Optical Appearances - mise en page in Journal Literature and Book Literature

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This sub-project regards the reciprocal semanticisation of literary texts and the typographical and material structure of their supporting media as a valuable field of enquiry within the broader field of a media-oriented literary history. It is premised on the idea that a literary text is not simply given as a 'mere' text, detached from the form of media in which it appears, but that it only comes to be expressed through its 'optical appearance' in the complex interplay of textual and media-specific semantics. This performative potential, the precise character of which is played out in concrete media usage, pertains to every text insofar as it must appear in one medium or another. Nevertheless, the reflexive dimension of a text - one which involves the reader in a performative manner - emerges most notably when the media-specific manifestation of literary works becomes a factor in a competitive process with other media formats. In the context of the rapid intensification of technical innovation in printing and the commercialisation of book production, the sub-project locates such a paradigmatic constellation in the literary market during the first half of the 19th century, up until the end of the 1860s. It is no coincidence that this period also saw the rise of the fashionable gift book format - a medium premised on its 'optical appearance.' From this point on, it was not only books and journals (initially in the form of periodicals, then in the second half of the century increasingly in the form of daily newspapers) that competed over the production of belles lettres and their various audiences; they were also joined by gift books, which on the one hand appeared periodically like journals, but on the other were book-shaped and preciously designed.The sub-project defines its object of study as that which is traded as 'literature' on this marketplace - a marketplace characterised by the competition and interference between different media formats and the various groups of readers whose attention is being sought. It thus returns to the period preceding the controversial processes of literary canonisation established in the (post) Goethe era. The project's guiding thesis is that this 'literature' takes a performative, media-based stance in relation to the contemporary market by which it is determined. And it does so all the more resolutely when it does not merely appear on this both economic as well as aesthetic stage, but when it appears in various media formats, in order, as it were, to compete with itself. The sub-project is particularly concerned with such optical 'multiple appearances' and the media-specific 'statements' they make. On the basis of case studies of texts that were published many times, whether canonised, trivialised, or 'forgotten,' it aims to contribute to a reconception of a media oriented literary history by providing a sketch of an implicit history of literary media - a history narrated by the printed literary work 'itself.'