This visual essay presents an exploration of Sara Ahmed’s book ‘Living a Feminist Life’, focussing specifically on citational practices. This exploration was done through a series of making exercises resulting in a series of artefacts such as sketches, embroidery pieces, videos and GIFs.
In ‘Living a feminist life’, Sara Ahmed uses citational practices to examine the relationship between knowledge production and power. Ahmed considers citation as a ‘reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.’. Citations are re-proposed as feminist bricks, as foundational materials that shape and affect the structures we build. Using citations as bricks is a way to enact feminist principles in academic practice: ‘I cite those whose work have contributed to the intellectual genealogy of feminism and anti-racism […] work that lays out other paths, paths we can call desire lines created by not following the official paths laid out by disciplines.’
This work is part of a broader PhD story that weaves together themes of power, participation and sketchnoting. It draws heavily from emancipatory traditions such as intersectional feminism, anti-racist and decolonial theory. These traditions challenge us to question knowledge structures and classification systems, to examine the values they reflect and uncover the power hierarchies they uphold.
This text shows how the circulation of German-language historical novels connected readers from different parts of the world during the nineteenth century. This is achieved through a case study based on the circulation of the works of Carl Franz van der Velde (1779–1824), an author who wrote historical novels in German. Public library catalogues, newspaper advertisements and reviews published in nineteenth-century periodicals are used as sources. I conclude that van der Velde’s novels underwent hundreds of editions in the nineteenth century, were favourably received by literary critics and served as an instrument of education in European countries such as France, England and Portugal, as well as beyond the Atlantic in Brazil.
This insight develops a praxeological perspective on circulation, underscoring the importance of tangible relay stations in shaping the sequential evolution of a literary work beyond its initial manifestation. These relay stations, positioned at the crossroads of various actor-networks, serve as epistemic sites for discerning specific translation, networking and relay practices. Through these practices, circulating assets assume distinct forms and expressions, becoming entangled in diverse ways and directed toward particular circuits with translocal capacities.
In the Afro-Eurasian core, from Egypt to China, writing emerged, developed, and then was transferred to the periphery, for instance, to the German-speaking world and to Japan. This process loosely synchronised the politics and literature of these two cultures, thereby explaining the striking similarity between song anthologies compiled in both regions, at a time when the two cultures had no direct interaction and also differed greatly. The similarities and the differences between the two cultures were presented by describing the networks that consisted of different factors such as power, gender, and media, and in which the songs circulated.
The comic book produced by Chilean artist Francisca Cárcamo Rojas, known as Panchulei, serves as a documentation of the international conference ‘Imagining the Black Diaspora’, held from 9 January to 10 January 2020. Organised by Dustin Breitenwischer and Jasmin Wrobel, the conference aimed to foster dialogue between cultural production and academic reflection surrounding representations of the Black diaspora across the Americas. Bringing together authors, comic artists, translators, and scholars from various disciplines, the event explored the circulation, distribution, and cultural significance of imagery in Black diasporic literature.
In Katherine Bode’s Insight, ‘Critical Modelling and Measurement’, she explores the intersection of literary studies and computational literary studies (CLS). The Insight critiques the prevalent representationalist paradigm in CLS, arguing that it confines modelling within an atomistic and dualist ontology, incompatible with the interdisciplinary nature of the humanities. The Insight proposes a shift from representation to measurement as a framework for critical modelling in literary studies, asserting measurement as a constitutive knowledge practice within the humanities. This perspective challenges Cartesian dualism and offers a pathway to create literary phenomena through critical modelling, emphasising the transformative role of measurement in shaping our understanding of literature.
This insight navigates the evolving landscape of modelling, examining its roots in the sciences and its recent emergence in the digital humanities. I contend that despite the digital humanities’ emphasis on the creative and subjective nature of data modelling, visual representations often succumb to adopting scientific graphical tools without due consideration of epistemological biases. Inspired by design practice, I propose a paradigm shift in critical modelling, spotlighting the pivotal role of visual representations as tools for reflective practice.
Although design models can serve as communication devices, in this insight I put an emphasis on their role as enablers of iterative development through reflective conversations between designer and model. By elucidating the qualities supporting reflective practice, this insight forges connections between theoretical claims and actual visual representations in the digital humanities, challenging conventional notions of data visualisation.
Critical modelling establishes a discursive site for reflecting on the constructed and transactional nature of our epistemic objects in relation to the critical vocabulary and infrastructure of knowledge-making. Rather than conceiving of models as a prefiguration of real-existing data worlds, a normative reification of an assumed literary (poly-)system, or a descriptive object ontology of a historical reality conceived as an ideational whole, this insight conceives of critical modelling as a scholarly practice that is enacted beyond representation and actively participates in the making of a space of intelligibility through processes of materialisation and instantiation of concepts and research questions with data.
The insight Cruising in Circles focuses on the short prose piece ‘Display’ by Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç in regard to its formal poetics of circulation and its embeddedness in a certain topical/political horizon and a resistant desire (or: a desire of resistance). As a literary text, I will argue, ‘Display’ engages formally with the nature of its subject and the desire of its subjects, which is doubled and redeemed by its poetic structure: ‘Display’ cruises. That is, with concepts of ‘queer’ or resistant temporality as a formal horizon, Keskinkılıç’s text brings forward a literary structure relying not on ‘straight time’, (Muñoz 2019) but on the promiscuous temporalities of rhythm: as a non-final, affect-driven movement of words and bodies in space that clashes with linear narrative and normative temporality.
‘The posts seem to want to proliferate’, wrote Linda Hutcheon in 1994. It’s the year 2024, and the posts are everywhere. This insight unpacks the contradictory and competing values that invariably attach themselves to the prefix “post-” by building upon the writings of Ann McClintock, Naika Foroutan, Jean-François Lyotard, and Rita Felski, among others. It argues that the perceived ubiquity of posts today evidences the ongoing competition of various temporal communities for the right to define what the “coming after modernity” means for today in ethical and political terms.
As Simon Godart’s analysis of the status of fabula has shown, the fabulous aspect in Descartes’s concept of mundus is so crucial that much effort has been invested in superseding it in order to arrive at the Ego’s infallible certainty. In Godart’s reading, one could say that Descartes’s Ego ought to devour the lesson of the fable. But does the fable always allow itself to be devoured and digested into a moral lesson? Is the reader capable of doing that? This question pertains not only to Descartes’s appropriation of the narrative frame of the fable, but also to the conventional genre of the Aesopian fable. How well can the fable be reduced to a moral lesson by the reader? How general should this moral lesson be—should it pertain to humanity as a whole or to specific human beings? In this contribution, by discussing two passages from Phaedrus and Rousseau on the genealogy and use of the fable, we will see that these two authors frame the supposedly simple genre of the fable with paratexts, which assure the reader that they need not be personally concerned—the failure of which may be part of the genre’s success. As Phaedrus denies and Rousseau openly fears, the fable renders the reader suspicious that its moral is not an impersonal musing about human manners, but a personal invective against the reader.
E-quotes are quotes created for the purpose of being posted on digital platforms. The aim of this paper is to investigate how literary e-quotes posted on Facebook pages demonstrate a new practice of valuation that contradicts traditional practices related to the “offline world”. In the light of two Facebook pages, whose content is inspired by excerpts taken from multiple literary works, this research explores how the concept of value is re-worked by generating new practices or modes that do not only emphasise the role of digitality, but also raise the question of agency and the role of new actors. For the purpose of this research, the paper is divided into two parts: the first demonstrates how literary e-quotes represent a transformation of traditional print literature into digitised content. In other words, this part shows how the value of literary works is re-worked through “datafication”, which turns these works into data so that it can be easily accessed and circulated. The second part focuses on analysing how valuation, as a practice, is communicated among members of digital communities. In this regard, the notion of value as a quantifiable form is tracked through the lens of the different responses that posted e-quotes generate. The analysis of different patterns of response demonstrates how digital communities become an active agent that take part in identifying the value of the digital content produced.
This insight provides an analysis of the representation of farm animals on TikTok. It outlines the main categories through which users come into contact with animals, and the cultural meanings they carry. Between narratives of empathy and alienation, social networks are involved in negotiating our contradictory relationship with other animals.
Narrative theory developed in relation to the modern Western novel, although its insights have been productively applied to all sorts of objects. This response proposes a narratological account of Western epic on two levels: it seeks to understand this pre-modern genre from a narratological perspective, and it also reads epic as articulating its own discursive function in narrative terms. The paper focuses on the night-raid trope as a mise en abyme, examining how this miniaturised narrative episode reflects and interrogates the larger poem’s capacity for narrative, political, and ideological closure. In conclusion, I suggest that epic is, itself, a kind of narrative theory.
Theories of narrative framing often resort to the Arabian Nights as a prime example of how frame tales and embedded tales interact. This contribution aims to move beyond the classical understanding of narrative framing by exploring a contemporary Tunisian example. In his novel Mayār: sarāb al-jamājim thumma māʾ [Mayār: The Mirage of Skulls, then Water] (2017), Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī (b. 1953) revives two layers of literary history. His first point of reference is the modern Tunisian author Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī (1911–2004), whose literary œuvre serves as a source of al-Kīlānī’s imaginary, style, and characters. The story of Mayār, however, reaches back even further to the accounts that entwine around the ayyām al-ʿarab, the early Arab battles. The author’s dialogue with these two sources allows for a multi-dimensional reading of narrative framing, including paratextual, intratextual, and metatextual elements, thus serving as a textual interpretation of “temporal communities” across several layers of literary history.
The theory of frame narratives emerged to discuss modern Western fictional prose, often using the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ as a prime example. However, the Arabic literary tradition, especially before the age of print, provides a rich field to explore and expand this concept. Since the eighth century CE, Arabic writers and storytellers have created and transformed numerous famous frame tales that should be considered part of World Literature, such as ‘Kalīla and Dimna’, ‘The Book of Sindbad/The Seven Viziers’, and ‘The Tale of Barlaam and Josaphat’. This insight argues that “framing” can used to highlight the dynamic relationships within textual production. By discussing four notions of textual or artistic framing—frame tale, mise en reflet/en série, paratext, and parergon—through examples like ‘Kalīla and Dimna’, the ‘Thousand and One Nights’, and the ‘Biography of the Prophet Muḥammad’ (al-Sīra al-nabawiyya), this study aims to reconceptualise the framing metaphor as a programmatic term denoting complex narrative texts.
Despite the dominance of novels, short stories play a crucial role in education and the global reach of literature; for example, in the case of Hans Christian Andersen or Anton Chekhov. This response reflects on the process of mapping a world canon of impactful short stories, emphasising the importance of combining subjective knowledge with statistical data from sources like UNESCO’s Index Translationum and Goodreads. Furthermore, the potential for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to enhance literary research represents a promising avenue for exploration, offering additional insights and context. Despite concerns about their accuracy, LLMs can expand the scope of literary studies and help identify influential short stories and authors overlooked by traditional methods. Integrating generative AI into canon studies offers a new dimension to understanding literary influence and impact.
In the curatorial statement to the “Articulations” collection ‘Circulation’, the concept of circulation encompasses both closed, repetitive movement and open, expansive transmission. Analysing Gilgamesh as a paradigmatic case, the text explores how literary works oscillate between novelty and continuity across cultures and epochs, embodying a dynamic interplay of sameness and difference essential for enduring circulation.
How to enact Global South methods of reading and analysing comics remains unresolved. This piece offers several approaches to this issue.
This analysis considers the intricate relationship between “literature” and critical modelling within the framework of the EXC 2020 Temporal Communities research agenda. It asserts that the term “literature” relies on intricate, often unacknowledged modelling operations in literary studies, necessitating explicit scrutiny. The Insight posits literature as a consequence of non-representational modelling, underscoring the importance of making these practices explicit in a global context. The Insight invites further exploration of temporal communities, which seeks to offer alternative perspectives on “literature” and challenges existing models by emphasising literature as a fundamentally social and performative practice.
René Descartes employs the term ‘fable’ or ‘fabula’ in numerous instances throughout his work, yet he never provides an explicit account of his understanding of the term. In my paper, I aim to establish an understanding of this usage in relation to the overarching theme of framing narratives. I highlight that, despite Descartes’s texts generally being decisively non-narrative and characterised by systematic and methodological approaches, their very nature depends on autobiographical, exemplary, and even ‘fabulistic’ moments. These moments are inscribed in the text yet only brought forth as means to an end that Descartes envisions for his philosophical prose. Applying our terminology to this corpus allows us to observe that when it is a narrative that does the framing, the framed need not necessarily be narrative as well. On the contrary, the outer or earlier stage of Descartes’s progression towards a binding and irrefutable philosophical method of thought is presented as a necessary, albeit negligible, detour towards the deeper insights of his work. Descartes regards his ‘fables’ as narrative tools that are only temporary components of his textual compositions. Once they have fulfilled their purpose, there will be no further need for moral advice, good examples, or biographical identification. When—according to Jean-Luc Nancy—Mundus est Fabula is an apt summary of Descartes’s so-called ‘methodological doubt’, this maxim applies only until further notice; with regard to their temporal structure, the global fables of Descartes’s world are written to be outlived by their ‘morals’—the overarching way towards knowledge of his future ‘method’.
Energy Humanities have firmly established “petropoetics” as a pivotal term of modern literary studies for mapping the global flows of fossil fuels through eco-critical readings of world literature. However, the infrastructures of these circulations have largely been overlooked. Among the various means of transportation that poetics leverages, the pipeline takes precedence in its double capacity as a technical system for energy circulation and symbolic device of transcultural communication. Based on the hybrid modality of the pipeline, this insight proposes the concept of “pipepoetics” as a new tool of analysis in literary and media studies.
This response reflects on Anita Traninger’s insight, ‘Modelling “Literature”’, and discusses the evolving concept of literature and the influence of power dynamics on its definition. At the German Literature Archive (DLA), new projects, such as archiving games, challenge traditional literary boundaries. These efforts highlight the necessity for inclusive literary modelling and reflect broader societal and media changes.
Girish Shambu’s manifesto ‘For a New Cinephilia’ is a call to replace an older ‘love of cinema’, which universalises its own very specific and contingent history, with a new cinephilia sensitive to political inequalities. In this insight, I use Shambu’s framework to discuss the reception history of Barbara Loden’s film Wanda (1970), which was recently rediscovered and is now valued as a feminist masterpiece. The case suggests the need to account for the situatedness of any value statement. Thus, the insight ends with a proposal for a situated notion of value––and a cautionary tale about simplistic celebrations of political reevaluations.
Based on an analysis of the Siegfried Unseld Archive in Marbach, this article aims to make visible the ‘realpolitik’ of the circulation of literatures with a focus on Brazilian literature between 1960 and 1990 in West Germany. It traces the steps and the process of modelling Brazilian modern literature and shows how the Suhrkamp publishing house, which set out to establish and model a “World Literature” according to purely literary criteria (of modernism), in relation to non-European literatures—such as Brazilian literature—still pursued a practice of forming cultural reception modules—such as ‘Latin American literature’. Additionally, it explores how the publishing house tried to find a solution in the case of Brazilian literature, which did not fit exactly and could not be subsumed so easily. It shows how, in this context, the cultural and topographical concept of the “sertão”, otherwise regarded as the topos of a national founding myth of the brasilidade, can be extracted, through the analysis of Suhrkamp’s publication criteria and the isolated contour of Brazilian literature in its programme, as a concept of reception in which untranslatability functions as an epistemological fulcrum. Through this interpretation, the article attempts to escape the narrative of a universalist history of “World Literature”—according to Eurocentric criteria of polarisation between centre and periphery, North and South—and, rather than telling the story of a successful appropriation of foreign culture and literature, it describes a history of reception through the untranslatable asymmetries of literature itself.
In this response, Longinotti explores the impact of circulation on Petrarch’s oeuvre and the transformation of World Literature. Petrarch’s Latin epic, ‘Africa’, played a fundamental role in his reputation as the first poet laureate despite its limited readership during his lifetime. Longinotti investigates the reception of ‘Africa’ in Florence and Padua after Petrarch’s death, examining how these regions negotiated its publication and Petrarch’s legacy. By analysing the dynamics between the competing communities and the circulation of Petrarch’s works, Longinotti reconsiders the concepts of literary text and reception, revealing the intricate relationships shaping Petrarch’s impact in early modern Italy.
This insight examines the multiple forms of framing the translated book Bashai Tudu has undergone, demonstrating that (re)framing is an activity that operates in and outside the text. These acts of reframing take the form of re-anthologisation, republication and translation, generating new (literary) contexts and audiences. Framing through paratextuality and intertextuality alongside extratextuality is closely considered to demonstrate how these acts alter the meaning and reception of the text. Translation is an activity that involves the dislocation of the text’s referent and its lingual and literary memory and could alter not only the meaning of the text but also its temporal aspect. If translation, as an act of reframing, could entail an asymmetrical relation between the text and its translation, there arises a need, I argue, to pay close attention to the text, its context and the multiple acts of framing. If these different forms of framing attempt to make a text accessible to various readers by shaping the interpretation of the text across time and space, the enframed text generates multiple transtemporal, trans-local communities of readers. To understand the dynamic of these transtemporal, trans-local communities of readers, and of interpretations, one also needs to consider the context of the text—a context that clarifies the unnamed history, politics, location, structure, language and readers of the text, and which enriches the text’s literary and theoretical interventions.
Petrarch (1304–1374) aimed to establish a transnational and transtemporal community that could bring together authors from different epochs and regions by imitating the idealised ancient Greek and Roman world, overcoming the supposedly obscure Middle Ages. The first part of this case study shows how Petrarch’s vernacular lyric poems Rerum vulgarium fragmenta were employed to foster concrete Gesellschaften and give rise to diverse cultural communities through two commentaries on the RVF, composed in Naples in the 1470s. The second part of the study delves into Petrarch’s efforts to build community within the Latin dialogue De remediis utriusque fortunae, with particular emphasis on a sixteenth-century German print edition. The conclusion addresses the impact of Petrarch’s role in building communities during the early-modern period.
This interview with the internationally renowned Kenyan writer, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, conducted by PhD-student Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque, provides insight into the complexities of conceptualising “circulation” when its manifestations differ greatly depending on geographic, geopolitical, and cultural positionings. In the course of the conversation, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor touches upon matters of home and movement, discusses the necessity of crafting counter-narratives to dominant Eurocentric ones, and explores the concept of allowing the living to be haunted. Finally, in light of her most recent project, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor shares powerful insights into the history, present, and presence of coffee, and envisions more just ways to approach it.
In this insight, the literary device of framing is used to shed light on the systematic structure of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt (hereafter, Ḥarīriyya). The work has been criticised by modern scholars for being fragmented, short-breathed, and episodic. In contrast, I argue that all fifty episodes of the Ḥarīriyya are part of a symmetric, well-devised structure, which places language at the centre of three cyclic frames: 1. the author’s introduction and afterword, in which al-Ḥarīrī dwells on the advantages of ambiguity and concealing one’s intentions, 2. the first and last encounter of the two characters, which summarise the trajectory from ignorance to knowledge (or recognition), 3. the liminal theme of safar or travelling, which emphasises the game of hide-and-seek led by the trickster and the narrator in different cities. The three frames share the central paradox of the Maqāmāt: concealment versus clarity; or more concretely, language as a tool for both expressing and obscuring one’s attention.
In the interview between Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, the concept of home emerges as a dynamic force, fluid and boundary-defying. Inspired by this insightful conversation, I explore the intricate interplay of language, identity, and belonging, with a focus on the evolving notion of Heimat. Venturing into the realm of contemporary post-German poetry, I delve into Uljana Wolf’s work, particularly her collection meine schönste lengevitch (2013). This cursory exploration shows how scrutinising the effects of closed and open circulation in Wolf’s postmonolingual oeuvre could significantly deepen our understanding of how language dynamics sculpt identities and affiliations in the globalised world.