Julia Genz

This article points out the significance of the materiality of written language for the understanding of literature and aspects of poiesis. For this purpose it is necessary to consider the interaction of materiality and mediality from a general point of view. Reading E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel »Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr« (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr), this paper explores how literature reacts to technical changes in the production of books and subsequent juridical debates. I read the novel as an intertextual play in reaction to an article by Johann Gottlieb Fichte on literary property (»Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks«). In trying to work through Fichte’s proposals concerning materiality and mediality, Hoffmann generates a new style of writing.

Digital media transform social options of access with regard to producers, recipients, and literary works of art themselves. New labels for new roles such as »prosumers « and »wreaders« attest to this. The »blogger« provides another interesting new social figure of literary authorship. Here, some old desiderata of Dadaism appear to find a belated realization. On the one hand, many web 2.0 formats of authorship amplify and widen the freedom of literary productivity while at the same time subjecting such production to a periodic schedule. In comparison to the received practices of authors and recipients many digital-cultural forms of narrating engender innovative metalepses (and also their sublation). Writing in the net for internet-publics enables the deliberate dissolution of the received autobiographical pact with the reader according to which the author’s genuine name authenticates the author’s writing. On the other hand, the digital-cultural potential of dissolving the autobiographical pact stimulates scandals of debunking and unmasking and makes questions of author-identity an issue of permanent contestation. Digital-cultural conditions of communication amplify both: the hideand- seek of authorship as well as the thwarting of this game by recipients who delight in playing detective. In effect, pace Foucault’s and Barthes’ postulates of the death of the author, the personality and biography of the author once again tend to become objects of high intrinsic value

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