Günter Leypoldt – författare

Beginning with its central insight--that the life of literature is in fact a double life, a life shared between two relatively distinct domains of value, "strong" and "weak"--Literature's Social Lives unfolds across five chapters offering ever--deepening insights at every point. Literature's Social Lives situates itself within an emerging field of a sociologically attuned literary criticism, which combines ethnographic interest in the aesthetics of literary experience with a curiosity about how literature gains cultural relevance and institutional authority. In this groundbreaking study, Günter Leypoldt argues that ever-rising turnover of books between 1800 and 2000 expanded the commercial literary marketplace, yet by inverse subsidy simultaneously stabilized literature's market-sheltered support systems. Today's spaces of high literary ambition seem beset not just by market bottom lines, but by scholastic corps effects emerging from the rise of academic patronage. He develops a critical lexicon that more closely mirrors the literary authority of critics and literary historians on the public square, showing how as readers they often participate in two value systems: one rooted in the everyday (where they behave as consumers suiting private purposes), the other in a sort of moral or charismatic economy that appeals to them from outside of their individual selves and purposive routines.This is a book for every scholar of literature, or indeed of cultural production more broadly, many of whom will recognize themselves in these pages. It shows what some prominent accounts of the contemporary U.S. literary field crucially miss about literature in our time--that it continues to be a vehicle for aspiration toward "higher" values than economic or utilitarian ones. The book builds its argument through sociohistorical research, and through case studies from nineteenth-century poets and journalist-writers (Wordsworth, Scott, Hawthorne, Henry James, among others) through to the modernists in 1920s' London and New York and the post45 shift towards academic patronage (Barth, Toni Morrison, and the American Dirt debate, among others).

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, Leypoldt traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his 'language experiment' transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What Leypoldt calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles: this book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the 19th-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor); a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus and cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson follows, and in a third section Whitmanian authority is located within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture: romantic notions of national style as a kind of music; place-centered concepts of national aesthetics; and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.

REAL invites contributions on the relationship between literature and cultural change. The study of culture has to face the difficulty of not being able to observe its object directly. Its only access is via cultural phenomena as observable products of human activity: artefacts, texts, rites, symbols, forms of conduct. If scholars wish to study cultural change, they need to do so by investigating the changing relationships among these phenomena, the changing connections between social structures, mentalities and the material dimension of texts, artefacts and other objects. While some scholars have rejected the concept of culture because of this indirectness, others – from Malinowski to Luhmann – have attempted to make it theoretically more precise and historically more saturated. Societies change as well as cultures, but they are not the same and they evolve at different speeds.