Networks of Knowledge in Avant-Garde Literature

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Several academic disciplines emerged or changed significantly circa 1900 and subsequently shaped the cultural landscape in Europe. In anthropology, the paradigm of armchair anthropology came to an end with a new discussion about field studies. In psychology, alternative and highly influential approaches, such as psychoanalysis and psychotechnics, were developed. The number of engineers started to increase rapidly as did the number of their inventions. Likewise, modern art and literature saw radical changes, as, among others, the experimental works of the various movements summarised by fin de siècle, Jahrhundertwende or avant-garde prove. In my proposed DPhil dissertation, I suggest that these simultaneous developments are kept distinct by authors and academics on the one hand, while, on the other hand, being intertwined in complex networks of knowledge, which I aim to trace and map scrutinising avant-garde literature.Contrary to critics such as Horst Bergmeier and Elizabeth Benjamin, whose views on Dadaism in particular and the avant-garde in general are limited to the philosophical and literary tradition of aesthetics (See e.g. Homayr 1991, Bergmeier 2011, Benjamin 2015), I would like to contextualise avant-garde art further and take its interrelation with other forms of knowledge into account. Interrelation, here, means a specific form of re-production: Rather than studying only the influence of science on literature (or vice versa), which has already been done profitably (See e.g. Hopkins 2004, Adamowicz/Robertson (ed.) 2011, Rasula 2015), I propose to focus on the ways the avant-gardists deployed this knowledge in order to produce new forms of it and on how they broke down the boundaries between literature and academic disciplines. Alongside this hybridisation process, the dissertation will have to consider the opposed "work of purification" (Latour 1993 [1991], 11), i. e. the avant-gardists' attempts to create pure modes of expression devoid of modern thought or knowledge, such as an Ur-Sprache. Methodologically, the dissertation will follow new historicist context analysis and also consider popular media as well as 'non-fiction' publications. While texts will be treated as media, deterministic approaches in media studies must be avoided. Therefore, I will employ and develop further an actor-network or actor-media theoretical approach as a loose framework (See e.g. Latour 2005, Schuttpelz 2013, Thielmann 2013). This allows to track interrelations in small translation steps and to regard them as hybrids rather than as connections of two clearly distinct entities called literature and science. Besides, the dissertation will address questions of otherness and representation, since avant-garde art is in many cases built on a triad of primitivism (See Gess 2013) - the 'savage', the 'madman', the child - and also deals with non-human actors. Hence, theoretical concepts dealing with otherness, such as postcolonial theory, will play a role as well. Besides offering a new perspective on the (German) avant-garde, the dissertation aims to contribute to contemporary fields of research in literary and media studies. The nexus of literature and knowledge, which has become an important part of German studies (See Vogl (ed.) 2010 [1999], Borgards et al. (ed.) 2013), would be addressed via a novel approach which analyses it as an active process of networking covered by the claim of purification. In doing so, the work should add to the very few but fruitful attempts to adapt the sociological actor-network theory to the study of literature and consequently render it more compatible for further research (See Schuttpelz 2005, Hahn 2011, Stockinger 2018).