Nachwuchsforschung

Saardine

Saarbrücker Digitale Interdisziplinäre Nachwuchsbeiträge zum Ecocriticism (SAAR.D.I.N.E.)

Anlässlich der DGAVL-Konferenz "Literatur und Ökologie", die im Juni 2014 am Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft der Universität des Saarlandes ausgerichtet wird, veröffentlicht die AVL-Fachschaft nachwuchswissenschaftliche Beiträge zum Forschungsbereich des "Ecocriticism".

Dabei sollen Aufsätze fortgeschrittener StudentInnen und NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen auf Deutsch oder Englisch einer interessierten Leserschaft frei zugänglich gemacht werden.

Ausgabe 1 — "Texte mit nachhaltiger Wirkung?" Ausgabe 2 — "Hanekes Tiere" Ausgabe 3 — "Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles'" Ausgabe 4 — "Fantasy-Wesen aus ökokritischer Sicht" Ausgabe 5 — "Zurück aufs Land! Die Eroberung eines alternativen weiblichen Raums" Ausgabe 6 — "Unter Wölfen"

Poetiken der Migration

Ein Glossar

Wie erzählt Literatur von Flucht und Vertreibung? Wie vom Leben im Exil oder als illegaler Einwanderer in Europa? Wie verarbeiten einzelne Texte die Themen Kulturkonflikt, Fremdheit, Gewalterfahrung und Sprachproblematik?

Anlässlich des Seminars 'Poetiken der Migration' unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Christiane Solte-Gresser im Wintersemester 2012/13 haben Master-Studierende der Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft ein Glossar mit methodologischen Begriffen und Kategorien zu diesem Forschungsfeld entwickelt.

Herausgegeben von Kristina Höfer.

Alterität / Fremdheit Autorschaft Die Andere Literatur Exilliteratur Expatriierung / Repatriierung Gastarbeiterliteratur Globalität / Globalismus Hybridität Identität (kulturelle) Imagologie Interkulturalität Kulturelle Differenz Kulturkontakt Kulturtransfer Literaturen ohne festen Wohnsitz Métissage Migrantenliteratur Migration Migrationsliteratur Mimikry Mobilität Multikulturalität Nomadismus Orientalismus Postkolonialismus Reiseliteratur Stereotyp / Nationalstereotyp Subaltern Studies / Subaltern Speech Third Space / Dritter Raum Transkulturalität Vielsprachigkeit / Multilinguale Literatur Weltliteratur (neue) Writing Back Zusammenlebenswissen

Living Handbook of Serial Narration

Einführung

In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine Flut komplexer Serienformate entwickelt — die Fernsehserie ist nicht mehr nur Entertainment, sondern erzählt auf vielfältige Art und Weise. Hier finden sich Strukturen, die bisher eher im Roman verortet wurden und damit in den Untersuchungsbereich der literarischen Narratologie fallen.

Seit Herbst 2012 entsteht am Saarbrücker Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft ein interdisziplinäres Forschungsprojekt, das sich eben diesem Sachverhalt widmet und systematisch ein 'Living Handbook of Serial Narration on Television' konzipiert.

Literary Approaches Towards Serial Narration on Television, Or: Is This Really Necessary? Comparative Literature & TV-Series

A lot has changed during the last 20 years and most of the reservation and reticence are gone within literary studies. Especially Comparative Literature — a discipline that was always fond of inter-art relations due to it‘s constant pressure to accentuate itself next to the established national philologies — focuses on the relations of text to other medial forms with an impressive implicitness. Medial relations between text, film, music, visual & fine arts are now an integral part of the academic curricula³. No one would argue that literature cannot only coexist next to these artifacts, it can actually benefit greatly from them since there is a lot to be learned about forms and functions of literature in contrast to other media (cf. Simonis, 2009, 4).
So if these times are so open and intermedial, why is a study about the relation between literature — literary narratology to be precise — and television-series even necessary? Or put another way, why for instance have the film and the graphic novel entered university‘s literature-classrooms, while others are still waiting to gain entrance?
It is more than obvious that series such as The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Damages, Dexter, TheSimpsons, FamilyGuy and many others have surpassed the widely assumed simplicity⁴ while remaining deeply rooted within popular culture⁵. There is an ever growing list of publications concerning various aspects of what is generally acclaimed as the brilliance of new US-American television-series, but there are few studies that systematically analyze the relationship between literature and television-series, whereas this debate is heavily featured in the feuilletons of various internationally renowned newspapers⁶. Here, the series is often pictured as the cineaste transcription of the novel for the small screen. The time to tell a story, develop characters and subplots experiment with different forms. Something similar cannot be found in literary criticism where the series is still perceived as a byproduct of cinema. There is not need to specifically mention TV-series in the all-absorbing field of intermediality:

“The problem is that intermediality has tended to be discussed without clarification of what a medium actually is. Without a more precise understanding of what a medium is, one cannot expect to comprehend what intermediality is.” (Ellestrøm, 2010: 13)

This citation is not meant to start a debate about mediality in general but to highlight the problem that television-series are seldom perceived as a medial entity in its own right.
To render this state more precisely, television-series are often treated as films since they use exactly the same semiotic codes within an identical medial framework. Often a single episode of a show is taken out of context and treated like a sequence of a movie⁷, a DVD-box-set is often compared to a long movie and so on.
This does ignore that there is more than one way of watching a show; unlike a movie that is usually consumed in one sitting⁸ a television show is perceived in a way that is dictated by its serial nature: from week to week. There are always cracks within the narrative, dictated by the gaps between the episodes and seasons⁹. A single episode is always framed by the previous and the next episode, so it is always contextualized and rarely demands to be seen autonomously by itself¹⁰.
It is specifically this aspect that creates a link to 19th century epic novels which were published chapter by chapter in newspapers and magazines. But this is a mere starting point for this project that intents to explore various relations between television series and literature with an emphasis of narratological¹¹ aspects.
If we can overcome the dichotomy between the worthy, serious champion Literature on the good side and the cheap and entertaining contender television-series on the other we might get the best of both. We can use the corpus of research done on literature to apply it on television series, modify the devices and tools of analysis whenever necessary and eventually understand how these two art-forms work alike.
Some of these topics are: how do we really perceive the series, how many ways of reception are there, how does narration work within the series and in-between episodes, does the idea of a (cinematic) narrator apply to series and could the television-series be the 21st century novel that never found its place in cinema?

To be continued... Footnotes

1) Two authors who should be mentioned in this context are Adorno and Horkheimer whose essay Dialectic of Enlightenment from 1947 brands popular art-forms like movies or pop-songs as a mass-addling product of the culture industry which are — put simplified — tools of state capitalism that is designed to manipulate mass society into docility and passivity. Opposed to this, true art is not commercially motivated and shall educate the mass towards actively questioning the status quo.
2) An example for this procedure can be witnessed in Alvin B. Kernal’s polemic pamphlet The Death of Literature that is concerned with all those medial outputs that pose a thread of annihilation towards literature: „The television spectacle is seen once in a flash and then [...] gone forever. Those who work in TV are quite aware that their medium does not favour complex meanings, and they adjust their material accordingly. Story and plot are minimal or nonexistent.“ (Kernan, 1992: 130)
3) One could argue that this development goes back to Lessing‘s Laokoon from 1776, but the rigid distinction between high and low arts dissolves with the raising of structuralism and the „anything goes“-paradigm of postmodernism. While relations of arts have been of interest for a few centuries a broadening of what is perceived as art and thus a broadening of possible relations is a rather young development.
4) Beginning with the 1990s, even expensive mainstream-productions within television and cinema were willing to take risks when it came to highly complex narratives (cf. Gymnich 2007, 128).
5) Carl Rhodes brilliantly exemplifies this process in his paper „The Simpsons, Popular Culture, and the Organizational Carnival“ from 2001. TV serials are even said to have a huge impact on Hollywood movies, and actually called the movies' archenemy (cf. Die Zeit 15 November 2012, p. 56 and online: www.zeit.de/2012/47/Film-Cloud-Atlas-Wachowski-Tom-Tykwer/seite-2). — Please note that we cannot take any responsibility for the content of external links.
6) For instance the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/books/review/the-channeling-ofthenovel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0),The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/12/salmanrushdie-write-tvdrama), FAZ (www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/the-wire-ein-balzac-fuer-unserezeit-1581949.html) and Die Zeit (www.zeit.de/2012/27/Fernsehen-Amerikanische-Serien) among many others. — Please not that we cannot take any responsibility for the content of external links.
7) Bakhtin encountered something similar when scholars were not used to novels and took out excerpts from the novel to compare them with poetry, an art form they felt more familiar with (cf. Bakhtin, 1981: 147).
8) Following Poe‘s idea in the Philosophy of Composition that a short-story must be readable in one sitting and Hitchcock's comment that the length of a film should „be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder“.
9) This serial frame is still remained on DVD since the single episodes are not compounded to one extremely long film.
10) This is also where series differ significantly from movie-series like James Bond, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Rocky etc because even though these movies are connected each of them has to have the potential to work as a standalone film.
11) This is not an attempt to apply Genette‘s concepts of narratology from literature to a medium it was not originally designed for, but to rethink and adjust existing models — not only Genette’s — like Markus Kuhn did with narratology and film (cf. Kuhn, 2010).

Bibliography

Promotionen am Lehrstuhl

Am Lehrstuhl Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft wird eine intensive wissenschaftliche Nachwuchsförderung betrieben. So stellt seit dem WS 2009/10 die Abteilung AVL/Komparatistik einen Großteil aller abgeschlossenen Promotionen der gesamten Fachrichtung Germanistik. Die thematischen Schwerpunkte reichen von Fragestellungen zur vergleichenden Erzähl- und Filmforschung und der Intemedialität über Probleme des Kulturkontakts und des Kulturtransfers bis hin zu theoretisch-methodischen Forschungen im Bereich der Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft.

Neben kontinuierlicher Einzelbetreuung durch die Lehrstuhlinhaberin (und gegebenenfalls durch ihren emeritierten Vorgänger Prof. Manfred Schmeling) und der engen Kooperation mit der Ecole Doctorale Transfrontalière LOGOS der Universität der Großregion (deren wissenschaftlichem Beirat Prof. Christiane Solte-Gresser seit 2010 angehört) bietet ein während des Semesters im 14-tägigen Rhythmus stattfindendes Doktorandenkolloquium die Möglichkeit zur regelmäßigen Präsentation und Diskussion eigener Projekte in unterschiedlichen Stadien der Arbeit sowie zu einer umfassende Vernetzung der Doktorandinnen und Doktoranden untereinander.

Sollten Sie an einer Promotion am Lehrstuhl Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft interessiert sein, so senden Sie bitte ein 5 bis 10-seitiges Exposé mit Thema, Relevanz der Fragestellung, theoretischem Rahmen, vorläufiger Gliederung und zu untersuchendem Textkorpus unter Angabe einiger Stichworte zu Ihrer Person an solte(at)mx.uni-saarland.de.

Formalia

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Betreute Dissertationen

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