A Walk Through the Text. On the Materiality and Impact of Textual Marks

Abstract

The dissertation investigates the effects that graphic, stylistic, and semantic elements have on reading and interpreting literary texts. In analyzing prose works by Arno Schmidt, Uwe Johnson, and Ilse Aichinger, each chapter traces the impact that individual writing styles have on the text. Taken as a physical and mental process, reading is constantly and cumulatively influenced by layout and punctuation, style and flow, semantic fields, and internal references. These elements are the material constituents of text that give the reader access to its content. Specifically, the thesis focuses on three layers of materiality: landscape, gravity, and sediment. While optical aspects of what I term landscape frame and guide the reading before most textual elements come to signification, style and flow, by contrast, create gravity, which influences the way we read the words in their sequence. The complexity and semantic fit of words, concepts, and sentences, as well as connotations and internal references gather like sediment and generate the full impact of the text after reading, based on how the materials coalesce. The sediment pertains to the layering of what has become part of the text in the moment of its construction, as well as that which is dissolved in the reading before settling again into new strata. The plurality of literary interpretations is anchored in these material levels. This, in turn, has widespread repercussions for the way differences between readings can be understood, legitimized, or rejected. The dissertation thereby shows how disagreements in understanding are as much based on the individual physical access to the page as on the idiosyncratic experience of poetics that accumulate over the course of reading.