Convention and innovation in literature

457 Pages·1989·7.016 MB·English

by  Grübel, Rainer Georg, Haen, Theo d', Lethen, Helmut

CONVENTION AND INNOVATION IN LITERATURE
UTRECHT PUBLICATIONS IN
GENERAL AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Editorial Board
Douwe Fokkema (chairman) - Joost Kloek
Sophie Levie - Willie van Peer
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David Bellos (University of Manchester), Keith Busby (University of Oklahoma)
Matei Calinescu (Indiana University), Yves Chevrel (University of Paris-Sorbonne)
Erika Fischer-Lichte (University of Bayreuth), Armin Paul Frank (University of Göttingen)
Gerald Gillespie (Stanford University), Hendrik van Gorp (Catholic University of Louvain)
Thomas M. Greene (Yale University), Claudio Guillén (Harvard University)
Walter Haug (University of Tübingen), Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto)
J0rgen Dines Johansen (University of Odense), Donald Maddox (University of Connecticut)
rgil Nemoianu (Catholic University of America), Stephen G. Nichols (University of Pennsylvania)
Roland Posner (Technical University of Berlin), Maria-Alzira Seixo (University of Lisbon)
Mario J. Valdés (University of Toronto)
recht Publications in General and Comparative Literature publishes studies in English which fall
o three main groups:
studies which approach the history and structure of literature from a supra-national point of view;
theoretical studies, especially studies devoted to larger issues such as genre, periodization, sym­
bolic mode, and manner of presentation (narrative, drama and lyric);
methodological studies, including studies devoted to the history of poetics and literary scholarship.
Inquiries and submissions should be addressed to:
The Secretary, Utrecht Publications in General and Comparative Literature
Instituut voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap
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Volume 24
Theo D'haen, Rainer Grübel and Heimut Lethen (eds)
CONVENTION AND INNOVA TION IN LITERA TURE
CONVENTION AND INNOVATION
IN LITERATURE
edited by
Theo D'haen, Rainer Grübel and Helmut Lethen
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1989
Illustration on dust cover reproduced with permission from Historisch Topografische
Atlas, Gemeentelijke Archiefdienst Amsterdam.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Convention and innovation in literature / edited by Theo D'haen, Rainer Grübel, and Hel­
mut Lethen.
p. cm. -- (Utrecht publications in general and comparative literature, ISSN
0167-8175; v. 24)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Originality (in literature) 2. Imitation (in literature) 3. Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.)
4. Literature, Experimental ~ History and criticism. 5. Literature ~ History and criticism.
I. Haen, Theo d'. IL Grübel, Rainer Georg. III. Lethen, Helmut. IV. Series.
PN56.067C66 1989
809 - dc 19 89-355
ISBN 90 272 2209 6 (hb.)/90 272 2210 X (pb.) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1989 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Contents
Introduction: The Decline and Rise of Convention vii
Theo D'haen, Rainer Grübel and Helmut Lethen
The Concept of Convention in Literary Theory and Empirical Research 1
Douwe Fokkema
Genre: A Modest Proposal 17
J.J. Oversteegen
The Dynamics of the System: Convention and Innovation in Literary
History 37
André Lefevere
Literary Convention and Translated Literature 57
Raymond van den Broeck
Cristal et Clarie: A Novel Romance? 77
Keith Busby
The Well-Tempered Lady and the Unruly Horse: Convention and
Submerged Metaphor in Renaissance Literature and Art 105
Bart Westerweel
The Shaking Walls of Convention: Popular Sentimentalism and Hein­
rich von Kleist's First Tale 123
Joachim von der Thüsen
Innovation or Confirmation of the Norm? Goethe's Werther in Hol­
land 1775-1800 151
J.J. Kloek
Folk-tale and Novel: On the Development of Russian Prose Fiction 165
Sander Brouwer
Convention and Innovation of Aesthetic Value: The Russian Recep­
tion of Aleksandr Puskin 181
Rainer Grübel
vi CONTENTS
A Note on Convention and Innovation: The "Odes" of John Keats 225
August J. Fry
Romanticism Unmasked: Lexical Irony in Aleksandr Puskin's Evgenij
Onegin 235
Melchior de Wolff
The Tribulations of the Alexandrine in the Work of Rimbaud: A Con­
test between Innovation and Convention 253
Jacques Flessen
Rudolf Borchardt: Poetry and Tradition 273
Jattie Enklaar
Innovative use of commedia dell'arte-elements in A. Blok's The Fair
ground Booth 293
Jenny Stelleman
The Rhetoric of Forgetting: Brecht and the Historical Avant-garde 305
Helga Geyer-Ryan and Helmut Lethen
Literature of Displacement: René Harding Rejects George Eliot 349
PJ. de Voogd
Convention and Innovation in British Fiction 1981-1984: The Con­
temporaneity of Magic Realism 361
Richard Todd
The Convention of the New Beginning in Theroux's The Mosquito
Coast 389
Hans Bertens
Genre Conventions in Postmodern Fiction 405
Theo D'haen
Notes on the Contributors 421
Index 425
Introduction:
The Decline and Rise of Convention
The evolution of conventions — their rise and
decline, spreading and replacement — can be
examined only if a theory of change in literary
history can direct our observation (Fokkema,
in this volume).
I
If we hold the various historical analyses that make up the bulk of this col­
lection of essays up to the epigraph to this introduction we are bound to
notice that the very idea of a "theory of change in literary history" has
become problematic today. The evidence from these analyses suggests that
in the contemporary literary-critical market the stocks of "innovation" are
going down, and those of "continuity" are on the rise.
In fact, it would seem that it is hardly possible to discern any explicit
theory of literary change underlying most contributions to the present vol­
ume. This may well be symptomatic. In literary historiography, over the
last few decades attention has shifted from the study of dramatic breaks and
paradigmatic changes demarcating literary periods, to that of long-term
phenomena. Of course, now as before short-term literary revolutions lend
themselves to be painted in brighter colors, to be couched in more exciting
tales, than long-term evolutions. But clearly there is widespread suspicion
that these glowing pictures and exciting tales fit the wishful-thinking
rhetoric of theories of literary change rather than provide us with real
insight into the "deep structures" of the process(es) involved.
The particular experience we had in putting together this collection of
essays could be situated against the backdrop of comparable developments
in related fields dealing with cultural processes. Here too, scholarly atten-
viii D'HAEN, GRÜBEL and LETHEN
tion has shifted from the study of dramatic short-term developments to that
of long-term series of relatively minor and gradual changes. The period
spanning such a series has come to be known, after Bakhtin, as a
chronotope. Concurrently, the category of repetition has come to the fore
in various cultural disciplines. In a sense, this is a fulfillment of Sören Kier­
kegaard's prophecy — in his essay on "Repetition," published some 150
years ago, and rather significantly subtitled "An Essay in Experimental
Psychology" — that in the future philosophy would look at life as basically
a form of repetition. In this view, obviously, repetition was still seen as the
complementary concept to the classical concept of mimesis: mimesis is
rooted in the past, repetition in the future. In the present, whether one
thinks of the "histoire des mentalités" of the French Annales-School or of
(Poly)System Theory, all attention is concentrated on the phenomenon of
repetition. Both in the American brand of sociology concerned with the
interaction rituals of everyday life and the influential theory of institutions
of the German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen the category of repetition is
being upgraded to the extent of directing all scientific observation. Empiri­
cal science only allows for the true study of a phenomenon if it is "repeata-
ble," or "re-producible." Therefore the possibility of an empirically
oriented theory accounting for singular changes seems — at best — prob­
lematic. In literary studies the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, with his
essay on the morphology of the folk-tale, pioneered the change-over from
exclusive attention for the new or "novel" in literature to that for recursive
phenomena. Certainly it is not a coincidence that Brouwer's inquiry into
the emergence of the Russian novel harks back to Propp's work. Brouwer
ventures to propose that the new fictionality of eighteenth-century Russian
prose does not appear out of the blue, but models itself after the conven­
tions of the folk-tale. Features such as the "bylina," for example, which
appear to be innovatory with respect to previous literary genres such as the
epic, prove to be no more than continuations of established conventions
when looked at from the genre of the folk-tale. In a wider perspective, it is
highly significant — though also ironical — that Propp's work, which
opposes a poetics of repetition — positing plot elements as recurring func­
tions — to the avant-garde poetics of change elaborated by the Russian
Formalists, was termed "formalist" by the French structuralist and
ethnologist Lévi-Strauss. Surprisingly, though, in Europe the most impor­
tant impetus for the present paradigm change in the study of cultural pro­
cesses did not primarily originate in ethnology, which concentrated on so-
THE DECLINE AND RISE OF CONVENTION ix
called "cold" cultures, untouched by the ideology of progress, nor in
anthropology, which concerns itself with the biological matrix of long term
cultural structures. Instead, it primarily originated in that discipline that
traditionally — at least in its modern guise — concerns itself with rapid
changes in time: viz. historiography (Hutton 1981, Le Roy Ladurie 1978).
It was the French Annales-School that, already in the twenties, paved the
way for the methodological re-orientation to come.
As long as the discipline of history was mainly concerned with proces­
ses of change, it concentrated on political history, marked by sudden breaks
in a fast and episodic evolution. The newly emerging history of mentalities
discovered that beneath the quick flow of political events slumbered a
slower stream of socio-cultural events, the meanderings of which were
determined by the structures of everyday life. Historians working in this
field consequently re-routed their attention to persistent patterns of
thought that prove to be highly stable and durable, even under rapidly
changing political conditions. It was then only a minor step to divorce the
concept of a linear political history marked by change from that of a cyclical
history of everyday life structures marked by endless repetition. Study of
the latter then allows for emphasis on the stability of systems, and the com­
parative neglect of moments of instability. Explicit theories of change, on
the contrary, necessarily depart from the instability of all things and struc­
tures.
In literary studies, too, this paradigm change has led to renewed and
increased attention to phenomena of everyday literary communication,
attempting to describe these — if dealing with "reproducible" features — in
empirical terms (Iser 1976, Link 1976, Grimm 1977, Suleiman and Crosman
1980, Tompkins 1980). Indeed, it is even possible to see the shift in research
interest from the genealogy of literary works, and of literature itself, to the
reconstruction of literary reception horizons and processes as both a means
of escape from methodological contradictions and a preliminary move to
paving the way for a future theory of the understanding of (literary and
other) texts.
In the contemporary situation just sketched, it is perhaps not surprising
that the essays collected in this volume should mainly address the phenom­
enon of convention rather than innovation. Still, we should stress that it is
only possible to speak of convention — even that convention is only observ­
able as such — if one starts from the possibility of an alternative to (any)
convention and the assumption of historical change. If, indeed, convention