Faceted Browsing
A Close Reading of Sara Ahmed through Making
This visual essay presents an exploration of Sara Ahmed’s book ‘Living a Feminist Life’, focussing specifically on citational practices.
‘By Far the Best Fiction in any Language’: An Analysis of the Circulation and Critical Reception of Carl Franz van der Velde’s Historical Novels in the Nineteenth Century
This insight focuses on the works of Carl Franz van der Velde to explore how German historical novels circulated globally in the nineteenth century.
Circulation by Translation
Tangible relay stations shape the circulation and sequential evolution of literary works. This insight highlights specific translation and networking practices at crossroads of actor-networks.
Circulation of Songs in the German-Speaking World and in Japan: Comparison Based on Anthologies 1000–1340
From Egypt to China, writing spread to the periphery, notably to German-speaking areas and Japan. This synchronised politics and literature, explaining the similar song anthologies in these regions.
Comic Book: Imagining the Black Diaspora
Chilean artist Panchulei’s comic documents ‘Imagining the Black Diaspora’ conference, exploring Black cultural representation.
Competing Communities, Renaissance Style
Taking the first version of Erasmus’s of Rotterdam Adagia (1500) as its starting point, this case study discusses competing communities as transtemporal networks.
Critical Intimacy
Critical intimacy addresses commonality in theory, sex and art. It engages contemporary theoretical discourses in the humanities, field literature and socially based art to reconsider the “we” in rela
Critical Modelling and Measurement
Katherine Bode critiques representationalist computational literary studies (CLS) paradigms, advocating for a shift to measurement in literary studies.
Critical Modelling as Reflective Practice
This insight explores the intersection of design and digital humanities, advocating for visual representations as tools for reflective practice.
Critical Modelling: From ‘Models of’ to ‘Modelling as’
This insight considers how critical modelling reframes scholarly practice, moving beyond representation to shape a space of intelligibility through materialisation and instantiation.
Cruising in Circles: Promiscuous Temporalities in Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, ‘Display’ (2021)
The insight ‘Cruising in Circles’ examines Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç’s ‘Display,’ focusing on its poetics of circulation and resistance.
Disidentifying with the Present: The Multiple Values of the Prefix “Post-”
This insight unpacks the competing values that attach to the prefix “post-” and reflects on debates over defining the “post-modern” era’s ethical and political implications.
Don’t take it personally! Phaedrus and Rousseau Against Their Readers
This response examines two passages from Phaedrus and Rousseau on the genealogy and use of the fable. It discusses how a reader is meant to deduce a fable’s moral lesson and the nature of its moral.
E-quotes and Valuation: Reviving Literature through Social Media
This insight investigates how E-quotes that are shared on Facebook pages demonstrate a new practice of valuation that contradicts traditional practices in the “offline world”.
Farm Animals on TikTok
This insight analyses the representation of farm animals on TikTok. It argues that social networks create narratives that negotiate and evaluate our contradictory relationship with other animals.
Framing Epic: The Night-Raid as Narrative Theory
This response proposes a narratological analysis of Western epic, focusing on the night-raid trope. It examines the poem’s narrative and ideological closure, suggesting epic as narrative theory.
Framing Narratives in Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s ‘Mayār’ (2017): A Contemporary Tunisian Perspective on Literary Framing Between Theory and Practice
This insight moves beyond classical framing by exploring Muṣṭafā al-Kīlānī’s novel Mayār (2017), engaging modern Tunisian author Maḥmūd al-Masʿadī to highlight multi-dimensional narrative framing.
Framing Narratives: Expanding the Narratological Frame Concept for the Study of the Premodern Arabic Tradition
This insight shows how a theory of frame narratives, using examples like the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ and ‘Kalīla and Dimna’, highlights dynamic textual relationships in pre-print Arabic tradition.
Generative AI and Canon Studies
Short stories are vital in education and global literature. This response reflects on the process of mapping a world canon of impactful short stories and integrating generative AI in literary studies.
Gilgamesh Returns
Insights on circulation reveal its dual nature: movement and return, sameness and difference. ‘Gilgamesh’ reveals how circulation embodies perpetual change and endurance across cultures and contexts.
Global South Comics and the Question of Method
How to enact Global South methods of reading and analysing comics remains unresolved. This piece offers several approaches to this issue.
Interfigurality
This response examines how literary characters circulate across media, and, through fragmentation and recontextualisation, become symbols in culture, politics, and commerce.
Modelling “Literature”
The Insight argues that the modern notion of ‘literature’ is a consequence of non-representational modelling, underscoring the importance of making the related practices explicit in a global context.
Mundus est Fabula
Descartes employs “fable” in his work without explicit definition. This insight examines its usage in framing narratives, revealing their pivotal yet transient role in his philosophical prose.
Pipepoetics and the Infrastructures of Circulation
Energy Humanities have overlooked the infrastructures, notably pipelines, pivotal for energy circulation and transcultural communication. This insight introduces “pipepoetics” to literary studies.
Practical Modelling of Literature in a Literature Archive
In this response to Anita Traninger’s insight on “Modelling Literature”, I consider the critical modelling of literature in the German Literature Archive in Marbach (DLA).
Situated Value and the New Cinephilia: The Case of ‘Wanda’
Girish Shambu’s manifesto ‘For a New Cinephilia’ calls for a ‘love of cinema’ sensitive to political inequalities. Using this, I call for a situated notion of value in Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970).
Suhrkamp Verlag and the Mediation of Global Literature from Brazil: In Favour of a Noise-filled Concept of Reception of Literatures of the World
This insight analyses the Siegfried Unseld Archive to reveal West Germany’s “realpolitik” in circulating Brazilian literature (1960–1990) and challenge Eurocentric narratives of “world literature”.
The Circulation of Petrarch’s ‘Africa’: Poet Laureate, Unread Poems, and Epic Fame
Longinotti examines the impact of circulation on Petrarch’s oeuvre, focusing on the posthumous reception of his Latin epic, ‘Africa’, and the transformation of World Literature.
The Many Lives of Bashai Tudu, the Many Acts of (Re)framing Devi
This insight examines the multiple framings of ‘Bashai Tudu’ through re-anthologisation, republication, and translation. It highlights the need to consider the text’s context, reception, and framing.
The Transtemporal Community of Francis Petrarch
Petrarch (1304–1374) aimed to create a transnational community by emulating ancient Greek and Roman ideals in the composition of his “Rerum vulgarium fragmenta” and “De remediis utriusque fortunae”.
The Value of German Medieval Literature in the 1930s: Martin Bodmer, Erwin Rosenthal, and the ‘Nibelungenlied’
This response explores how German antiquarian booksellers shaped perceptions of medieval works in the early twentieth century, highlighting their role in promoting scholarship and valuing rare books.
‘To Defy Someone Else’s Mythology of our Extinction’: A Conversation with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
The interview with Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, by Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque, explores the complexities of “circulation” through various geographic, geopolitical, and cultural contexts.
Protected: Topographies of the Unseen: Visualising the Borderland in Hamzehian and Mortarotti’s Eden
This essay examines Hamzehian and Mortarotti’s Eden (2014) and its interrogation of representation, realism, and reification. It explores their critique of documentary conventions and image politics.
(Un)veiling Language or Frames in al-Ḥarīrī’s ‘Maqāmāt’
This insight uses framing to analyse the systematic structure of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt. It argues for a symmetric design with cyclic frames that focus on language’s dual role in concealment and clarity.
‘warum / spielen heimatländer in den lüften karten?’ A Glimpse into Uljana Wolf’s Post-German Poetry
Inspired by the discussion of home as fluid and boundary-defying between Raphaëlle Efoui-Delplanque and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, I explore “Heimat” in Uljana Wolf’s meine schönste lengevitch (2013).

Credit: Faceted Browsing design inspired from and based on Marian Dörk’s PivotPaths with some modifications by Maren Welterlich-Strobl.