Komplitt Seminar with Matthew Johnson

In the writing of literary history and in the analysis of individual texts, the archive – as both a repository of historical documents and an amorphous concept (e.g., ‘the rules or regularities,’ in Foucault’s account, ‘that govern what can be said within a discourse’) – plays an important but indeterminate role. In recent decades, literary scholars invested in archival work have increasingly moved beyond genetic criticism and editorial projects, following a ‘move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject' (Stoler).

In my presentation, I will reflect on how such an ‘archival turn’ might reshape our understanding of multilingual and transnational literary histories, with a particular (but not exclusive) focus on the intersection of Yiddish- and German-language literature in the first decades of the twentieth century. I will spotlight the unpublished texts of such better- and lesser-known writers as Moyshe-Leyb Halpern, Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum, Alfred Döblin, Franz Kafka, Malka Lee, and Itzik Manger, and, in so doing, turn attention to writing that is often unfinished and unsettled, that testifies to experiences of displacement and migration, that resists standard hermeneutic approaches, and that, as Elizabeth McHenry writes in a different but related context, “suggest[s] another way of understanding literary history, a way that recognizes literary production, even when that literary production did not culminate in literary publication.”

// Matthew Johnson, Yiddish