AFTERWORD Serial Literature’s Untimely Afterlives?
The Pre-March era [1830–1848] is a veiled time. Indecipherable like the present and hard to recognize.
Der Vormärz ist eine verschleierte Zeit. Unkenntlich wie die Gegenwart und schwer zu erkennen.
—REINHART KOSELLECK TO CARL SCHMITT, LETTER, APRIL 30, 1962
In closing, I would like to add one more figure to our gallery of nineteenth-century writers and editors whose works straddle book and journal formats and take on differently timed afterlives. The Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) first published most of his work in journals, and early on in his career he incorporated adapted aspects of Jean Paul’s “foolish” tone into such pieces. Yet in reworking and expanding the size and scope of his writings, he increasingly aspired to a Goethean notion of the completed work.1 Like many contemporary writers, Stifter’s ultimate benchmark of literary success was a single-author works edition, yet he continued to write for journals until his death. These tensions between continuation and completion and between journal and book formats can be seen in the posthumous volumes of Vermischte Schriften (Mixed writings) (1870), which are part of the multivolume works edition Adalbert Stifters Werke (1869–1870) and which collect fragments and sundry periodical texts, including several short essays published just a few years earlier in the illustrated family weekly Die Gartenlaube für Österreich (The garden bower for Austria) (1866–1869). The piece “New Year’s Eve” (Der Sylvesterabend) takes us back to the commemoration of the new year through “small” products of serial print considered in parts I and II of this book and to questions of literary legacy. In this middlebrow family journal, Stifter appears as a specifically Austrian writer, but one adept at stock forms from the periodical press. This piece appears in Die Gartenlaube’s final issue of the year and begins with speech reportedly overheard during the last hours of the year:
“New Year’s Eve is here,” people say, “a year is up in a few hours and a new one begins.”
“It is an important segment of time [Zeitabschnitt],” the others say, “It’s brought the one thing and the other, what will the new one bring.”
And, as many ask, “What is time?”2
These anonymous, anodyne statements evoke the tone, if not the content, of year-end reflections, but these overheard fragments might just as well serve as a personalization of the ubiquitous ways that journals and newspapers mark the passing of the year—one journal has a poem about time, another predicts what will come in the new year, and yet another offers more general reflections on time, et cetera.
Turning from what other people/journals have to say, Stifter shifts to a first-person perspective: “When I speak of something so enormous as a period of time, I ask, ‘How can one cut it up [abschneiden] and cut it apart [zerschneiden]?’ ”3 Continuing, he writes that time is perhaps the most unknowable part of life: “It is the secret of all of creation, we are enveloped in it, no heartbeat, no gaze of the eyes, no twitch of a fever takes place outside of it, we cannot step out of it, and do not know what it is.”4 These ruminations are evocative of Augustine’s famous reflections on time in the Confessions, and they fit well with the popular pedagogy of the journal—indeed, the journal format performs the very work of segmenting through its periodic, serialized publication. Stifter wraps up this section by returning to the conceit of reported speech, giving the floor to a kind of no-nonsense common man:
“Wait a moment,” someone will say, “what’s the point of these idle questions, what’s the point of this idle talk that people don’t even understand in the first place [wozu das müssige Gerede, das man nicht einmal überall versteht] and that there isn’t even a solution for and probably isn’t even necessary in the first place? What’s the point?”
The man is right, I will never find the solutions to these questions, and yet I ask these questions time and again, and even write them down here in a New Year’s Eve speech, and will ask these questions again, and people will ask them with me who travel down similar paths, and the others will have to forgive us, all the people who, when sitting in front of the image of Sais, don’t feel the twitch in their fingers to at least partially raise the veil.5
Ruminating about time is idle (müssig) and perhaps even foolish. Though Stifter’s piece is not outright humorous in tone, “idle” (müssig) and “foolish” (närrisch) are not far apart in the moral compass of the provincial Bildungsbürger, and the fool is associated with certain kinds of periodical-based entertainment that we have seen throughout the book. Indeed, calling these reflections a new year’s “speech” brings to mind Jean Paul’s end-of-the-year addresses and the perpetuation of such stock genres through the periodical press. This passage is organized around a notion of repetition and recurrence, with the first-person narrator underlining the repetitive quality of his reflections on time. Stifter thereby envisions a process of ongoing observation, a process of past, present, and future temporal reflection that measures and cuts up time, as well as related processes pursued by others. Even if these undertakings are “idle,” they are collective and involve multiple participants, as Stifter envisions journal readers undertaking similar observations in tandem. Even if time remains inscrutable, we can find an approximate understanding of it by marking it in different ways and by breaking it into different segments, not least through techniques that Stifter draws attention to in “writing down” (and publishing) his “speech.”
It is at this point that the essay pivots to territory more familiar to some of the family journal’s readers: “I return to the middle-class celebration of New Year’s Eve” (Ich kehre zu dem bürgerlichen Sylvesterabende zurück). The piece proceeds to sketch how people spend the end of the year, whether by gathering with one’s family and exchanging gifts, meeting in the local Gasthaus, or passing a lonely night without company. This impressionistic surveying of different figures and social types corresponds to Die Gartenlaube’s ideal of mirroring and figurally unifying different aspects of Austrian society.6 Stifter closes with a gesture of well-wishing that is rather stock, yet it exhibits nicely how writing helps to observe and commemorate certain periods of time:
And before I put down the quill, I write on the sheet [Und ehe ich die Feder niederlege, schreibe ich noch auf das Blatt]: a joyous new year for all who read these lines, and for all who do not read it, and may heaven provide that the good that befalls certain people persist and that the deep pain that has come in certain hearts be softened.7
This somewhat curious move of directing new year’s wishes to people who do not receive them represents an oblique gesture toward future reception, with the arrival of the wishes with certain audiences at some future moment occurring via circuitous and indirect pathways that no longer coincide with this particular year (indeed, this is a feature of this text that is reinforced by its publication in the posthumous works edition). The wishes might well arrive with those who need it by some other means or at some other point in time, at the next holiday or the next year’s New Year’s Eve. The reference to a lack of present reception and to forms of circulation that remain outside the control of the author opens up a space for repetition and reencounter. Here we have a rather impassive sense of literary legacy that is open to the possible reception of minor works, simple “sheets,” rather than insistent about the enduring greatness of larger works.8 Despite Stifter’s literary fame at this late stage in his career, it is striking that he so readily and comfortably inhabits a mode of journal-based writing. Stifter sends his wishes off into the world and out onto the sea of print, uncertain of where or when it will arrive. Taken together with the essay’s reflections on time, this closing remark continues the process of the ongoing marking of time through patterns of repetition and continuation, a process that would seem to run counter to any kind of finality or completion. This gesture complements the function of collected works to promote a sense of literary legacy based on future encounter, yet the gesture is not organized around a notion of the completed work or set of works. Even if it is foolish to write about time, such folly is hard to resist and calls out for more: more imitators, more writing, more images, and more attempts to lift the veil and perceive time in its smallest and largest segments.
Reflections on the timeliness and untimeliness of serial forms—including on their indeterminate or untimely afterlives—prompt considerations as to serial literature’s place in the writing of literary history. The promise of more to come or future reencounter is all too pertinent to literary historiography, which tasks itself with managing the terms and justification for future rereadings of shifting literary corpora. Of course, foregrounding periodical culture and serialization brings into view key, often underthematized features of nineteenth-century media ecologies and is of merit if only for that reason. Yet theorizing the textual and medial heterogeneity that one encounters on the pages of periodicals, newspapers, and magazines can be both productive and daunting: the corpus is potentially unlimited, and one runs the risk of focusing on one set of objects almost arbitrarily over others. What, then, are the actual (or just potential or possible) afterlives of nineteenth-century serial print, and what roles should such afterlives play in the writing of literary history? Is the study of serial formats a subcategory of the broader literary tradition and its patterns of transmission, or should it be a more privileged thread? How does the focus on seriality negotiate the challenge of discerning the relationships among various kinds of more or less interrelated texts in comparison to other literary-historical approaches? How do serial forms bring a sense of nineteenth-century life and experience more into view, on the one hand, and reveal the difficulties involved in doing so, on the other? In offering partial, case-specific answers to these questions, this book has attempted to show how serial forms complicate conceptions of the self-standing work and authorial oeuvre; how the migration from journal to book to works edition prompts reflection on the literary field more broadly; how republication can function as an important technique of authorial promotion and diminution alike; how early and mid-nineteenth-century modes of history writing draw on the peculiarities of serialized cultural journalism; and how format and genre conceits such as the tableau, caricature, and physiognomic portrait train readers to be on the lookout for more to come. Studying serial literature shifts our attention from individual monumental works to the ongoing flow of variously sized forms, genres, and formats and thus expands the range of materials we are interested in as literary historians.
Another way to pose the question of literary-historical relevance is to ask how the study of the serial print of past centuries might shed light on the temporal awareness of our digital age. Do certain aspects of nineteenth-century serial culture converge with our present-day experience of digital ephemeralities? Any consideration of the contemporary relevance of nineteenth-century print is immediately confronted with the ubiquity of such material in digital archives.9 Indeed, the writing of parts of this book would have not been possible without digitization projects at the Universities of Bielefeld, Jena, Munich and at the Austrian and German national libraries. With most nineteenth-century print being in the public domain, such digitized material is ripe for various projects, including digital humanities and curation projects and topic-specific databases.10 If we think back to Ludwig Börne’s thought experiment about the perishing of Parisian readers in a future natural disaster which began part I of this book,11 we might conclude that this digital archive in fact disproves his vision of the disappearance of the newspapers and journals that nineteenth-century readers held in their hands: instead, we have embarked on a preservation project that can continue to make nineteenth-century serial print available and ever more searchable. Even as certain key aspects of nineteenth-century life are lost to us, we do have many journals and papers from the era at our disposal, contrary to Börne’s vision of incinerated print. As James Mussell puts it, digitization returns “newspapers and periodicals, previously neglected due to their complicated bibliographical condition, to their central place in [the nineteenth-century] corpus of print.”12 Even though certain aspects of this media ecology have been superseded—leading journals have ended their run, and new media regimes have emerged—digitization redeems serial print’s promise to continue and to reemerge. Digitization makes print timely again, one might argue, for it allows us to access the central place of it in the lives of nineteenth-century readers. Serial forms help us to rethink the archive and our inventories of it. Here, too, the trope that we tracked throughout the book of reencountering old papers seems to find new purchase. Digitization complicates and even counteracts the material and figural ephemerality of newspapers. Access to the archive allows us to find proof of how serial cultures of various sorts saturate the nineteenth century, a concern of recent studies of serial forms by Clare Pettitt, Claudia Stockinger, and others.13
At the same time, though, so many of the practices and media ecologies of print continue to withhold themselves from view, and new forms of access do not make this material any less foreign. We are far removed from the world of nineteenth-century print; part of my book’s project has been to bring it closer, but it is still a difficult if not impossible task to recreate the print diet of the typical nineteenth-century reader and the conscious or unconscious points of reference that readers, editors, artists, and writers brought to texts. Here Koselleck’s remark (in a letter to Carl Schmitt) that the Vormärz era (1830–1848) remains an “indecipherable,” “veiled time” is salient. For at the very time Koselleck wrote this to his notorious mentor, he was working on his massive habilitation dealing with exactly this period. If there was anyone who had access to historical knowledge about the Vormärz, it would have been Koselleck! Yet he expresses the essential historical insight that great swaths of the past (and of the present, as he observes) are lost to us. This insight would seem to confirm a certain strand of Börne’s thought experiment: it is nearly impossible to work our way into the life worlds of the past, let alone into those of our contemporaries. In this line of thinking, the lives and afterlives of serial print become precarious, tenuous, and contingent, and the mass of materials that exist in print and digital archives amplifies an awareness of loss.
Reflections on the unrecognizability of the past and present prompt us to do new things with serial print and to undertake historiographical thought experiments that linger with the foreignness and untimeliness of the material. These are historiographical choices that do not start with the book- and work-based biases of more traditional scholarship but instead aim for a more accurate sense of reading practices and publishing techniques, yet that simultaneously also recognize that we access this material differently than nineteenth-century readers. Recent scholarship has experimented with different ways of encountering serial forms and imagining structures of reading and archival strategies that engage with the particularities of serial print. As James Mussell has pointed out, an irony of nineteenth-century serials is that we stand at a historical remove where we can witness the end of publication formats predicated on serial continuation, that is, on not ending. This makes our perspective as readers fundamentally different from that of past readers. As Mussell puts it, “From our vantage point in the present, we have the last [installment of given periodicals] and so are able to do what its nineteenth-century readers could not: step outside the series and see the periodical or newspaper as a whole.”14 This seeing as a whole is a historicizing gesture to be sure, and perhaps Mussell exaggerates the point; nineteenth-century editors and historians of journalism could indeed have surveyed a range of short-lived journal projects and evaluated what did and didn’t work in recent decades. Yet approaching serial forms from the perspective of their ends prompts us to consider afterlives that do not adhere to the logic of continuation inherent in these forms. Viewing the journal as a whole, discretely bounded run is different from looking at how serialization and periodicity structures its contents. If certain organs of serial print are predicated on not ending, what do we do when they end? This was the thought experiment undertaken by Jean Paul, in the context both of his eulogy for the Morgenblatt in the journal’s very first issue and of his conception of a works edition that would somehow be continued after his death.
Other scholars similarly manipulate the parameters of serial form in order to get at the particularities of periodical literature. Jon Klancher, for example, explores how the shift of journals into bookish volumes of collected issues and then into digital archives causes something to “happen” to periodicals that wrests them from the ways that they were consumed issue to issue.15 To be sure, the common practice of anthologizing journal issues into a continuously paged, bound volume at the end of the year belies the contrast of ephemeral journal and permanent book, yet, as Klancher notes, anthologizing often changes the appearance of the issue, cutting out advertising and removing at times up to almost half the pages of given issues. (This is part of what Laurel Brake speaks of when referencing the “stripping, disciplining and institutionaliz[ing]” of various kinds of texts.16) Similar alterations occur with the migration of the printed page to digital readers. The loss of certain features of journal issues in these processes is also analogous to the loss of materiality in the process of digitization.17 It is in this context that Klancher proposes that we return to single issues as our object of study, in effect drawing in small draughts from the sea of print and breaking up the flow of multi-issue formats in the process. This approach runs counter to treating issues and texts as interlinked series of materials and thus as broader serial shapes of time as I have sought to do in this book, yet Klancher’s proposed style of reading nonetheless makes seriality visible in its absence, as he reads against rather than with certain rules established by print and digital archives. If the nineteenth century is an age of mass print in which serial culture occupies large swaths of public debate and consumption, taking a microperspective can be instructive and is in line with recent work in literary historiography that emphasizes the sometimes outsize cultural labor achieved by small forms.18
A recent book similarly limits its focus to a short range of irregular Napoleonic era journals printed in Germany from 1813 to 1815, exploring how such journals shape a sense of irregular temporalities.19 These journals mirror the chaotic uncertainty of wartime, but they also lend structure to temporal frameworks in their own way and warrant the finetuned attention of microanalysis. In a collective undertaking, David Brehm, Nicola Kaminski, Volker Mergenthaler, Nora Ramtke, and Sven Schöpf uncover such times at work in contemporaneous formats, genre rubrics, title vignettes, and more. They explore time-specific occurrences in the unfolding runs of specific journals and papers, revealing points of convergence and concentration between different journals that at times run parallel to unfolding events (Ereignisgeschichte) but also have their own logics that facilitate reader experiences with nonlinearity, simultaneity, contiguity, and incoherence.20 In an interesting formatting decision, the authors opt to present their research in a book, the pages of which take on the appearance of an irregular twenty-three installment, sixteen-page quarto journal, with articles by different authors existing side by side and serialized across multiple “issues” (which replace the chapter rubrics of conventional edited volumes). The decision to present contemporaneous scholarship in the costume of an anachronistic historical format serves to make the complex temporalities manifested by these historical journals even more salient. This format also remediates text passages and images from different journals under examination, using “headlines and ultrashort excerpts” that draw attention to the reflexes of serial print to mark time.21 This project is a radically microperspectival deep dive into the print archive that allows the authors and readers to intuit by analogy the complexity, irregularity, and multidirectional times at work in other historical media ecologies.
Koselleck’s suggestion that past and present are similarly unrecognizable invites us to consider how the untimeliness of the past might illuminate the untimeliness of the present. The foreignness of past historical epochs was certainly a problem that occupied Koselleck and Schmitt in relation to the pre– and post–World War II eras, but this problem can also be extended to the divide between print and technical media. Media theorists are often keen to stress differences between pre- and post-electric and electronic media, yet certain shared strategies of negotiating and organizing print and digital archives nonetheless persist, whether it is through techniques of managing the flow, feed, or stream of constant information, through the perception of accelerated news cycles, or through necessary strategies of selection and curation. Print and digital media likewise both enable the ability to reencounter variously timed ephemeralities. Here the work of media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is instructive, for she identifies a basic ephemerality at the core of digital media that arises not only through the internet’s constant self-regeneration but also through the simple yet counterintuitive fact of the material decay of digital media: “Digital media [are] not always there. We suffer daily frustrations with digital sources that just disappear. Digital media [are] degenerative, forgetful, eraseable.”22 Computer memory is impermanent and volatile, and the decay and planned (or unplanned) obsolescence of digital archives provide a new perspective on a more general problem pertaining to all media. Here Chun positions herself against views that take digital media to be the newest panacea for archiving previously unstable media, views that assert that “the always there-ness of digital media [could] make things more stable, more lasting.”23
Along with exploring how material technologies create media times of their own (a key component of recent media theory à la Wolfgang Ernst), Chun also stresses the temporalities at work in human interface and use.24 In contrast to the broadcast model of television and radio, users consume web content across a range of heterogeneous temporal frames. The ways in which digital archives store information condition or alter its “liveness” or timeliness. To be sure, digital media capture and circulate exponentially more traces of minute ephemera of the everyday, allowing ever more individuals to weigh in with their time-specific opinions, emotions, and desires and leave a trace of these in a common web-based archive. At the same time, however, digital media archive these interventions and make it possible to access them at nonsimultaneous, heterogenous points in time: “The lag between a digital object’s creation and its popular or scholarly uptake—its nonsimultaneous dissemination … grounds [new media] as new.”25 In a sense, then, the live, the ephemeral, and the event are lying in wait, sometimes becoming outdated or obsolete, and sometimes suddenly and without notice becoming more timely than ever, giving new meaning to untimeliness. This, then, is the compelling paradox of digital media: they speed up the production and dissemination of content, but they also persist in ever-shifting forms in the online archive. Chun calls this a form of “enduring ephemerality” particular to the digital and distinct from earlier technical media such as television,26 but the untimely preservation and recirculation of once current, now expired ephemeralities is a central feature of the print landscape as well, both at the time and in its literary- and media-historical resonances. Analogous to the universal medium of the computer, serial print is the universal medium of the nineteenth-century information age, remediating other media—the visual image, theater, performance, and more—and provides timely and untimely points of comparison to digital media.
All of these approaches are interested in the untimely afterlives of different media and read media ensembles as dynamic constellations open for multiple inroads and kinds of use. These constellations appear different to each user depending on what they are looking at and exhibit in varyingly radical ways the contingency of literary-historical choices. It is a common gesture in serial literature to refer to the “future historian” who will have the proper overview to survey the source materials collected in serial print and achieve conclusive historical knowledge, to disentangle “the thousandfold intertwined knot [Knäuel] of written and oral traditions,” as Bertuch and Böttiger put it. Perhaps such future historians never came, perhaps the task was simply too large, or perhaps the corpus too massive to survey, and indeed, many such expectations for future readers peter out amid the flow of ever more materials. In this context, it would be presumptuous to position ourselves as the very future historians capable of providing disentangled systematic overviews even as we chart new inroads into media constellations of the past and track specific shapes of time. Throughout this book I have worked with the metaphor of multiple literary-historiographical horizons: the horizon of reader orientation toward a classicizing work, the horizon of the kindred reader attuned to authorial sentiment, the horizon of the philological editor of the critical edition, the horizon of author-based republication across different formats, the horizon of future republication and reception, and the horizon of the never-ending proliferation of serial entertainment and cultural journalism. Each of these horizons opens up on the basis of the choices we make as readers and scholars, and each tracks certain shapes of times and closes itself off to others. Throughout this book, I have examined writers and editors who are especially attuned to the horizons of serial literature, to the temporal footprints of different publishing formats, to questions of authorial control, and to questions of untimely history writing. All cast out into the sea of print in search of shapes of time and provide us with a more differentiated vision of time and its medial filiations.
One final word on Börne’s thought experiment about Paris as an archaeological site that served as the point of entry for this book: the paradox of the simultaneous ephemerality and the endurance of serial print occasions us to consider the world of print as it was serially reproduced day in and day out throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, but it also invites us to think about how we reencounter the past in the future, both as a material absence and as an actual material artifact. Put differently, the trope of print ephemerality helps to imagine both the presence and absence and both the accessibility and inaccessibility of bygone historical presents in the future. The future history of today’s newspapers is a story about these papers’ ends, but it is also a story about their continuation. The past both withholds and discloses itself through the material traces of print as publications migrate across formats, from journal to book, from microfiche to pdf, or from digital pagination to XML. Börne ultimately was after a specifically political promise inherent to reading serial print—that reading the newspaper on a daily basis is a form of democratic participation—but the promise of repetitive patterns of print can be read as a media-archaeological promise as well. As long as we continue to sift through the ephemera of the past, we are bound to discover differently timed patterns of life, the world, and media, either in artifacts that have long since disintegrated, in preserved print matter, or in the remediated digital archive.
1. Johannes John calls this aspiration the “utopia of the finished text.” Johannes John, “Die Utopie des ‘fertigen’ Textes,” Stifter-Jahrbuch 20 (2006): 105.
2. Adalbert Stifter, “Der Sylvesterabend,” in Vermischte Schriften, vol. 2 (Pesth: Heckenast, 1870), 310.
3. Stifter, “Der Sylvesterabend,” 310.
4. Stifter, “Der Sylvesterabend,” 310.
5. Stifter, “Der Sylvesterabend,” 315–16.
6. On this function in the German Gartenlaube, see Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube,” 1853–1900 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
7. Stifter, “Der Sylvesterabend,” 320.
8. This scene is an example of what Ulrike Vedder identifies as scenes of successful and failed transfer and inheritance in Stifter’s writing, scenes that operate “beyond intention” and that eschew direct and intentional transfer. Ulrike Vedder, “Erbschaft und Gabe, Schriften und Plunder. Stifters testamentarische Schreibweise,” in History, Text, Value. Essays on Adalbert Stifter, ed. Michael Minden, Martin Swales, and Godela Weiss-Sussex (London: University of London Press, 2003), 31.
9 . Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press.
10. “As digitization creates processable data, content and metadata from different publications can be cross-searched and compared. Unlike holdings in print archives, digital resources can be accessed by many people at the same time, from wherever they are … and whenever they want.” Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, 58.
11. Börne imagines a Paris engulfed, Pompeii-like, by natural disaster and Parisians frozen in their entombed poses as they are reading their daily papers.
12. Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press, 1.
13. See Pettitt, Serial Forms; and Stockinger, An den Ursprüngen populärer Serialität.
14. Mussell, “Repetition,” 345.
15. Jon Klancher, “What Happened to the Periodical?” Studies in Romanticism 59, no. 4 (2020): 507–18.
16. Brake, Print in Transition, 1850–1910, 29.
17. On “lossiness” as a key feature of serial print, see Mark W. Turner, “Seriality, Miscellaneity, and Compression in Nineteenth-Century Print,” Victorian Studies 62, no. 2 (2020): 283–94.
18. See for example Tautz, Translating the World.
19. See Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815.
20. Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815, xiii.
21. Brehm et al., Zeit/Schrift 1813–1815, xii.
22. Chun argues that web-based digital media create “enduring ephemerals” by archiving time-specific materials that can be accessed at different times. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future Is a Memory,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 169.
23. Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral,” 153.
24. For Ernst, the human falls out the more the technological operations of media become incongruous with forms of human experience.
25. Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral,” 153.
26. “Networked new media does not follow the same logic of seriality as television; flow and segmentation do not quite encompass digital media’s ephemerality.” Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral,” 153.