Writing Scenes and Telling Time: Post-War German Journal Literature, Between Diary and the News(Papers) Michael Watzka Submitte
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Writing Scenes and Telling Time: Post-War German Journal Literature, Between Diary and the News(papers) Michael Watzka Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Michael Watzka All Rights Reserved Abstract Writing Scenes and Telling Time: Post-War German Journal Literature, Between Diary and the News(papers) Michael Watzka Located at the intersection of literary, journalistic, and socio-historical discourses, “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” looks at diaristic texts in Post-War German Literature through the lens of news reporting and mass media. Since the 1970s, diaristic texts in German emerged across genres in the works of canonical authors. These works are widely read as subjective texts and linked to their authors’ supposedly diaristic interest in introspection and selF-expression. However, these texts’ orientation towards the outside world and their interest in the temporality and scene of writing does not fit into this existing narrative. This dissertation looks at four decades worth of journal texts by Peter Handke, Sarah Kirsch, Jürgen Becker, and Rainald Goetz. Considering these texts between the poles of diary and news(papers), “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” argues that the modes of writing that emerged must be read as a new genre. Looking at novels, poetry, prose, blogs, and epics, “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” analyses writing as the site of narrative experiments that resulted in new attempts to define literary categories. “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” establishes links between the accelerating and alienating effects of mass media and the narratological impact of journalistic reporting on literary writing. The project takes reporting and the report as its methodological cornerstones and looks at the journal’s conception of scene, time, image, narrative, and writing through the lens of contemporary literary theory. My project situates itself within the temporal turn and contributes to recent studies on literature and time. The three chapters of this dissertation trace different modes of journal writing emerging since the early 1970s. Chapter I investigates how the texts of Jürgen Becker focus on the temporality of short-term memory and its implications for a new definition of plot. Chapter II traces journal writing in Sarah Kirsch’s poetry and prose and the way in which it focalizes settings of spatio-temporal liminality. Chapter III looks at the works of Peter Handke and their focus on the temporal simultaneity of writing and its relation to the surrounding scene. My conclusion revisits these modes through the lens of 2000s journal writing in the works of Rainald Goetz. “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” suggests that these texts’ very rigid repudiation of mass media and journalistic reporting lies at odds with the extraordinary phenomenological influence both have on the conceptions of writing contained in them. This dissertation, therefore, intervenes in a literary history of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s by challenging common center/periphery binaries that imply an author’s supposed degree of (non)involvement with the modern world. It expands existing theories on diaristic writing, looking at journal writing as a speciFic genre that transcends existing categories. “Writing Scenes and Telling Time” concludes that a broad range of supposedly diaristic texts from the German post-war era must be reconceived with regards to their genre status. Through its focus on writing, this dissertation ultimately aims at establishing journal writing as a new theory of genre. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... ivv INTRODUCTION: Between Diary and the News(paper): Writing Journal(s) in the German 1970s I. .................................................................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: Ruminating Plot: Approximating Photographic Narrative in Becker’s Journal Texts I. ................................................................................................................................................ 22 1.1 Mining the Past – “Rolls of Never-Developed Films” ................................................... 24 1.2 Not in the News(papers), But Not in the Diary Either .................................................... 26 1.3 The Narrative(s) of Elapsing Time ................................................................................. 30 1.4 Exposing Autobiographic Subjectivity ........................................................................... 33 1.5 From Landscape Stills to Motion Pictures ...................................................................... 38 II. .............................................................................................................................................. 45 1.6 Writing Journal and Recording Time ............................................................................. 47 1.7 Approximating Narrative(s) Through Photographic Time ............................................. 53 1.8 Retroactively Arranging Zeit and Schrift ....................................................................... 58 1.9 The Shadow of the Photographer .................................................................................... 65 III. ............................................................................................................................................. 72 1.10 The Journal Consciousness of Photograph and Newspaper ......................................... 77 1.11 Towards a New Subjectivity, Beyond Diary and the News .......................................... 80 i CHAPTER TWO: Focalizing Scenes: Liminal Settings in Sarah Kirsch’s Journal Texts I. ................................................................................................................................................ 84 2.1 The News(paper) at the Horizon ..................................................................................... 87 2.2 The Hidden Human in the Wings ................................................................................... 90 2.3 Focalizing Order, Refracting Diegeses ........................................................................... 95 2.4 The Journal Gaze – A “Tender Squinting” at the World ................................................ 99 2.5 A Faceless Focalizor? ................................................................................................... 103 II. ............................................................................................................................................ 108 2.6 Putting a Pen on the Pulse of Time ............................................................................... 114 2.7. In Between Times, Between Poetry and Prose ............................................................ 119 2.8 The Weather at the Other Shore .................................................................................... 126 2.9 Mediating Between Mouth and Hand ........................................................................... 132 CHAPTER THREE: Writing Time: Synchronicity and Image in Peter Handke’s Journal Texts I. .............................................................................................................................................. 145 3.1 A Diary or the Chronicle of a Crisis? ........................................................................... 148 3.2 In-Sync with the Scene, the Beat of the World ............................................................. 152 3.3 (Un)covering the Days .................................................................................................. 156 3.4 Departing from the Diary .............................................................................................. 160 3.5 Everyday Matters – The “Writing of Day-to-Dayness” ............................................... 166 II. ............................................................................................................................................ 174 3.6 Journal as a State of Mind ............................................................................................. 179 ii 3.7 The Image in the Age of Universal Pictures ................................................................. 185 3.8 (Un)burdening Information ........................................................................................... 193 3.9 Writing Dates, Discerning Data .................................................................................... 200 CONCLUSION: Collapsing Journal? The Daily Text(s) of Rainald Goetz I. .............................................................................................................................................. 213 II. ............................................................................................................................................ 220 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 232 iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my friends and family for their support, without which this dissertation would not have been possible. The first year with a new baby is a time like no other, and the last year of a dissertation is an