The Conditions of the Field Imagination: Realism and William Dean Howells

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Sedlmeier
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 330432137

My research project provides a revision of literary realism in late-nineteenth-century U.S.-America through its most prominent institutional representative, William Dean Howells. The first part draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu in order to chart the discursive and institutional conditions of the literary field in late-nineteenth-century America. This field, I contend, can no longer be assumed because a differentiated and fast-paced print capitalism produces an unprecedented confusion and complexity. For the first time now, the order of the field must be imagined by its actors, who stand in a relation of competitive alliance, who are rivals but also collaborators. This field imagination, I argue further, centers on the signifier “realism” and the signature “William Dean Howells.” My analyses focus on three formats of literary criticism (editorial, interview, review), which show two basic principles of ordering the field: epistemologies of difference (ethnicity, gender, region) and a notion of the contemporary. Both principles are converted into literary capital. They account for the increasing permeability of social boundaries and the permanent transformation of the U.S. as a country of immigrants, and they remain central for the writing of U.S. literary histories until today.The second part of my research project examines three literary genres: novel, play, novella. Going beyond Bourdieu, who limits his account of the field to cross-sectional analysis, I develop a reading practice with respect to the field imagination. Building on the central observation that Howells repeats and displaces characters and figurations across several texts, I understand realism as a self-archiving project, which constitutes and modifies itself via a poetics of iteration. On the one hand, iterations erode conventional notions of the closed entity of the singular text, which have dominated literary theories of the twentieth century. By contrast, iterations require conceptualizing a continuous literary universe, which formally represents the continuity of social experience. On the other hand, iterations establish the notion of a process of sociality that oscillates between repeated habitual scripts and moments of modulation or transformation, and that expresses modes of recognition and misrecognition. Realism thereby develops into an open sequence, into a self-archiving and self-historicizing project, which dramatizes the contingencies of sociality.The first part of this project therefore explores realism within a sociology of literature that elucidates the institutional dimensions of textual production and reception. The second part of this project discusses conditions of the literary dimensions of the social and challenges premises of conventional theories of the novel.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Hosts: Professor Phillip Barrish; Professor Mark Seltzer