Martin von Koppenfels / Manuel Mühlbacher (Hgg.), Abenteuer. Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre. (Philologie des Abenteuers 1) Brill/Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2019. 279 S., € 59.–.
The twelve essays in this volume grew out of a conference of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft-funded research group "Philologie des Abenteuers" at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich in June 2018. In their Einleitung, the editors present this volume as beginning to engage in an "Archäologie des Abenteuers" (p. 16) with the specific goal of orienting Abenteuer vis-à-vis "Gattungen, Genres, Textmustern, aber auch zu übergreifenden Konstruktionsprinzipien wie Vers und Prosa" (p. 2). While the prevalently philological, literary-historical orientation of the working group makes the analogy to archaeology and the largely chronological ordering of the chapters in this volume quite justifiable, the range of the topics covered in this volume also suggests understanding Abenteuer more dynamically as a cultural process interlinking oral and literary narrative traditions with such areas as politics, economics, psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, as well as sciences, media, and technologies, and understanding the endeavor undertaken by this volume as a necessarily ongoing and transdisciplinary one.
In her essay "Wissenschaft als Abenteuer", Julika Griem focuses on Abenteuer in its connection to the contemporary academic setting of literary studies via an analysis of two novels, Felictas Hoppeʼs novel Johanna (2006) and Mattias Énard's novel Kompass (2015) and the notion of the "erotic professor" (connected to Corey Robin's 2018 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education). In the second chapter, "Abenteuer avant la lettre. Kontingenz und Providenz in Epos und Roman der griechischen Antike", Susanne Gödde provides a minimal working definition of Abenteuer which the research group had evidently jointly agreed upon, based on four criteria: "(
In his chapter, "Märchen und Abenteuer", Wolfgang Ette's focus is on what he calls their "integrale Erzählform" (p. 103). Märchen tend to cast the departure as motivated by necessity and the protagonist as immature, incapable, and not yet willing or prepared for risk, whereas that of Abenteuer tends to cast the departure more as an opportunity freely taken by the protagonist. The differing departures thus manifest, for Ette, different identifiable stages of individual and cultural-historical development. The other co-editor Manuel Mühlbacher's chapter "Die Lust an der Endlosigkeit. Spuren des Abenteuers in der italienischen Gattungspoetik des 16. Jahrhunderts", examines signs of Abenteuer in the cinquecento reception of Aristotle's poetics. For Mühlbacher, the misapplication of the Aristotelian epic understanding of poetry to the romances — for example Orlando Furioso — resulted inevitably in a depreciation of the latter or a misunderstanding of them, though it also gave rise to "erzähltheoretische Reflexionen" (p. 119) that would not have been possible according to other traditional conceptions of poetry's functions derived from antiquity. Michael Waltenberger follows with "Tychander und Springinsfeld. Krieg als Pikarische Abenteuerspäre bei Hieronymus Dürer und Grimmelshausen", in which notable examples of the German reception of the Spanish picaresque tradition are seen as shaped by Abenteuer and vice versa. In the case of Dürer, Waltenberger shows the Kontingenz of Abenteuer expressed in primarily economic terms, whereas in the chaotic Thirty-Years-War inspired world of Grimmelshausen's protagonists — in which we observe that the contingency of Abenteuer largely merges with the senseless brutality of this war — the wheel of fortune seems to follow no predictable tendencies, economic or otherwise.
The final four chapters extend the volume's chronological range of inquiry from the eighteenth century to the present. Inka Mülder-Bach's chapter, "Das Abenteuer der Novelle. Abenteuer und Ereignis in den Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten und der Novelle Goethes", moves chronologically forward to the literary-cultural context of Enlightenment, the rationalizing tendencies of which effectively limit Abenteuer to fantastic short stories such as those in the Unterhaltungen or, as in the case of Goethe's 1828 Novelle, recast the adventurous in terms of a continuous thirst for sensation designed to overcome the collective repression of the irrational occurring in Enlightenment. Katrin Härtl's chapter, "Abenteuerliche Paratexte. Selbstbeschreibungen viktorianischer Abenteuerfiktionen", shows how the features of Abenteuer, excluded from the Bildungsroman as well as realist literary currents of the later nineteenth century, find a new home in the modern popular adventure novel of the Victorian period by way of an analysis of the forewords of Frederic Marryat's Masterman Ready (1841) and R. M. Ballantyne's The Coral Island (1858). In her chapter, "Abenteuerstoffe. Zur Materialität des Abenteuers", Dariya Manova focuses on the raw materials of Abenteuer in popular German adventure stories in the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth century (such as Karl May), placing emphasis on how engagements with the elements designed to fuel the industrial age — coal, iron, gold, fire — are woven into adventurous narratives. Abenteuer serves in Manova's analysis both to conceal economic exploitation as well as an instrument for the popularization of technical knowledge. Aage A. Hansen-Löve, in his chapter "ʻWir sind zur einfachsten Kriminalhandlung unfähig...'. Experimentelle Schundliteratur der russischen 20er Jahre", focuses on a unique endeavor on the part of the Russian formalist avantgarde to repurpose the increasingly popularized Abenteuer-genre in the interest of the production of a more dynamic, action-oriented narrative based on the Anglo-American model. The volume's final chapter, Jan Söffner's "Die Ordnung der Abenteuer in George R. R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire", extends the range of inquiry to contemporary mass media, in which originally medieval and early modern models and techniques connected to Abenteuer (e. g. entrelacement) are manifestly in play. Bringing an interpretive approach based on Joseph Campbell's conception of the hero's journey to bear on the role played by Daenerys Targaryen in the popular HBO series Game of Thrones, Söffner argues that this figure — despite being suggestively cast as a redeemer figure throughout the series — in the end destroys her own hero's journey with an act of brutality in the final season, thus effectively leaving audiences with a "Öffnung zur Transzendenz qua Trauma" (p. 278).
The "Philologie des Abenteuers" working group is to be commended for taking on a topic as difficult and elusive as it is important. The chapters of this volume are uniformly good and insightful, despite occasionally excessive plot synopsis in the case of some of the literary examples. More than the literary excavation suggested by the volume's title, the chapters establish numerous useful and interesting recurring themes, motifs, and ideas suggestive of Abenteuer as a cultural dynamics articulating individual/society, literary humanities/sciences and technologies, microcosm/macrocosm, private/public, highbrow/popular. In view of these, one wonders if some other organizational scheme for the volume as a whole (possibly including section headings derived from the original conference upon which this volume was based or from the above-referenced criteria of Abenteuer upon which the working group had agreed) might have been preferable to the volume's rough chronological and somewhat amorphous ordering principle for the chapters.
By Will Hasty
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