The Craft of Literature, 1775-2010

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Michael Bies
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 389733629

Even if literature is not a craft, German-language literary and aesthetic texts since the late eighteenth century constantly refer to craft. They fashion images of past worlds of crafts, report on trips oriented on the model of journeyman travels, and they narrate the decline of craft in a modernity characterized by advancing industrialization. Moreover, it is striking that aesthetic texts resort to craft and the crafts to reflect upon the status and the order of literature in modernity and to find answers to the question of what literature can or cannot, and should or should not, be.This research project seeks to elaborate the relationship, not yet described in its breadth, between literature and craft in its characteristic forms and functions. In contrast to the majority of previous research, this project does not presuppose that literature primarily reflects socio-economic relations whenever it represents craft. Rather, it assumes that literature's recourse to craft is above all an effort to explore and thematize itself and its own possibilities. Hence, the project analyzes how, in the confrontation with craftwork, literary and aesthetic texts treat the production as well as the order and rules of literature; how, in the representation of crafts, they seek to explore and compensate for the status of literature and art under the conditions of social modernity; and how, in this way, they participate in the "invention" of a typical modern image of craft and also promote a general discussion about modernity. This recourse to craft is enabled by a series of changes and events which come together in the second half of the eighteenth century, which is the starting point of this project. Among these are the increasing "publication" of craftwork knowledge, the formation of a narrative of "the decline of craft," the changeover from a rule-based poetics to a poetics of innovation, as well as the emergence of "art" and "craft" in the singular.The project will trace literature's reference to craft in its continuity as well as in its transformations all the way up to the twenty-first century and, at the same time, take into account the fundamental erosion and recoding that this reference undergoes in the context of postmodernity. To this end, canonical literary and aesthetic texts by authors such as Goethe, Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Stifter, Storm, Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald will be analyzed, as will texts by lesser known authors such as Johann Friedrich Rupprecht, Otto Ludwig, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Max Kretzer, Hermann Stehr, Karl Scheffler, or finally Marc Schweska.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants