Abstract
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.
In the Cluster’s name, ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’, which at the same time epitomises its research agenda, “literature” is by many perceived to be the only self-evident term not in want of explanation. Yet it could be argued that it is, to the contrary, the most complex term in the equation because it depends on complex modelling operations that are, however, typically not recognised as such.
Models and modelling in literary studies
Models have been conceived both as the externalisation of thought and, contrarily, as representations of reality. Models are often described as abstractions that facilitate a focus on essential features, flexible devices for scientific inquiry, and tools for reducing complexity (e.g. Full reference in Zotero Library). As a consequence, modelling itself has been recognised as being ‘hard to conceptualize’ (Full reference in Zotero Library). Above all, modelling appears to be in itself a practice that depends on tacit knowledge: ‘modeling grows out of practice, not out of theory, and so is rooted in stubbornly tacit knowledge — i.e., knowledge that is not merely unspoken but may also be unspeakable’ (Full reference in Zotero Library; cf. Full reference in Zotero Library).
What does this mean for literature? Bernd Mahr, in his extensive work on models, has variously insisted that any object can serve as a model (e.g. in Full reference in Zotero Library), thereby stressing the material manifestation of modelling efforts. Thus, with regard to literature, if there is an idea, a concept, or a theory waiting to be externalised and an object (in the sense of Gegenstand, i.e. literature) waiting to be modelled—which material object serves as the model? Where does the effect of modelling manifest itself?
Modelling has not been among literary studies’ core methodologies. In particular, that the notion of literature itself would depend on modelling operations has not been contemplated at all. The notion of a model has been applied, however, to the literary text as such. This idea was introduced in structuralist poetics, notably by Jurij Lotman, who defined literature as a ‘secondary modelling system’ and assigned the literary text the purpose of offering a ‘model of reality’. Texts are not meant to “copy” reality, but rather to facilitate a type of abstraction in the service of detecting reality’s underlying structures. It is the observer/reader who is tasked with recognising the difference between reality and its artistic model, which requires an ‘aesthetic’ predisposition (Full reference in Zotero Library; cf. Full reference in Zotero Library). Thus, essentially, Lotman’s assigning a modelling function to literature is an attempt at answering an age-old question: what is literature?
What is literature?
Just as with the notion of a “model”, which has variously been described as vague and hard to pin down, there is widespread consensus that it is quite unclear what “literature” actually “is”. This consensus has, on the one hand, long entered the handbooks and introductions (cf. Full reference in Zotero Library; Full reference in Zotero Library). On the other hand, volumes and chapters bearing the exact same title ‘What is literature?’ abound, each admittedly struggling to present a unified perspective, despite the fact that these takes are typically offered from within universities’ literature departments and other literary institutions. There is a reason why the question continues to be asked, as Jonathan Culler observed:
In fact, when people take up the question “what is literature?” it is usually in order to propound an answer that will recommend one critical approach to literature rather than another. The question functions above all to invite responses that argue for particular ways of approaching or analysing literature by positing a nature of literature that requires this particular approach. Full reference in Zotero Library
While these interventions rhythmically punctuate academic debate by flaring up every couple of years, the question is usually not at the heart of academic work in the field of literary studies. For many, it is only when preparing large collaborative grant proposals (such as ours) that the question arises: how do you conceive of literature? What does count as literature — and what does not? And every time the question proves to be a stumbling block. While literary scholars comparatively effortlessly agree on the most advanced research agendas, they regularly struggle to accept any one definition for the object of their studies.
One stumbling block is, of course, the fact that “literature” does not refer to a single class of objects. As a matter of fact, defining literature cannot be achieved inductively, not only because the texts that count as literature do not typically share a fixed and definitive set of characteristics, but also because the parameters according to which texts are claimed as literature are ever-shifting:
What is literature? A creature of Cartesian cleavage, I begin by thinking of a set of objects. […] I want res extensae, a corpus of books I can touch and tuck away in one corner of a library apart from science, non-fiction, religion, or art. The trouble is that these different books will not stay put in the categories librarians give them. A private diary, even one written in a secret code like Pepys’, shifts over into the category of literature when its pedestrian, slightly preposterous author subsides into historical respectability. The Spectator, once kept under “current periodicals” as the Times is today, comes to be assigned in literature courses. The radio plays of the 1930’s and the fugitive songs of country fiddlers slide out of folklore into Literature with a capital Left. Full reference in Zotero Library
A global perspective
What counts as literature is constantly negotiated and re-constituted in social practice, independent of how texts were intended or used in their context of origin. But what is more: the Genji monogatari, Montaigne’s Essais, and Eugen Gomringer’s Konstellationen can only be brought under one conceptual roof when viewed through the lens of a certain notion of literature that is not and cannot be derived from studying these texts and identifying shared traits. EXC TC states as much in its approach to global literature, acknowledging that ‘literature is, of course, not a self-evident category, and even less so from a historical and transcultural perspective’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Literary studies do and always have accommodated texts from cultures and eras that do not subscribe to the European, post-1800 notion of literature as imaginative, fictional texts that are intimately tied to linguistic communities and could thus be claimed as building blocks for national literatures.
Apart from the fact that a global perspective has to deal with a multitude of traditions and terminological conventions, the Western notion of literature itself has undergone seismic conceptual shifts. The term literature is at times a faux ami, even within the Western tradition, as it has at least referred to two fundamentally different concepts. While the notion of literature that informs the current shape of the field stems from the early nineteenth century, the term literature is emphatically not an invention of the nineteenth century. It occurs already in Cicero, where it refers to concepts as broad as “erudition” or “literary culture”. Only in the second century A.D. did writers including Tertullian and Cassian begin to use the term to refer to a body of secular writing (litteratura) as opposed to the Bible (scriptura) Full reference in Zotero Library. Still, up to the eighteenth century, ‘avoir de la littérature’ referred to a set of learned, yet not necessarily scholarly practices (cf. Full reference in Zotero Library). “Literature”, for the longest time, did not refer to a body of texts but rather, as Richard Terry has put it, to ‘an activity and a mental accomplishment’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Only in the course of the eighteenth century did the semantic core of “literature” shift from a competence to a group of objects, from a certain manner of dealing with texts to a certain kind of imaginative texts themselves Full reference in Zotero Library.
It does not come as a surprise that Raymond Williams included “literature” in his study of keywords, i.e. words, as he put it, that ‘virtually forced [themselves] on my attention because the problems of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss’ Full reference in Zotero Library.
Today, these imaginative texts are predominantly imagined as narrative prose, as the vast digital corpora currently being built demonstrate (the realist/naturalist novel now being firmly situated at the core of these efforts). In non-European history, cognates of “literature” (in both senses) may or may not exist at a given point in time, yet “literature” usually works as a conceptual screen that obscures the acts of usurpation that necessarily underwrite a “global perspective”.
Manifesting models
The remit of EXC 2020 Temporal Communities’s Research Area 5 is to model temporal communities, which have been conceived as a device for exploring the ever-shifting webs of exchange that are typically prompted by literature. If we claim, however, that we will look at how we model temporal communities both digitally and “hermeneutically” (which stands as an unfortunate shorthand for the constellation of historical, philological, interpretive, theoretical, rhetorical, and analytical methods and approaches that make up literary studies), we accept, at the same time, the challenge to make literary studies’ notoriously implicit modelling practices explicit. It is an act of judgement (or a series of acts of judgement) that converts texts into literature, in particular in a historical or transcultural perspective. Yet the conditions for this judgement, its criteria, its necessary perspectivity and performativity, are typically not spelled out.
It may be helpful to conceive of “literature” as an effect of non-representational modelling in that it is informed by processes of selection and subsumption that create the field that is supposedly denoted in the first place (cf. Full reference in Zotero Library).
With this, I return to my initial question: what is the model that results from the (non-digital) modelling of literature? Apparently, this model—or models—is right before our eyes without being recognised as such: it is, according to Katherine Bode, the regular products of literary study—editions, bibliographies—that counts as a modelling exercise, given that these products are embodied arguments about texts:
[A] scholarly edition models an ideational concept—typically a literary work, in this case, a literary system—by demonstrating and justifying its interpretation of documentary evidence. Full reference in Zotero Library
Where bibliographies are perceived by many people as facts about literature and scholarly editions as especially accurate versions of literary works, in contemporary textual studies they are conceived as “embodied arguments about textual transmission” (Full reference in Zotero Library, quoting Full reference in Zotero Library).
Other than a concept, a model manifests itself in material constellations. Taking Katherine Bode’s argument further, I would say that modelling takes place in a range of formats, each foregrounding a particular aspect. The predominant site of active, explicit, and mildly critical modelling is literary history, where the question of selection comes into play and, contrary to the abstractions of literary theory, concrete questions on the extension of the notion of literature have to be pondered. This challenge has to be met against the backdrop of a discipline that operates on the basis of models beyond the textual genre of literary history, models that manifest themselves in department structures themselves, in how literature is taught (syllabi, reading lists), archived (libraries, repositoria), curated (editions), and discussed (monographs, papers) as well as, critically, in how research projects are organised (cf. the national structure e.g. in COST actions). These structures are both conventional and persistent, surviving decades of critical assaults and institutional reforms.
This is quite an astonishing insight against the backdrop of the debates on modelling in the sciences, where models are conceived as thinking devices with the purpose of facilitating discovery. With this type of modelling as a translation of a contested concept into institutional structures, genres, and media, thus into a set of materialised practices, the question of discovery is replaced by that of affordances: which notion of ‘literature’ is afforded by these structures?
Temporal communities
“Temporal communities” has been devised as an alternative—or competing—approach to conceiving of literature, and in a global perspective at that. As such, it is about making the processes that underwrite the modelling of literature explicit, and this task is put into stark relief by twinning the effort with digital approaches.
In this sense, the definition of literature offered in EXC 2020 Temporal Communities’s research agenda is not so much a definition but rather a set of very general rules for proceeding. They are an invitation to model against the powerful, institutionalised, iteratively recreated models that depend on the founding parameters of nation and era, powerfully embodied by literary studies departments and the denominations of the professorships allocated to them.
EXC 2020 Temporal Communities relies on a definition of literature that encompasses more than books and that acknowledges the fact that, over the course of history, texts and practices may be recognised as literary at one point but not at another—yet none of the aspects listed in this definition will help determine whether a given text “is” literature. Let us revisit the definition:
By “literature” we refer to a fundamentally, but by no means exclusively verbal form of cultural expressivity in action. We conceive of literature as a material practice self-consciously operating with and beyond language in time. Within our analytical horizon, literature is necessarily embodied and hence fundamentally social and performative: it is something that people do with words, but not only with words, and it exists only because people do it. Because we perceive literature to be a material practice existing only in action, we do not see it defined primarily by its textual nature, its metrical composition, its narrative structures or fictional components—although they all matter in specific cases—but by the way it is treated and transmitted, performed and practised. That means that the ontology of literature is by definition unstable, and the literary is subject to constant negotiation. Full reference in Zotero Library
Here are the criteria again in a keyword format: verbal, non-verbal, social, performative, material, in action, transmitted, unstable, negotiated. How this can or will translate into a new model remains to be seen.