The interpretation of a literary text as becoming derives from the reconstitution and simultaneous destabilization of the common divisions between author, reader, and text. In adducing examples from the late 19th as well as the early and late 20th century, our panel offers three distinct case studies that investigate how a text ‘testifies to itself’: our papers contemplate how the medium of text is staged, how it stages itself, and how its staging seemingly reverses the conventional divide between messenger and message by turning to the medium within the medium. Further analyzing the properties inherent to text, our panel productively intertwines the interpretation of paratextual elements such as typography and design with epistemic questions on the possibilities of literary form.

In his paper “The Distracted Text: Automatism, Attention, and Vision in Gertrude Stein‘s Tender Buttons,” Colin Vanderburg reads Tender Buttons with Stein’s scholarly work on automated forms of writings. He considers automaticity in Tender Buttons as both method and metaphor for the dialectical interrelation of the “refusal to attend” to the text and the “concentrated attention” (Steven Meyer) on behalf of both author and reader. The book’s prose poetry both performs and disrupts ‘automated’ attention in a scattering of perceptual processes. The uncanny proximity to the comprehensible in Stein’s writing makes the exact sources of its inscrutability all the more difficult to track. In this vein, Tender Buttons continually dismantles, rebuilds, and again dismantles what she calls an “automatic personality” by confronting it with “objects, food, rooms”—banal elements of domesticity—and documenting, as if in real time, the making and unmaking of reading and writing subjects.

In our second paper, “Politics between Covers: The Materiality of German Interwar Photobooks,” Verena Kick examines the material aspects of four politically oriented photobooks and compares their use of materiality in light of their respective political agendas. In the 1920s, photobooks were mainly used by avantgarde artists to carry out photographic visual experiments. At the latest after 1933, however, photobooks began to center more around politics. While the genre appears to invite an analysis focusing primarily on its photographic material, Kick highlights its tactile materiality: the book’s size and format as well as aspects such as paper quality, page layout, and typography. In examining these material elements, Kick uncovers not only how interwar photobooks forged their political agendas, but also how they imagined or produced their readership.

“Literary Geomorphology in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” our third paper, closely investigates the drafts of Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Not primarily aiming at a reconstruction of its genetic history or speculating about McCarthy’s intentions, Stefanie Heine analyzes moments in which the written matter reveals what she calls a weak non-human agency. Assessing a “correlation of elemental and written matter,” she centers on passages in the text which reflect its own mediality. For example, the desert in Blood Meridian is staged as an elemental medium that generates aesthetic effects—such that geological and elemental forces in many desert descriptions are inseparable from forces of language and textual matter. What is more, the elemental processes of form-building and decomposition in the narrative resemble the processes of form-building and decomposition that can be observed in traces of the writing process of the novel’s drafts. Thus, the development of written matter in the novel-in-progress sometimes corresponds—like in erosion, stratification, and continental drift—to geological processes.

All papers will be 15-18 minutes long and there will be no lengthy written response. Instead, our presider, Christian Struck, will deliver concise commentary of 1-2 minutes each and facilitate an unstructured discussion with both audience and panelists at the end of the session.