H-Germanistik CFP: ACLA Seminar: Trouble Every Day. The Novella and its (Ordinary) Terror, Chicago (23.09.2019) Discussion published by Marie-Luise Goldmann on Thursday, September 5, 2019 Trouble Every Day: The Novella and its (Ordinary) Terror ACLA-Seminar (Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association) in Chicago, March 19-22, 2020 Organizers: Anna Hordych, Universität Potsdam (
[email protected]) Marie-Luise Goldmann, New York University (
[email protected]) Narrating against the crisis: a constitutive element of the novella and an effective way of coping with the catastrophe. As the European novella’s origin highlights, by narrating, the novella confronts and aims to overcome an external crisis. For example, in Giovanni Boccaccio’s paradigmaticIl Decamerone, the horrors of the plague call for diversion in the form of entertaining narratives. Similarly, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, the terrors of the French Revolution generate a need for distraction through fiction. In both cases, the protagonists’ narration is defined by their confrontation with a disastrous event marked by its extraordinary, unprecedented singularity. During the 19th century, a major shift occurs: The novella’s entanglement with mass media, newspaper production, and journalism, as well as its engagement with topics like class and gender, spawn new and exciting ways of writing, reading, and consuming literature. Out of a newfound concern with the representation, production, and construction of reality, literature in the second half of the 19th century becomes obsessed with the ordinariness of everyday life. The singular turning point – an essential characteristic of the traditional novella – becomes entangled with the base motives and little troubles of a daily grind, which defines the novella’s temporality via seriality and repeatability.