Tim Lanzendörfer | Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main (original) (raw)
Papers by Tim Lanzendörfer
Textual Practice, Feb 1, 2023
The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comics, Film, Podcast, TV, Games, 2023
We argue that Lovecraft and the Lovecraftian are instructive problems in the theory and practice ... more We argue that Lovecraft and the Lovecraftian are instructive problems in the theory and practice of adaptation, drawing on affordance theory and Heidegerrian terminology to develop a sense of the process Lovecraft's fiction undergoes in adaptation
Textual Practice, 2023
I argue for the need to understand interpretation as the chief social good of literary studies; d... more I argue for the need to understand interpretation as the chief social good of literary studies; discussing the concerns of postcritique, I suggest that any focus on literary experience must be on socioaesthetic experience; and I suggest the need to think through our sense of what literary studies does to reflect on how it must change, if it must change.
ock, Stephen. Trump Fiction., 2020
published in Hock, Stephen. Trump Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.
The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts—Literary Developments—Critical Analyses., 2019
...The Aesthetics and Politics of Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowh... more ...The Aesthetics and Politics of Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man (2002), Teju Cole's Open Ciy (2011), and Peter Mountford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (2011).
The American Weird: Concept and Medium, ed. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe., 2021
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2021
This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approx... more This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approximation, commodity production. This has consequences for our understanding of the work of literary studies. We are no longer able to easily recur to preformed theories of the 'literary' as a category at least in some way exempt from extrinsic pressures. Attention to the 'literary market' remains superficial when it insists on paying attention chiefly to so-called literary fiction on the understanding that it has prima facie higher claims to our attention than popular genre fiction-it does not. In fact, as this essay argues, appreciation of the thorough commodification of art under capitalism asks us to take seriously the need to break with our categories; to insist on the primacy of interpretative attention in determining what kinds of fiction we study.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Comics - Bilder, Stories und Sequenzen in religiösen Deutungskulturen, 2015
Published in LinQ 41 Special Issue "Armageddon". This is not the journal's formatting. World War... more Published in LinQ 41 Special Issue "Armageddon". This is not the journal's formatting.
World War Z (2006) produces a liberal utopian vision of a world in which many of the political problems of the early 2000s have been solved after an apocalyptic event, yet the underlying structures that created those problems are left unaddressed. This article thus argues that World War Z should be read for both its apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic dimensions. In analysing the contributing factors of the apocalyptic scenario as well as its post-apocalyptic aftermath, this reading shows how the novel highlights the limits of a progressive liberal imagination.
The essay argues that the politics of Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One (2011) can only be... more The essay argues that the politics of Colson Whitehead’s zombie
novel Zone One (2011) can only be adequately understood through an understanding of its debts to its generic forebears. Suggesting that Zone One offers a utopian solution to what it recognizes as contemporary political and social problems, the essay argues for a dialectical reading of its genre influences as simultaneously permitting recognition of its generic forebears as well as requiring a new appreciation of ‘genre’ texts. It suggests that the contemporary trend towards generically
amalgamated fictions should be read as a search for alternative forms of expressing literary politics beyond the social novel.
ZAA Special Issue Literary Approaches to Contemporary Comics
ZAA Special Issue Literary Approaches to Contemporary Comics, 2010
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2012
Textual Practice, Feb 1, 2023
The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comics, Film, Podcast, TV, Games, 2023
We argue that Lovecraft and the Lovecraftian are instructive problems in the theory and practice ... more We argue that Lovecraft and the Lovecraftian are instructive problems in the theory and practice of adaptation, drawing on affordance theory and Heidegerrian terminology to develop a sense of the process Lovecraft's fiction undergoes in adaptation
Textual Practice, 2023
I argue for the need to understand interpretation as the chief social good of literary studies; d... more I argue for the need to understand interpretation as the chief social good of literary studies; discussing the concerns of postcritique, I suggest that any focus on literary experience must be on socioaesthetic experience; and I suggest the need to think through our sense of what literary studies does to reflect on how it must change, if it must change.
ock, Stephen. Trump Fiction., 2020
published in Hock, Stephen. Trump Fiction. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020.
The American Novel in the 21st Century: Cultural Contexts—Literary Developments—Critical Analyses., 2019
...The Aesthetics and Politics of Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowh... more ...The Aesthetics and Politics of Transnationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man (2002), Teju Cole's Open Ciy (2011), and Peter Mountford's A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (2011).
The American Weird: Concept and Medium, ed. Julius Greve and Florian Zappe., 2021
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2021
This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approx... more This essay argues that under contemporary capitalism, all literary production is, at first approximation, commodity production. This has consequences for our understanding of the work of literary studies. We are no longer able to easily recur to preformed theories of the 'literary' as a category at least in some way exempt from extrinsic pressures. Attention to the 'literary market' remains superficial when it insists on paying attention chiefly to so-called literary fiction on the understanding that it has prima facie higher claims to our attention than popular genre fiction-it does not. In fact, as this essay argues, appreciation of the thorough commodification of art under capitalism asks us to take seriously the need to break with our categories; to insist on the primacy of interpretative attention in determining what kinds of fiction we study.
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Comics - Bilder, Stories und Sequenzen in religiösen Deutungskulturen, 2015
Published in LinQ 41 Special Issue "Armageddon". This is not the journal's formatting. World War... more Published in LinQ 41 Special Issue "Armageddon". This is not the journal's formatting.
World War Z (2006) produces a liberal utopian vision of a world in which many of the political problems of the early 2000s have been solved after an apocalyptic event, yet the underlying structures that created those problems are left unaddressed. This article thus argues that World War Z should be read for both its apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic dimensions. In analysing the contributing factors of the apocalyptic scenario as well as its post-apocalyptic aftermath, this reading shows how the novel highlights the limits of a progressive liberal imagination.
The essay argues that the politics of Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One (2011) can only be... more The essay argues that the politics of Colson Whitehead’s zombie
novel Zone One (2011) can only be adequately understood through an understanding of its debts to its generic forebears. Suggesting that Zone One offers a utopian solution to what it recognizes as contemporary political and social problems, the essay argues for a dialectical reading of its genre influences as simultaneously permitting recognition of its generic forebears as well as requiring a new appreciation of ‘genre’ texts. It suggests that the contemporary trend towards generically
amalgamated fictions should be read as a search for alternative forms of expressing literary politics beyond the social novel.
ZAA Special Issue Literary Approaches to Contemporary Comics
ZAA Special Issue Literary Approaches to Contemporary Comics, 2010
American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 2012
I use Yanis Varoufakis's attempt at periodizing the post-World War II history of economic systems... more I use Yanis Varoufakis's attempt at periodizing the post-World War II history of economic systems to read the present moment as one of a break with postmodernism, suggesting the need to understand ourselves as placed in a new era, if not necessarily one that can be named, or fully understood, yet.
A paper delivered at the conference "After Postmodernism?" at Mainz, September 2015.
My paper today will address the critique of transnationalism which Ken Kalfus's 2013 novel Equila... more My paper today will address the critique of transnationalism which Ken Kalfus's 2013 novel Equilateral undertakes. Transnationalism is obviously a term with many possible meanings, and it would be foolhardy indeed to suggest that the critique I see in Equilateral takes in all of them. Indeed, transnationalism as a mere description of a number of interrelated contemporary facts of life, such as increased global connections and shifting migratory patterns, is not my object here (though I recognize the possibility to quibble with the term even there). To be sure (and to get it out of the way), Kalfus himself has those "transnational affiliations" which Jahan Ramazani feels are already enough to demand a "reconsideration of the conceptual structure of much critical production" in literary studies-in Ramazani's case, in poetry studies (23). Kalfus has lived in Paris, Dublin, Belgrade, Moscow, and New York; he is, in that somewhat banal phrase, a transnational writer. Neither I nor Equilateral are interested, however, in such a definitional procedure.
In my presentation today, I want to do two things. First, I want to inquire into the status of th... more In my presentation today, I want to do two things. First, I want to inquire into the status of the anthology as a teaching tool in the age of the digital archive. This is a question which has not, as far as I can tell, received as much attention as it perhaps should have, and I will argue that material now available digitally is still sorely in need of being anthologized, while the resultant anthologies themselves should not forego the advantages of the digital archive. In a nutshell, the problem is that the digital archive does not offer us insight into vital questions of production contexts, and is not suitable as a primary tool for teaching. Secondly, I want to offer a preliminary concept of an anthology that is currently under development at the University of Mainz which, I hope, shows the validity of the anthology even in the "exciting future"-the words are Sandra Roff's-suggested by the digital archive, and offers a glimpse at the changes from previous forms of anthologies which the digital archive requires.
The Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft: Comic, Film, Podcast, TV, Games, 2023
Preface (in lieu of an introduction) to Medial Afterlives of H.P. Lovecraft.
The Routledge Companion to Literary Magazines, 2022
Introduction to the Routledge Companion to British and North American Literary Magazines.
The introduction from my second book, Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Liter... more The introduction from my second book, Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature, which lays out some of the book's argument and its structure. Published 2018 with University Press of Mississippi.
The table of contents and my introduction of a collection of essays I edited. It explores the mul... more The table of contents and my introduction of a collection of essays I edited. It explores the multiple valences of the concept of genre in the contemporary moment, from the importance of combinations of popular and literary genres to the shifting uses of traditional literary genres such as the bildungsroman.
Table of Contens and Introduction; co-edited with Oliver Scheiding
Winner of the Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize 2015.
Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2020
A special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies (64.4, 2020). Contributors include: Timothy Be... more A special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies (64.4, 2020). Contributors include: Timothy Bewes, Sheri-Marie Harrison, Andrew Hoberek, Carolyn Lesjak, Lisa Siraganian, and Clemens Spahr.
Teaser:
(...) As Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski put it in the introduction to their edited volume, Critique and Postcritique, “[w]e are currently in the midst of a recalibration of thought and practice whose consequences are difficult to predict” (2017, 1). Literary criticism today certainly finds itself in the middle of a debate about its fundamental methodological operations (see also Slaughter 2013, Felski 2014, Di Leo 2014, Mullins 2017), but this is in fact a debate of longer standing. Already in 2004, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht argues that twenty-first century literary criticism must turn toward a post-hermeneutic methodology, aiming for more “immediate” engagements with texts. Gumbrecht’s early demands an engagement with the “presence” of our engagement with texts, a demand that anticipates the turn to affect, feeling, and other immediate approaches to texts that try to move beyond interpretation (2004). Reading itself is consequently understood differently in the context of the post-hermeneutic turn—not as the unlocking of meaning (such as ideological interpretation or various forms of historicization) but instead as exemplified by what Gumbrecht elsewhere calls “reading for mood” or the investment in “Stimmung” (Gumbrecht 2008). Such forms of immediate reading, the proponents of postcritique also ultimately claim, indeed constitute a closer, more intimate engagement with the text, one that is purportedly a truer way of reading. Not surprisingly, the various forms of post-hermeneutics that have emerged since the early 2000s have been widely disparaged as anti-historical ways of reading, which has also given rise to great suspicion regarding the politics of such a methodology. Of course, to champions of postcritique, the charge of anti-historicism constitutes little more than knocking on open doors, for their investment lies not in the defense of the historical and political status of the text but rather in defending the text itself. And texts, Gumbrecht already argues, produce not only meaning but also, and maybe more importantly, presence (such as affective or emotional responses). The result of the post-hermeneutic turn that finds its climax in postcritique has given rise to heated debates over the status of the fundamental operations and concepts that define literary criticism. In a recent exchange between the journals Representations and nonsite, for instance, critics like Walter Benn Michaels and Jonathan Flatley have produced initial propositions, responses, and rebuttals that ask one fundamental question: can “reading for mood” be considered a form of reading, and can it be considered a valuable methodology for literary criticism (Flatley 2017, Michaels 2018)? Indeed, they ask, must literary criticism be invested in making meaning, and, if so, what do we mean by “making meaning?” In such a situation, how do we move forward as literary critics, and how do we engage with the challenges posed for literary criticism in recent years in a manner that does not simply commit to increasingly entrenched sides that battle for a singular methodological future for literary criticism? The title for this issue, “Literary Criticism after Postcritique,” wishes to foreground and directly engage with precisely this uncertain future of criticism in the face of postcritique’s challenge. And yet, while we suggest that postcritique must be taken seriously, we believe that its value for literary criticism today may lie less in its assessment of our discipline and its established methods but rather in its status as a literary criticism phenomenon itself that emerges out of specific historical conditions. Put differently, we are less interested in contributing to debates about whether or not postcritique may be correct in its assessment of our discipline and whether or not postcritique is the method that literary studies needs. Rather, we are interested in postcritique as a historical symptom itself. And if our moment in history gives rise to phenomena such as postcritique, we ask, then how might we formulate a vision for literary criticism by responding to the situation and not the critical provocation itself? A critical challenge has been made to the dominant practice of literary criticism. How may we understand the causes for this challenge, and how might we trace possible responses to this situation without simply “picking sides?” The title of this issue, therefore, does not name our exclusive interest in the postcritical debate, but rather points to the way we can think forward now, departing from observations about the present condition of literary criticism. (...)