Life histories/itineraries of things in german and world literature

Abstract

Throughout the history of literature, and German literature in particular, there have been repeated accounts of “life cycles” or “life histories” of things: efforts to narrate the trajectories of artefacts in socioeconomic cycles, which in toto elude observation and remain imperceptible. In some cases, accounts are written in first person singular simulating an autobiographical perspective of things. The paper proposes to call this formation the autocyclography of things. Historically, literary tradition of the autocyclography of things goes back as far as the Antiquity. The paper outlines the theoretical framework and contextualises examples from German literature in a broader framework of world literature (British it-narratives and Soviet literatura fakta). Special emphasis is given to Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s autocyclography of a toilet paper. The paper also discusses examples of autocyclography of things in 18th- and 19th- century German Literature: a coin, a wig, a fly, a book, a coach, a toothpick, a joke and a stomach. This corpus still awaits more detailed scholarly attention. Keywords: poetics of things, autobiography of things, autocyclography of things, it-narratives/novels of circulation