Handbook Literature and the Public Sphere

An Interdisciplinary Handbook

Edited by Karin Höpker, Antje Kley, Dirk Niefanger and Antonia Villinger
Metzler/Springer Nature

Without a public sphere there is no literature, and literature, in its many forms of publication and
its various addresses, remains an indispensable pacemaker for the formation of public opinions.
This chiasmus indicates the timeliness of the handbook, shapes its articles’ methodological
choices, and explains its cultural and theoretical relevance. It seeks to make the interdependencies
between literatures and public spheres tangible for a broader audience (scholars, students,
teachers). In doing so, it relies on a concept of literature that encompasses socio-cultural
contexts, political frameworks, (inter-)mediality and media competitions, cultural institutions
(libraries, reading circles, academies, etc.), and the literary scene as the environment and object of
analysis of literary products. Our understanding of literature sees the book as one possible mode
of literary mediation among others; it also considers digital, oral, visual, and other performative
literatures. The handbook adopts a reflexive cultural studies approach and a comprehensive
concept of literature.

The handbook is not bound to national languages, but it focuses on literatures of different
cultural areas (mainly English-, German-, French-, Spanish- and Russian-speaking), including
minor literatures and minority cultures that have adopted former colonial and settlement
languages as well as their publics on different continents. In doing so, the handbook relies on the
diverse disciplinary expertise of its authors. In a comparative and transnational perspective, we
consider praxeological, social, medial, material, ethical, and economic aspects of literary
communication. The handbook’s focus lies on literatures that could hardly be more diverse. All
of them, however, are characterized by an increasingly determining globalization, specific but
interrelated political constellations, media transformations, the mechanization of everyday life,
and changing public spheres.

The handbook seeks to present the enabling conditions and the impact of literary production in
different public spheres. Our scope of interest is the present. The articles will focus on literature
that has been published since 1945. Where relevant, historical references will reach beyond that.
An exception is made for the global-historical dimensions in section four. Literatures will be
understood in terms of their specific characteristics, potentials, and functions, first as
seismographs of often contradictory cultural, media, and social developments, second as
generators of a vocabulary for articulating multi-layered experiences of the respective present,
and third as forums for the debate of publicly relevant issues. The effects of different publics on
different literatures are also addressed in the individual contributions to the handbook.

The contributions to the handbook Literature and the Public Sphere deal in different ways with the
fundamental question of what constitutes literature. The editors assume that publicity – to
whatever extent, in whatever form, and in whatever media – is and has always been one of the
fundamental constituents of all literature. In general and in specialized articles, the contributions
to the handbook show how, under what conditions, and with what consequences literature can
be perceived as a form of representation that is always public even if not necessarily accessible to
all. Economic, linguistic, or political aspects determine access to and the reception of literatures.
On this basis, the articles explore what the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion of public
spheres mean for different societies and sociocultural milieus.

The handbook seeks to establish a heuristic connection between systematic and global-historical
perspectives as well as current discursive contexts. The second section – Basic Principles – is
devoted to the systematic unfolding of the relationship between literature and the public sphere.
The third section – Perspectives – develops selected approaches and methodologies that promise to
be particularly productive for the elucidation of the interdependencies between literatures and
publics. A systematic, culturally and theoretically ambitious analysis of the relationship between
literature and the public sphere makes limited sense without global-historical relativizations and
current discursive standpoint epistemologies. Therefore, in Part 4 – Global Historical Dimensions –
different historical constellations of literature and the public sphere will be outlined, and in Part 5
– Literary Positionings in the Present – recently momentous thematic fields will be paradigmatically
mapped out.

Outline

I . Introduction

The Public Sphere as a Constituent of Literature

II. Fundamentals

1. Attention
2. Different Publics
3. Major and Minor Literatures
4. Communication Control
5. (Cultural) Difference
6. Reading, Seeing, Hearing
7. Literature and Ethics
8. Literature and Political Institutions
9. Literary Industry/Market
10. Literary Scandals
11. Materiality and Literature
12. Media Systems
13. Political Literature
14. Write
15. Translate
16. Publish
17. Circulate

III. Perspectives

18. Anthropology
19. Digital Humanities
20. Environmental Humanities
21. Gender und Queer Studies
22. Global Studies
23. Interculturality
24. Intersectionality
25. Comparative Literature
26. Sociology of Literature
27. Medical Humanities
28. Media Ethics
29. Media Economics
30. Postcolonial Studies
31. Public Humanities
32. Translation Studies

IV. Global Historical Dimensions

33. Ancient World
34. Middle Ages
35. Early Modern Times
36. 18th Century
37. 19th Century
38. 1st half 20th Century
39. 2nd half 20th Century
40. 21st Century

V. Literary Positionings in the Present

41. Age
42. Anthropocene
43. Work
44. Poverty
45. Bioethics
46. Energy
47. Cultures of Memory
48. Fake News
49. Identity
50. AI / Digitalization
51. Childhood / Youth
52. War
53. Migration
54. New Right
55. Ecology
56. Pop
57. Postmigration
58. Shoa/Holocaust
59. Social Media
60. Death and Life
61. Virtuality
62. Cultures of Resistance