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Die Lesbarkeit Jean Pauls
(2021)
In this article, the readability of the world that Jean Paul’s literature tries to produce and the readability of Jean Paul’s literature that the traditional edition wanted to ensure are intertwined with, firstly, the interwovenness of the primary work and parerga and, secondly, with the issue of the edition of his manuscripts. Jean Paul’s autonomy aesthetics replaces the depiction of reality with the world as text; this is mirrored in his handwritings, the edition of which allows for insights into the mycelium of an ‘alternate’ classical literature.
In 2012 Georg Diez provoked a literary scandal with his review of Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium. Since then, almost ninety informed studies which show an ongoing academic interest in the book have been published. Many of these studies attempted to explain the apparently failing analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt that the novel claimed in an irritating manner. Nevertheless, none of them took an esoteric approach which Kracht himself suggested in an interview with Denis Scheck as a starting point for their analyses, although esoteric references seem to be an ignored constant in Kracht’s oeuvre since Tristesse Royale. Hence, by tracing this esoteric intertextuality in the whole of Kracht’s oeuvre and linking it to the references which Kracht makes to right-wing ideologies since Faserland, it will be shown that there actually does exist an analogy between Hitler and Engelhardt in Imperium which aims to deconstruct Hitler mythemes by ridiculizing Engelhardt. Furthermore, it will be demonstrated that the interrelations between Kracht’s texts create a rhizomatic network of intertextuality that dissolves the boarders between external references and self-references.
The article starts with the etymology of the words Vorlesung („lecture“) and Hörsaal (“lecture hall”). On the one hand, it turns out that the two expressions are deeply anchored in the history of the old Latin scientific language. They transmit Latin structures and perspectives in German neologisms. On the other hand, the two words arose exactly at the time when the sciences were moving from Latin to German, thus distancing themselves from the traditional forms of Latin scholarship. In this light, they exemplify an epochal change in the history of the German language, but at the same time they represent a great European continuity. Against this background, the two words can be interpreted as symptomatic words associated with the Enlightenment’s confident outlook on the future relationship between science and society. Further corpus linguistic surveys also show how productively the two words appear in word formation processes. In particular, these surveys show by way of example that and how German standard language has benefited from the emergence of German academic language.