginative Geographies of Home: Ambivalent Mobility in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture” (Literary Geographies, 2019) and “Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction” (Anglia, 2023). She is a founding member of the interdisciplinary research network “Scales of Home in Contemporary Europe” as well as of the research network “Diversity & Transformation: Heterogeneous Societies as a Challenge for Interdisciplinary Research”, in whose context she explores depictions of luxury in twenty-first century literature. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 425 Deborah de Muijnck is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen. For‐ merly a researcher at RWTH Aachen University (2019-2023), an institutional affiliate at Harvard University (2023), and a research fellow at the University of Graz (2024), she holds a PhD in English Literature. Her first monograph explores how British military personnel reconstruct their identities after war experience through autobiographical writing (2022). Other publications such as Pandemic Storytelling (2025, Brill) address the reciprocal impact of pandemics and narrativity, the influence of non-normative life experiences on narration (Poetics of Disturbances, Brill, 2024), and the relationship between narrative, culture, and identity (Routledge Companion, 2025). As a NEST research network investigator, her work in empirical ecocriticism explores narratives that raise awareness, address ethical issues, and propose solutions to climate change in European local communities. Her second monograph discusses literary scandals as forms of cultural transgression in-Britain-from the 18th-21st century.- Alexandra Effe is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Literature, Cognition and Emotions (LCE) at the University of Oslo and teaches anglophone and comparative literature at the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages. She is the author of J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Narrative Transgression (Palgrave, 2017) and of A History of Autofiction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), and co-editor of The Autofictional (Palgrave, 2022) and of Autofiction, Emotions, and Humour (Routledge, 2023). She has published on narrative and cognitive theory, twenty-first-century literature and culture, postcolonial literature, testimonial writing, and manuscript studies. As visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she co-convened the project “Autofiction in Global Perspective.” Anna-Lena Eick is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of General and Comparative Literature at Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Her doctoral thesis engages with the co-evolution of visual media (such as photography and early film) and the critical re-orientation of postmodern historical novels from the 1960s onwards. A revised version, ‚Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten‘ - Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung, was published in 2024 with Brill in the series Inter/ Media. Her current project examines the intersections of a postdigital mediascape and transnational issues of cultural belonging and identity. Further research inter‐ 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 426 List of Contributors ests include classical and post-classical narratology, interand transmediality studies, as well as ancient mythology. Carolin Gebauer is Lecturer in British Literature and Culture at the University of Wuppertal and a postdoctoral researcher at Wuppertal’s Center for Narrative Research. She was part of the Horizon 2020 project “Crises as OPPORTUNI‐ TIES: Towards a Level Telling Field on Migration and a New Narrative of Successful Integration” (2021-2025), funded by the European Union, and she is currently serving as a member of the executive team of DIEGESIS, a bilingual interdisciplinary e-journal for narrative research. Carolin Gebauer is the author of the award-winning monograph Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (De Gruyter, 2021). She has coedited special issues of DIEGESIS (“European Narratives on Migration: Concepts and Case Studies”, 2023) and Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies (“Nomadworld: Global Mobility and the New Anglophones”, 2024), as well as a collected volume entitled Mobility, Agency, Kinship: Representations of Migration Beyond Victimhood (Palgrave, 2024). Marion Gymnich is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Univer‐ sity of Bonn. Since 2019, she has been Principal Investigator and Vice-Speaker in the Cluster of Excellence “Beyond Slavery and Freedom: Asymmetric Depend‐ encies in Pre-Modern Societies” (EXC 2036) / the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies. Her research interests include British literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present, children’s literature, narrative theory, gender studies, genre theory and dependency studies. She has published six books and more than 100 articles in journals and edited volumes and has (co-)edited 20 books. Since 2023 she has been Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Bonn. Hannah Klaubert is a postdoctoral researcher in the interdisciplinary “Nuclear Natures” project at TEMA, the Department for Thematic Studies, at Linköping University in Sweden. She holds a bi-national PhD in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies from Stockholm University, Sweden, and the GCSC at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. During her PhD, she was employed as a research assistant at the Chair of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies at JLU and served as the interim academic coordinator of the International PhD Program (IPP) “Literary and Cultural Studies” at the GCSC. Elizabeth Kovach is a Scholarship Officer at Goethe University Frankfurt. She obtained her PhD at the International PhD Programme “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) and the International Graduate Centre for the Study 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 427 of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen with a dissertation entitled Novel Ontologies After 9/ 11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-American Narrative Fiction (2016). Her postdoctoral research project explores values and ethics surrounding work in U.S.-American literary history from industrialization to the present. Heidi Lucja Liedke is Professor of English Literature at Goethe-University Frankfurt/ Main. From 2018 to 2020, she was a Humboldt Foundation Postdoc‐ toral Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of three monographs (The Experience of Idling in Victorian Travel Texts, 1850-1901 [2018], Faultiere. Ein Portrait [with Tobias Keiling, 2021] and Livecasting in Twenty-First- Century British Theatre: NT Live and the Aesthetics of Spectacle, Materiality and Engagement [2023]) and numerous articles. Recent articles cover topics such as queer ethics, depictions of reading, and failed endings and are forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Literary Ethics, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerika‐ nistik and Performance Research. She is the co-editor of a special issue of Theatre Research International on “Presence and Precarity in (Post-)Pandemic Theatre and Performance” (2023). Ansgar Nünning is Professor of English and American Literature and Cultural Studies and founding director of the “International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture” (GCSC), funded by the Excellence Initiative and inaugurated in 2006, at Justus Liebig University in Giessen, as well as of the International PhD-Programme (IPP) and the European PhDnet Programme. His book publica‐ tions include Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives (ed. with Vera Nünning & Birgit Neumann, 2010), Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze - Personen - Grundbegriffe (ed., 5th ed. 2013), Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses (ed. with Michael Basseler & Daniel Hartley, 2015), Methods of Textual Analysis in Literary Studies: Approaches, Basics, Model Interpretations (ed. with Vera Nün‐ ning, 2020), Krisennarrative und Krisenszenarien. GRM: Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 70.3-4 (ed. with Vera Nünning, 2020), The Value of Literature. REAL - Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 36 (ed. with Vera Nünning, 2021). In addition to narrative theory, English and American literature, cultures of memory, and literary and cultural theory, his recent research interests include crisis narratives, forms of life and notions of the good life, narratives of slow change (e.g. climate change, mind change, stories of health and illness), and the interfaces between literature and happiness/ wellbeing, and between narratives/ narrative studies and medicine/ salutogenesis. 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 428 List of Contributors Vera Nünning is Professor of English Philology at Heidelberg University, where she also served as vice-rector for international affairs. She has published books on eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, and (co-)edited 28 volumes mainly on contemporary literature and narrative theory. Her articles deal with narrative theory, gender studies, cultural studies and British fiction from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Her book Reading Fictions, Changing Minds (2014) joins insights from psychology and neurosciences with those of narratology. She was a fellow in two Institutes of Advanced Studies as well as guest professor in several European universities, and is associate editor of three book series. She is currently co-editing The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans Narrative Studies (2025). Magdalena Pfalzgraf is Junior Professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bonn. Publications include Mobility in Contemporary Zimbabwean Literature in English: Crossing Borders, Transcending Boundaries (Routledge, 2021), The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature: Transcultural Engagements, Global Frictions (Bloomsbury 2024, edited with Silvia Anastasijevic and Hanna Teichler) and Moving Publicly, Writing Mobility: Public Transport in African Literatures. Special Issue of English Studies in Africa 67.2. (2024, edited mit Anna-Leena Toivanen). She is co-editor of Matatu: Journal for African Literary and Cultural Studies (Brill). Jan Rupp is currently coordinator of the Research Centre for the Study of Culture (RCSC), Giessen, having served as an interim professor at the universities of Frankfurt, Giessen, Heidelberg and Wuppertal. He is the author of Genre and Cultural Memory in Black British Literature (2010) and a second monograph on representations of ritual in modernist Pageant Fictions (2016). His research interests include the contemporary novel, cultural memory studies, narrative theory, intermediality, ritual in literature, and (neo-)Victorian studies. He has published widely on diasporic British as well as postcolonial Anglophone writing and theory, including on didactic perspectives of the literature class‐ room. Among his current work is a project on figurations of world writing and environmental memory in literatures of the Global South. Christine Schwanecke is Professor of English Literature and Culture as well as Head of the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. She specialises in drama, early modern literature and culture, digital literature and culture, intermediality, and transgeneric and transmedial narratology. Her publications include A Narratology of Drama: Dramatic Storytelling in Theory, History, and Culture from the Renaissance to the Twenty-First Century (De Gruyter 2022), The Transformative Power of Literature and Narrative: Promoting Positive 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 List of Contributors 429 Change (Narr 2023, with Corinna Assmann and Jan Rupp), as well as articles on (digital) drama and theatre, intermediality, and the intersection of literature and culture. Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis is a literary and cultural studies scholar and her work focuses on future(s) and postclassical narratology such as econarratology. Anna Tabouratzidis holds a bi-national PhD in English Literary and Cultural Studies ( Justus Liebig University Giessen), and in German Studies (University of Warwick). Her research engages with utopian and future studies, the politics and aesthetics of care, and alternative temporalities. She has co-edited a special issue on Ecocriticism and Narrative Form (SubStance, 2021) and published on queer temporalities (in Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer, and Trans Narrative Studies 2025) and incommensurable time regimes (in Troubling Times, 2024). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0019 430 List of Contributors Index Adventures of Rivella-23, 131 ff., 136-149 animal industry-245, 247 f., 252, 257, 260- 264 attachment 18, 20, 22, 26, 41-44, 49, 51, 70, 292 f., 295 ff., 303, 357, 361 Atwood, Margaret-60, 254 f., 259, 261 f., 265 Austen, Jane-21, 24, 64, 76, 158, 168, 364 autofiction-21, 23, 130-135, 138-148 canonisation 64 ff., 95, 110, 332, 343, 380 f., 392 climate crisis-13, 20, 26, 173, 187 f., 311, 314-319, 321-327, 368, 426, 428 comfort-20, 25, 38, 174, 176, 178 f., 181 ff., 185 f., 190 ff., 237, 337 f. companion species-253, 260, 263 conjunctures-15, 21, 28, 146, 312 f., 327 consolation-25, 174-182, 184-187, 189 ff. COVID-19-21, 25, 35, 39, 173-176, 178, 180-187, 189, 191, 193, 295, 403, 405 f., 422 criticism-14, 20, 22 f., 31, 36, 55 f., 58 f., 61-71, 75 ff., 82, 85, 90, 92, 94 ff., 99, 107-111, 115 f., 123, 130, 144, 151 f., 156, 158-162, 195, 202, 250, 253, 263, 272, 282, 284, 288 f., 292-297, 302, 335, 352, 355, 383, 396, 407, 419 f. cultural studies 9, 21, 30, 102, 248, 307, 399, 425-430 dependency studies-24, 427 digital-20 f., 27, 29, 37, 45, 98 f., 108, 165, 173, 375-379, 381-397, 399, 403, 429 post--27, 375-378, 380, 382-393, 395 f., 426 drama-23, 72, 75, 107, 109 f., 113, 116-120, 122, 124, 300, 429 Early Modern-98, 152 economics-18, 36, 297 f., 302, 411 ecopoetry-21, 26, 321-325, 327 eighteenth century-23, 36, 45, 47, 91, 116, 131-136, 138 f., 141, 144-147, 156, 201 Empire 61, 64, 66, 68, 77, 154, 164, 167, 169, 371 environmental memory-26, 312 f., 316 ff., 429 essayism-343 eudaimonic turn 24, 31, 38, 54, 98, 104, 223, 225, 239 f. fictionality-146 f., 282, 367 fictions of work-21, 405-410, 421 flash fiction-20, 175 f., 182 genre-20 f., 23, 27, 57, 74 f., 91, 100, 107- 113, 115 ff., 119 f., 122 f., 132, 134, 147, 157, 176, 192, 200 f., 224, 233, 238, 252, 258 f., 297 f., 322 f., 327, 332-339, 341 ff., 345, 427 poly--108, 110, 122 studies-107, 123 theory-23, 108-113, 115 f., 120, 122 f., 338, 427 gestalt theory-260 Global South 26, 305, 311-317, 323, 327 ff., 429 good life 22, 38, 82, 84 f., 88-101, 158, 232 f., 235, 260, 293, 428 hermeneutics-21, 26, 39, 56, 68, 75, 288, 294 ff., 303, 305 suspicion-21, 26, 39, 56, 68, 75, 288, 294 ff., 303, 305 home-20, 25, 35, 50, 64, 158, 173-192, 207, 229, 236, 302, 322, 375, 392, 403, 419, 425 hope-22, 35 f., 40-43, 46-51, 101, 108, 119, 122, 153, 185, 261, 301, 303, 311, 320, 323, 327, 367, 420 humanities-9, 13, 15-21, 24-29, 37, 39 f., 56 f., 68, 107, 124, 165, 176, 223, 226 f., 249, 252, 274, 287, 289, 293 f., 312 f., 352, 388 environmental-30, 285, 287, 308, 328 medical-24, 240 f. nuclear humanities-25, 272, 274, 282 f. literary studies 13-16, 18 f., 21 f., 30 f., 36 f., 60, 63, 78, 82, 85, 104, 107, 126 f., 131, 140, 145 ff., 151 ff., 174, 195, 223, 225, 239, 248, 250, 252, 263 ff., 268, 270, 272, 290, 298, 306, 312, 327, 329, 333 f., 345, 351 f., 376, 386, 392, 397, 425, 428, 430 animal-26, 247 f., 250, 252, 266, 425 cognitive-146, 226 mobility-27, 353, → narrative literature- British-54, 151, 370, 427, 429 pandemic-173 Macfarlane, Robert-25, 272, 275 f., 283 f., 286 Manley, Delarivier-23, 131-134, 136-140, 142 ff., 146-149 Mantel, Hilary-24, 197, 201, 212, 215, 217- 221 meat paradox-256 narrative-19 f., 22-25, 27, 35 f., 45 ff., 51 f., 59, 92 f., 95, 109 f., 113-120, 122 ff., 131, 133 f., 138 ff., 143, 146, 157, 159, 188 f., 197, 199-204, 206, 210, 213 ff., 223-228, 231, 233 ff., 237 f., 251 f., 258-263, 272 f., 276-281, 284, 292, 296, 299 ff., 304 f., 311 f., 314, 320, 324, 326, 332 f., 335 f., 339-344, 351, 353-368, 376, 381, 387, 394, 400, 408, 417, 426-429 mobility studies-27, 354, 358 f., 365, 367 f. narrative drama-122 narratology-24, 27, 110, 113, 146, 223, 226 f., 296, 305, 314, 332, 351, 353 f., 356, 359 f., 364, 366 f., 427, 429 f. cognitive-88, 146, 226 cultural-27, 250, 351, 354, 367 f. eco--25 f., 272, 283, 313 f., 316, 327, 354, 356, 430 new economic criticism-28 nineteenth century-28, 49, 84, 133 f., 136, 152 f., 156, 158 f., 161 ff., 165 f., 181, 335, 365, 406, 408, 410 f., 427 novel-20, 24, 27, 37, 44-49, 72, 74, 77, 88, 113, 116, 129 ff., 133 ff., 141, 146, 151, 158-161, 164, 175, 183-189, 191, 197, 201 f., 204-207, 209 f., 212 ff., 216 f., 220, 224 f., 228 f., 233 f., 256, 260 f., 290, 298- 303, 314, 316, 318-321, 324, 327, 332- 339, 341 ff., 345, 363, 375, 393 ff., 417 f., 420 f., 429 Orford Ness-25, 271 f., 275 f., 285 f. Pericles-20, 23, 107, 109 ff., 113-125, 127 persuasiveness-24, 195-202, 205, 214-217 petroculture studies-26, 287-299, 302 f., 305, 314 postcolonial studies-55-62, 64 ff., 68 f., 166 f., 351 f., 390, 393 postcritique-26, 37, 56, 295 ff., 303 postmigrant-27, 375 ff., 379 f., 383 f., 389 f., 395 f. Rafeyenko, Volodymyr-335-342, 344, 347 reading- close-22, 131, 224, 316, 365 reparative-22, 36, 50, 305 surface-22, 26, 36, 43, 48, 51, 295 432 Index suspicious-56, 68, 291, 297, 303 remote work-403 Rooney, Sally-21, 36, 44, 46 f., 54 salutogenesis 223 f., 226, 233, 235-238, 240 satire-21, 136, 332, 334, 338, 342-345 Menippean-337 ff., 341-344 Second World-27, 331 f., 344 f., 409 Shakespeare, William-18, 20 f., 23, 72, 107, 109, 111, 113 ff., 117-120, 122-127, 163, 169, 306 sick-lit-21, 24, 223-226, 231, 233-238 slavery-152, 154, 162, 167 ff., 427 Smith, Ali-35, 37, 48, 52 ff. speciesism-256 storyworld-119 f., 197, 201 f., 231, 236 f., 279 ff., 314, 336, 342, 362-365 Strong Asymmetrical Dependency-24, 151-156, 162, 165 f. Text World Theory-140 ff., 149 Ukraine-332, 335 ff., 339, 344 utopia-36, 40 ff., 101, 246 f., 256, 284, 333 f., 418, 422, 430 value-14 f., 17 ff., 22, 25, 28 f., 38, 43, 48, 56 ff., 60, 64, 68 ff., 72, 75 f., 82 f., 85, 92-95, 97 ff., 101, 113, 134, 139, 142, 146, 156, 165, 175 f., 181, 190, 208, 210, 223 f., 227, 229, 233 f., 238, 264, 287, 296 f., 300, 315, 354, 356, 364, 367, 390, 395, 403- 408, 411, 418, 421 f., 428 Wilkins, George-109, 115, 117-120, 122 f., 127 Wolf Hall-24, 197, 201-221 work ethics-28, 405, 408, 411, 417 f., 421 world literature-26 f., 290, 313-316, 327, 331 f., 334, 336 f., 343 ff. Index 433 ISBN 978-3-381-14441-9 If there is one enduring tradition in the humanities, it is the repeated declaration that this or that field, method, or concept has reached its end. Ironically, these scholarly obituaries often mark not an ending but the start of yet another wave of debates, rediscoveries, and revisions. It seems that nothing stays dead for too long and against the backdrop of the lasting legitimation crisis of the humanities, by now its default mode, the present volume shows that the arts and humanities are alive and kicking. The articles in this volume explore new conjunctures and directions in literary and cultural studies, they hone in on various interand transdisciplinary research fields in emergence such as home-comfort or dependency studies but they also grapple with the uniqueness of literary and cultural studies research especially in the wake of postcritique.