"Dichter haben mit dem Publikum nichts zu schaffen"—Zu Autorschaft und Paratext: Schriftsteller Innenrundfragen 1900-1933 by Martin Gerstenbräun-Krug (review)

"Dichter haben mit dem Publikum nichts zu Schaffen" is a fine volume that grew out of a 2018 Innsbruck dissertation, supervised by Thomas Wegmann. It represents the new generation of data-driven literary studies resting on ideas of publicity and media circulation rather than authorial or textual intention (well-represented at the University of Innsbruck, especially in Germanistik and Komparatistik). Gerstenbräun-Krug's work represents some of the best in that field, as he combines solid work in the traditional humanities (he was part of the editorial team for the Ernst Toller editions) with well-developed media-theoretical perspectives.

The discussion offered in this volume combines perspectives from the German tradition of tracking the Literaturbetrieb, the business of books, with a starting point like that offered by Michel Foucault in his famous 1969 speech-turned-essay "What Is an Author?," that redefined the authority attributed to authorship as depending on an "author function" rather than aesthetics or genius alone.

Gerstenbräun-Krug has designed a project grounded in Gérard Genette's idea of paratext (from Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, Cambridge UP, 1997): the materials that surround an author's text and stage it for its public reception, including anything that contributes to the life of a book—the editor, print, and publishers, as well as the author herself can all contribute to this, in texts, typefaces, footnotes, prefaces and dedications, jacket illustrations and cover texts, and the like. The latter are called peritexts, attached to the works, as opposed to epitexts, which include reviews, letters, questionnaires, and other discussions of the text and the author. Genette made the case that such elements, which older literary studies had used as support for understanding a text, actually steer, if not control readings of the texts in substantive ways. This perspective shatters the absolute authority of the text as Cleanth Brooks's "well-wrought urn" that conveys ideas and pulls our focus onto its materiality and onto the transactionality of text, which is redefined pragmatically and strategically as an interchange between public and an author/text constellation. These insights are in themselves not new, but they have not emerged as central in literary discussions until recent decades, likely because they involve commerce and marketing as much as aesthetics. Yet the results of assuming this model come closer to revealing what working authors know about the threshold between a work's quality and its chances at impact.

Gerstenbräun-Krug's contribution to this ongoing discussion is a careful examination of an interesting corpus: a set of published author polls/surveys (Rundfragen) from the first part of the century. They were designed to work in lieu of personal interviews, but they lead to publishable results for the periodicals that give them; authors participate because they can give them visibility often in publishing venues that they might not otherwise appear in. As such, they are particularly interesting epitexts that are closely attached to the author's public persona, and with the advantage for the author of control that is relatively unmediated by their own publishing industries.

The author starts by establishing the history of the author polls as a genre, explaining the various forms it took, the terminology used in describing them, and what the concept contributes to literary studies, especially in nuancing the question of what an author is. The bulk of the volume is dedicated to the discussion of particular Rundfragen (almost twenty different ones, between 1906 and 1932). These stem from journals like Das Literarische Echo and Das UHU and also included those in book form and in newspapers. One of the most interesting of these is a Rundfrage published by Ludwig Ficker in Der Brenner (the only one he did)—a discussion of Karl Kraus. Gerstenbräun-Krug traces how the survey was used to bolster Kraus...