Sources and Methods: Theory of Canon and the Possibilities of Disciplinary Practice in German Studies

Abstract

Starting from interdisciplinary theories of canon, this essay zooms in on literary canons and the canon of the field of German Studies in particular. In comparison to many kinds of canons, academic canons, it is argued, are structured based on different and frequently opposing assumptions. On this basis, a distinction is made between the adjective “canonical,” which refers to the supposedly stable functions of legitimate or illegitimate authority, and the adjective “canonic,” which evokes the specific forms of critical self-reflexivity required in academic contexts. The concluding discussion addresses the specific challenges of the canonic design of German Studies in the North American context. As an interdisciplinary discipline operating at a distance from Europe, the canonics of global German Studies are relatively undefined. This can be interpreted positively as a source of freedom and flexibility but also as a challenge of self-definition in relation to various disciplinary-canonic architectures.

Keywords:

• German Studies
• Luhmann
• censorship
• decolonization
• sociology of canon
• literary history
• literary theory

Notes

1 See Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” in Kanon und Zensur: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), 7–27 and Alois Hahn, “Kanonisierungsstile,” in Kanon und Zensur: Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), 28–37. Space does not permit me to introduce these theorizations in detail, but they provide essential framework for the present discussion.

2 The typical result is a discourse- and reception-theoretical, contingency-based model of canonization, which received early exemplification in theoretical classics such as Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (a narrative of the canonization of capitalism as a form of life) and Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (a narrative of how the Galilean and Cartesian conceptions of reality became canonical). The larger purpose of a contingency-based approach in humanistic research is to locate the ambient canonical structures in a way that does not result in a purely deterministic-causal constitution of individual actions or particular objects. Canonical relevance, on this account, is not established based on a work’s reputation or its specific aesthetic achievements as such, nor by tracing the ‘reasons’ for canonicity or non-canonicity, but by showing how the work itself intervenes within the intra-literary and extra-literary space of canonicity (historical macro-phenomena like genre or capitalism). “Canonizability” in this sense might be described as the point of contact between “work” and “reality”—the space within which realism became a central category of modern poetics and aesthetics.

3 See Lutz Danneberg, “Zum Autorkonstrukt und zu einem methodologischen Konzept der Autorintention,” in Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, ed. Fotis Jannidis, Gerhard Lauer, Matías Martínez, and Simone Winko (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1999), 77–105.

4 Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” 7.

5 See Hannes Bajohr and Annette Gilbert, “Platzhalter der Zukunft: Digitale Literatur II (2001 –> 2021),” in Text + Kritik (Sonderband): Digitale Literatur II (2021), 7–21, and Jürgen Habermas, “Warum nicht lesen?,” in Warum Lesen. Mindestens 24 Gründe, ed. Katharina Raabe and Frank Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020), 99–123.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Gesammelte Schriften 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1990), 40.

7 “Im diffusen Licht wissenschaftlicher Forschung löst sich jeder Kanon auf” (Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” 19).

8 See Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 618–19. This amateur application of Luhmann to the theory of canon is my own – but it is not totally unique. See, for example, Hahn, “Kanonisierungsstile”: “Uns geht es hier nicht um die ‘richtige’ soziologische Beschreibung der ‘wirklichen’ Grenzen einer Gesellschaft, sondern um die expliziten Grenzziehungen, die in einer Gruppe, einem Staat, einer Religionsgemeinschaft usw. als Selbstidentifikation vorgenommen werden” (31).

9 Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” 15–16.

10 Hahn, “Kanonisierungsstile,” 36.

11 Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, Tamar Liebes, and Avril Orloff, eds., Canonic Texts in Media Research (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).

12 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Das Beispiel des Klassischen,” in Wahrheit und Methode: Gründzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 290–95, and Assmann, “Kanon und Zensur,” 25.

13 Nikolaus Wegmann, “Was heißt einen ‘klassischen’ Text lesen? Philologische Selbstreflexion zwischen Wissenschaft und Bildung,” in Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp (Stuttgart & Weimar: Metzler, 1994), 334–50.

14 See Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj, “Introduction,” in Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, ed. Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020), 1–22.

15 David Gramling’s piece on graduate education is the one exception, providing numerous hints about canonic architecture of German Studies. See David Gramling, “Dear Incoming Graduate Student Colleague,” in Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, ed. Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020), 309–26.

16 See Evan Torner, “Documents of Colonialism and Racial Theorizing in the German Classroom,” in Diversity and Decolonization in German Studies, ed. Regine Criser and Ervin Malakaj (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2020), 101–18.

17 Productively countering such a thesis as well as the inherited “Sonderweg” historicizations, see Sandra Richter, Eine Weltgeschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Munich: C. Bertelsmann, 2019).

18 German Studies as an academic discipline is not especially well positioned to influence the production side or reception side of the literary market or the wider field of “canonical literature.” The last German-language author to receive highest-level global canonization was W.G. Sebald—but his reputation may already be waning, and arguably this canonization mostly took place outside of (and even: despite) German Studies. One factor in Sebald’s meteoric rise (though certainly not the only one) were the excellent English translations, published in prominent venues like The New Yorker. Thus, if one is primarily interested in influencing the canon of what people actually read (and what makes its way onto syllabi outside of German departments), then translations and publications that speak to a broad audience will inevitably be more impactful than specialized academic publications.

19 See Stefan Zweig, Master Builders: A Typology of Spirit, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking Press, 1939). Der Kampf mit dem Dämon was first published in English in 1939 under the title The Struggle with the Daimon, as a part of the collection Master Builders: A Typology of Spirit (Baumeister der Welt: Versuch einer Typologie des Geistes, German 1928).

20 See Jeffrey Sammons, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?” Genre 14.1 (1981): 229–46, and Norbert Christian Wolf, “‘Göthe wird und muß übertroffen werden’: Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen und die Genrebegründung durch Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,” in Der Bildungsroman im literarischen Feld: Neue Perspektiven auf eine Gattung, ed. Elisabeth Böhm and Katrin Dennerlein (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), 55–106.

21 On the role of randomness and unpredictability in reading and modern philology, see Kirk Wetters, “The Law of the Series and the Crux of Causation: Paul Kammerer’s Anomalies,” Modern Language Notes 134:3 (April 2019): 643–60.

22 See Willi Goetschel, “Germanistik in den USA: Zu diesem Heft,” Weimarer Beiträge 39:3 (1993): 325–43. On the question of how and whether theory can continue to play a defining role in German’s disciplinary profile, see Kirk Wetters, “Notes on the Theory-Hub Model of German Studies,” in Re-Imagining the Discipline: German Studies, the Humanities and the University (conference blog), 2020. https://futurehumanities.wixsite.com/re-imagining/kirk-wetters

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kirk Wetters

Kirk Wetters is a professor at the Yale University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, focusing on German literature and theory from the eighteenth century to the present. He is the author of two monographs, The Opinion System (Fordham UP 2008) and Demonic History (Northwestern UP 2014). His most recent publications are: “Hermann Broch’s Massenwahntheorie Today,” in: Sarah McGaughey, Elisa Risi, Daniel Weidner, und Doren Wohlleben (eds.): Massenwahntheorie und Friedenspoetik: Hermann Broch und die bedrohte Demokratie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin/Boston 2023, 9–32; “Criteria of Tragic Form: Toward a Reconstruction of Georg Lukács’s Earliest Critical Theory,” New German Critique 149 (50/2, August 2023), 9–35.