Zuschauer im Eckfenster 1821/22 oder Selbstreflexion der Journalliteratur im Journal(text). Mit einem Faksimile des Zuschauers vom April/Mai 1822 by Nicola Kaminski and Volker Mergenthaler (review)

This unusual, original, and compelling book presents E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Des Vetters Eckfenster" as a quintessential piece of periodical literature. The book is unusual in part because it includes a facsimile of portions of the journal Der Zuschauerin which the "Eckfenster" originally appeared. This is the second such volume by this authorial team: their 2010 book on Eichendorff's "Viel Lärmen um Nichts" likewise programmatically situates Eichendorff's novella in light of its original serial publication. Central to these projects (and to the larger DFG-funded research group on Journalliteraturin Bochum, Cologne, and Marburg spearheaded by Kaminski, Mergenthaler, and others) is the indictment of traditional scholarship for having long overlooked how the periodical format shapes the composition and reception of literary texts. As the authors show, the "Eckfenster" presents the reader with "complex scenes of self-reflection and self-problematization" of Journalliteraturin particular (231). Using Hoffmann's text as an exemplary instance of literary and medial self-reflexivity, the authors take steps toward creating a typology of basic features of periodical literature, including modes of literary-journalistic authorship, the status of serialized prose, and the paraand peritextuality specific to periodical publication.

The book begins with a programmatic introduction sketching the stakes of material-philological reading attuned to serial publication and the limitations of previous editions of the "Eckfenster." It is followed by high-quality facsimiles of two months of Der Zuschauer, including (but not limited to) the issues containing the "Eckfenster." which was published across six issues of the journal. The book then turns to an extended, monograph-length critical analysis of the text and its place in the journal across fourteen focal areas. These individual chapters, each based on short phrases from Hoffmann's text, approach the "Eckfenster" through a rich collection of sources and contextual and philological details drawn from contemporary lexica, periodicals, and other print products. Aiming for the "Ton des plaudernden Lekturespaziergangs" (11), the authors create a virtual map or network of possible pre-, inter-, and peritexts, refracting possible constellations of meaning and reference in which contemporary readers might have situated the "Eckfenster." The chapters address fashion, visual art, the theater, representations of city life, current politics, and more. Along with serving as article-like deep dives into specialized topics, these critical excursions also articulate a cumulative argument about the place of the "Eckfenster" in Der Zuschauer, its take on literary authorship, and the status of Fortsetzungsliteraturin the early nineteenth century.

It is only natural that this critical section begins with Der Zuschauer(1821-1823). The authors compare this Berlin-based four-page publication edited by J.D. Symanski to its eighteenth-century predecessors, including German and British moral weeklies such as the journal's namesake, Steele and Addison's Spectator, as well as to more contemporary Berlin-based periodicals such as Der Freimuthigeor Der Beobachter an der Spree. In each of these cases, the journal is personified in an observer figure that collects varied sketches, glances, or Blickeupon contemporary affairs. As Kaminski and Mergenthaler argue, Symanski's project updates the relatively homogenous, monological voice of eighteenth-century moral weeklies and embraces the multiauthor "paratactischer Fortsetzungsjournalismus" characteristic of the nineteenth century.

Kaminski and Mergenthaler then turn to different modes of authorship, a topic, to be sure, that has long preoccupied scholarship on the "Eckfenster." However, they complicate standard accounts of the sick Vetteras the central author figure: the sick Vetter's description of the healthy Vetter's lack of literary talent has been too often accepted at face value, even though it is precisely the latter who is to have written the piece (which, as the opening of the "Eckfenster" playfully states, is merely "mitgetheilt von E.T.A. Hoffmann," a paratext often excised by...