More than any other art form, literature has in Western modernity been established as strictly non-collaborative: a solitary practice in terms of both production and reception where authors write in isolation for readers who read alone. But at the same time, literature has also always been understood and 'used' as a deeply intersubjective force that, ideally, allows for specific forms of connecting with and participating in other worlds. In that view, literature has world- and community-building potentials, yet these potentials remain mostly unenacted. The reader is not so much a participant in, not even a participant-observer of, the stories they read; readers are rather posited as bystanders looking in from the outside at an inside that yet may exert a strong appeal and trigger what Immanuel Kant, in a different context, has dubbed "wishful participation".  

This joint project proceeds from the observation that over the past two or three decades, literary practices have (re)emerged that foreground the partcipatroy and collaborative dimensions of both writing and reading. This is no doubt owed to a significant degree to the medial shifts in the wake of the digital revoution, but it clearly affects 'traditional' print literature as well, as indicated by a range of budding modes of cooperative  and multi-authored textual production as well as by the manifold forms of collaborative reading. Our project aims to provide a number of case-specific analyses but also to develop a systematic and conceptual vocabulary for the current trend to rearticulate 'literature' as collaborative and participatory. This endeavour can only be pursued with a view on the worldly dimension of literature as 'species-wide faculty' (Dimock). It is for this reason that we explicitly attempt to bring Western notions of literature, however volatile these may be at this conjuncture, into conversation with concepts, schools and traditions from outside Europe and the US. Next to Dirk Wiemann, the Principal Investigator,  early-career scholar Shaswata Ray will contribute to the project with a PhD research project on collaborative and distributed authorship within contemporary cultures of sharing.  Moreover, Prof. Dr. Satish Poduval (English and Foreign Languages University Hyderabad, India) will act as a visiting Mercator Fellow and substantially widen the scope of the project with his expertise. 

Together we wish to  explore and acknowledge (some of) the manifold collaborative and participatory formats in which contemporary literature happens, both in terms of production/writing and reception/reading. The aim is a) to develop a theoretical model of reception as transformation of the reader-bystander into a collaborator akin to the spect-actor envisaged by Augusto Boal; b) to generate and specify that model in the course of case-specific analyses of concrete literary collaborative events and their respective modes of recipient address; and c) to bring the model into conversation with alternate conceptualizations of verbal world-making beyond the confines of dominant notions of ‘literature’ –  as, e.g., exemplified in the South Asian tradtions of sahitya as a praxis that posits writing as inherently ‘being-together’. 

Project Team