Summary
Central to the project is the interface between ‘time’ and ‘writing’ inherent in the media formats of magazine and newspaper, which means journals are already conceptually identified as specifically time-dependent and time-related media formats. In Die Realität der Massenmedien in 1966 (The Reality of the Mass Media), Niklas Luhmann drew attention to the “evolutionary improbability” of “daily news”, for “if it is the idea of surprise, of something new, interesting and newsworthy which we associate with news, then it would seem much more sensible not to report it in the same format every day, but to wait for something to happen and then to publicize it” (p. 25). The sub-project “Zeit/Schrift” (“Journal”: “Time/Writing”) takes as its systematic starting point the fact that neither the periodical writing of time nor the resulting insight into the ‘poeietic’ potential of the media distribution of journal reportage is self-evident; its epistemological interest is in a ‘chronopoetics’ of journal publication. It examines newspaper-like journals which opt out of the periodicity intrinsic to journals – thereby exposing this as something that is not self-evident – and can therefore be read as experiments in media format. In the research group’s definition of the title, the sub-project accentuates not literature but the journal. It focuses its attention on contemporary, non-literary journals and uses these as a starting point for asking where literariness begins. It understands the ‘chronopoetic’ arrangement of time-writing as the nucleus of literariness. This time-writing becomes semanticisable where periodical timing is not self-evident.
In this context, German-language journal publication during the Napoleonic wars of 1813-15 is construed as a laboratory in which, in this interim of real and extreme press freedom, the theoretical possibilities of the medium of the journal are explored and microscopically observed. Particular attention is given to journals which a) are re-established within this period with explicit reference to time and, at the same time, contain irregularities, b) are conceived as ‘chronicles’ in their generic format, combining political history and military matters with literary and cultural topics, and c) refer to their own status as journals. The core corpus comprises six journals across the whole course of their publication, of which four of them are characterised by significant irregularities in their periodicity and the remaining two are not detemined by regularity but are published “in informal issues”:
- Das erwachte Europa 1813–15 (“in informal issues”; first issue: after 4 March 1813; last issue: Oct./Nov. 1815; place of publication: Berlin, occasionally “Germany”; changing addresses of publisher)
- Feld-Zeitung 1813/14 (first number: 6 Oct. 1813; last number: 29 April 1814; changing places of publication according to the “respective location of the Königl. Preuß. Feldbuchdruckerei”; editor: Carl Heun)
- Deutsche Blätter 1813–16 (first number: 14 Oct. 1813; last number: “in June 1816”? “in April 1816”?; places of publication: Altenburg and Leipzig; editor/publisher: Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus)
- Rheinischer Merkur 1814–16 (first number: 23 Jan. 1814; last number: 10 Jan. 1816; place of publication: Koblenz; publisher: B. Heriot; editor: Joseph Görres)
- Friedensblätter 1814/15 (first number: 16 Juni 1814; last number: 30 Nov. 1815; place of publication: Vienna [1814], Vienna, Freiburg im Breisgau, Leipzig [1815]; changing addresses of publisher; “Published by a society”)
- Freimüthige Blätter für Deutsche 1815–18 (“in informal issues”; first issue: March/April 1815; last issue: Dec. 1818; place of publication: Berlin; publisher: Duncker und Humblot, Maurersche Buchhandlung [1818]; editor: Friedrich von Cölln)
The project is expected to find much evidence of the ‘poietic’ arrangement of time in the form of multiple material irregularities (in terms of paper format, paper quality, characters, typographic design). In order to abstract from these findings into a concept of the ‘chronopoetics’ of journal literature, it will establish synchronically and diachronically systematic comparative relations. In the diachronic perspective, accessing ‘more standard’ journal projects makes it possible to cross-check for conceptual generalisability within the other sub-projects. In the synchronic perspective, the specifics of the media format are defined by the double tendency of the ‘chronicle’ – which is in non-book form – to move towards the book form: conceptually, towards the long-term goal of the self-contained work of the historian (without actually being ‘there’ yet); materially, towards the short-term goal of the kind of archiving typical of journals, by converting ‘pages‘ and ‘issues’ into quarterly, half-yearly or annual volumes. Precisely because they suspend periodical regularity, such archiving techniques then themselves become the material stage upon which the editorial and publishing tensions between journal and book are presented.