Context in Literary and Cultural Studies COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND CULTURE Series Editors TIMOTHY MATHEWS AND FLORIAN MUSSGNUG Comparative Literature and Culture explores new creative and critical perspectives on literature, art and culture. Contributions offer a comparative, cross-cultural and interdisciplinary focus, showcasing exploratory research in literary and cultural theory and history, material and visual cultures, and reception studies. The series is also interested in language-based research, particularly the changing role of national and minority languages and cultures, and includes within its publications the annual proceedings of the ‘Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies’. Timothy Mathews is Emeritus Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, UCL. Florian Mussgnug is Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature, UCL. Context in Literary and Cultural Studies Edited by Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen First published in 2019 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Contributors, 2019 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in the captions, 2019 The authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Ladegaard, J and Nielsen, J. (eds.). 2019. Context in Literary and Cultural Studies. London: UCL Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356245 Further details about Creative Commons licenses are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons license, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-626-9 (Hbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-625-2 (Pbk.) ISBN: 978-1-78735-624-5 (PDF) ISBN: 978-1-78735-627-6 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-78735-628-3 (mobi) ISBN: 978-1-78735-629-0 (html) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787356245 Contents List of figures vii Editors ix Notes on contributors xi Acknowledgements xv Introduction: the question of context 1 Jakob Ladegaard and Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen Part I: Contexts of production 1 Cosmopolitanism and the historical/contextual paradigm 17 Bruce Robbins 2 Witness narratives in context: analysing the political prison writings of Graciliano Ramos and José Luandino Vieira 37 Elisa Scaraggi 3 Literature as testimony: textual strategies and contextual frameworks in Fatima Bhutto’s Songs of Blood and Sword 55 Ana Ashraf Part II: Interventions in context 4 Between the Audienzsaal and the bedroom: A feminist-narratological reading of female sovereignty in Caroline Auguste Fischer’s Der Günstling (1809) 77 Aude Defurne 5 Literary form and limited liability: it-narratives and the context of corporate law in the British public sphere, 1860–1880 96 Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen 6 Homeland(s) in comparison: contexts of reterritorialisation 115 Susana Araújo CONTENTS v Part III: New contexts 7 Swimming against the hetero- and homonormative tide: a queer reading of Wolfgang Tillmans’ photo installation (2004–2009) in the Panorama Bar at Berlin’s Berghain 135 Oliver Klaassen 8 Performative contexts in contemporary theatre: towards the emancipation of the relational sphere 156 Belén Tortosa Pujante 9 I object to your position: hyperreal decontextualising of objects 172 Ana Calvete 10 From data to actual context 190 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen Index 210 vi CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES List of figures 7.1 Wolfgang Tillmans, installation view, Panorama Bar (Berghain), Berlin, 2014 (left on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer (left), 2004, 198 × 609 cm; right on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer (right), 2004, 198 × 609 cm), courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. 136 7.2 Wolfgang Tillmans, installation view, Panorama Bar (Berghain), Berlin, 2014 (left on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer (right), 2004, 198 × 609 cm; right on the wall: Wolfgang Tillmans, nackt, 2003, 132 × 200 cm), courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. 136 7.3 Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer (left), 2004, courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. 139 7.4 Wolfgang Tillmans, Ostgut Freischwimmer (right), 2004, courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. 140 7.5 Wolfgang Tillmans, nackt, 2003, courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne. 142 10.1 Measuring redundancy, 1800-1900 (purple crosses indicate archival novels, orange circles canonical ones). Algee-Hewitt, Mark et al. 2016. ‘Canon/Archive. Large-scale Dynamics in the Literary Field’. Stanford Literary Lab, Pamphlet 11. 197 10.2 Graph of nouns that most typically occur with the concept ‘epiphany’ over time, generated by the Google Ngram Viewer. See Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden. 2010. ‘Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books’. Science. Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010 DOI: 10.1126/science.1199644. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/331/6014/176. 200 LIST OF FIGURES vii 10.3 Graph generated by the Smurf tool (Royal Danish Library) showing changes in the use of the terms ‘Novelle’ and ‘Fortælling’ over time: http://labs.statsbiblioteket. dk/smurf/ 202 10.4 Ration of pre-1150 to post-1150 words, excluding stopwords and proper nouns. Underwood, Ted. 2013. Why Literary Periods Mattered. Stanford: Stanford University Press, p.167. 203 viii CONTEXT IN LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES Editors Jakob Ladegaard is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is a literary scholar who also occasionally writes about cinema. His research is primarily concerned with the relations between modern literature, politics and economy. He is currently the PI of the research project ‘Unearned Wealth: A Literary History of Inheritance, 1600–2015’, funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. The project uses digital methods to study English and French literary representations of inheritance. Jakob Gaardbo Nielsen is a PhD student at the Department of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. His PhD project deals with literary representations of financial institutions in nineteenth-century Britain and France. He has published on Anthony Trollope and Laurence Oliphant, and is currently co-editing a special issue of Victorian Review on the topic of ‘Fraud and Forgery’. EDITORS ix Notes on contributors Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He holds a PhD from Harvard University. He works mainly in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, literary and cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Duke, 2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (NYU, 1999), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (Verso, 1993) and The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (Columbia, 1986; Duke pb 1993). His most recent books are The Beneficiary (Duke) and Cosmopolitanisms, which was co-edited with Paulo Horta. Both came out in 2017. In 2013 he directed a documentary film entitled Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists. He is now completing a documentary on the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand and working on a book about literary representations of atrocity. Elisa Scaraggi holds a BA degree in Translation and Interpretation from the University of Genova (Italy) and an MA degree in Modern, Comparative and Post-Colonial Literatures from the University of Bologna (Italy). She is a student in the International PhD Programme in Comparative Studies (PhDComp), based at the Centre for Comparative Studies (CEC), Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. Her main research interests are concentrationary literature, memory studies and literature under authoritarian regimes. In addition, she has a special interest in literary translation. As a member of CEC, she has been working with CILM Project (City and (In)security in Literature and the Media). Ana Ashraf is a PhD fellow in the department of English Literature at KU Leuven, Belgium. The topic of her research is ‘Testimonies of War in the Works of Modern and Contemporary Women Writers’. She focuses CONTRIBUTORS xi mainly on the British and Pakistani women’s literary representation of war. In 2011, she finished her MPhil dissertation, titled ‘Preponderance of Simulacra in Modern Times: An Analysis of American Virtual War in Afghanistan’ from GC University Lahore. Her research interest lies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century