My project ‘JOURNAL POETICS’ was an attempt to rewrite the history of literature from the late Enlightenment (1770) to early Realism (around 1840) from the perspective of media history - using the journal as a guideline. At the same time, the aim was to define the journal as a central epistemic object of literary research and to develop a methodology for analysing it in line with the recently flourishing international journal research and periodical studies. I have coined the term ‘journal poetics’ to describe this new methodology. The starting point was the concern to question established epochal narratives: in the course of the 19th century, an epochal image of the Goethe era was shaped that is closely linked to the work-like, completed book as the guarantor of an elitist, art-autonomous claim to validity. This autonomous aesthetic perspective promoted the prejudice of an unworldly art doctrine that emerged in the course of the ‘classical legend’ (Berghahn et al.), whose representatives had acted beyond the market and even against their own audience - with the consequence of basically not having been read. The representatives of Weimar ‘court classicism’, above all Schiller, the ‘court poet[] of German idealism’ (Adorno), and Goethe, had thus brought about a fatal dichotomisation of German literature under the sign of an ‘autonomy doctrine’ (Ch. Bürger) and also contributed to a massive devaluation and exclusion of women writers. The central thesis of this study, however, is that these epochal narratives begin to falter when we look at the dynamic media realities and fluid publication contexts around 1800. The starting point was an initially surprising finding: the age of autonomy aesthetics, of all eras, witnessed the rapid rise of the periodical as a popular mass medium of literature. Protagonists of the era such as Wieland, Schiller and Goethe played a pioneering role in this. The ‘Kunsteperiode’ (Heine) is the period of the periodical. For the key players of Goethe's time, the periodical was therefore not the other side of their concept of art, but rather its essential medium. Periodicals such as the Teutsche Merkur, the Thalia and the Horen were catalysts of literary and aesthetic development; they enabled and thus favoured the formation of a literary field by producing the model of the free, market-dependent writer. The aim of the study was thus to unfold an overall panorama of periodical culture from around 1770 to 1840, alternating between overview and detailed description. It is within this time frame that the central change in media history takes place, in the course of which the journal establishes itself alongside the book as the most important, complementary media format in literature.
In terms of methodology, my project draws on the recently flourishing international journal research and periodical studies as well as the latest studies on material formats of literature (Spoerhase). Network theories (Latour) combined with aspects of social history and literary sociology (Bourdieu, H. S. Becker, Reckwitz) also provided starting points for a decidedly praxeological approach: in addition to the material-philological and reception-aesthetic perspective of current journal research (DFG research group ‘Journal Literature’), my project takes the journals as its starting point and follows the actors in their media and social-historical contexts. Based on the concept of ‘journal poetics’ (Cf. IMAGE 1), this enables inductive work close to the source.Journal poetics focuses on the production side (poiesis): on the one hand, the compositional strategies of editors (and some editors) and publishers of journals, and on the other, the media-related poetics of the authors. Journal poetics thus refers to the totality of those factors that affect the scope and selection, structure and proportion, composition and arrangement of a journal. It results from the interplay of calculation, conception and contingency and is constituted in the alignment of producers and recipients. In addition, questions of materiality (typography, choice of paper, text arrangement, etc.) are integrated into the model. Journal poetics is thus a praxeological concept that is not based on rigid, declarative normativity, but on multi-actor processes and interdependencies in an increasingly complex literary field. With these factors in mind, a finely differentiated journal-poetic analysis matrix was developed to open up the black box of a journal and make the actors visible in their associations and interactions.
Through the project and the resulting publications, especially the monograph, I have shown a new way of researching the Age of Goethe. The theory and method can also be used for further journal research into other epochs.
