Abstract The article outlines a promising yet underdeveloped field of research: lay literary theory. This field encompasses, among other things, lay readers’ conceptions of terms such as ›literature‹ as well as their beliefs about how literary works should be interpreted. The article first clarifies the concept of lay literary theory by proposing the following definition: a lay literary theory is a system of terms and propositions that (1) serves to categorize, connect, explain, predict, or interpret literature-related phenomena; (2) abstracts from individual instances; (3) extends beyond what has already been observed empirically; and (4) is accepted by a person who does not work in a literature-related profession and does not possess expert-level knowledge about literature. The article then reviews existing research on the topic. Although a substantial body of relevant work already exists, including psychological research on reading beliefs and didactic research on literature-related assumptions held by students and teachers, this scholarship remains fragmented and leaves considerable scope for further investigation. The article next explains why lay literary theory deserves greater scholarly attention. Lay literary theories may be surprisingly widespread, likely shape how readers experience and understand literature, and serve important functions for those who hold them. Moreover, investigating lay literary theory can improve the public communication of literary knowledge and provide valuable impulses for academic literary theory itself. Finally, the article considers how lay literary theory can be studied empirically. It argues that the analysis of Digital Social Reading documents, such as online book reviews, offers a particularly fruitful approach and concludes with a brief proof of concept demonstrating how lay literary-theoretical terminology can be investigated using reviews from the German-language review platform LovelyBooks.
Abstract The essay departs from the so-called »end of theory« and relates it to transformations of temporal horizons: the loss of an emphatic conception of the future, ecological crises, and artificial intelligence. It engages in conversation with two developments, each starting from the past of (literary) theory: first, the demand for a return to the object of study; second, the historicization of formerly emphatic theory, which is now regarded as a cultural event of former generations. The essay proposes to connect these various directions in a productive way: the literary studies division of labor between theory, method, and object is interpreted temporally with reference to proposals by, among others, the theoreticians of science Mary Hesse and Niklas Luhmann. The role of the object is to represent the constructed past of scientific arguments. Method secures the future in an operative sense: it generates probable possibilities for continuation. Theory, then, is the mediation of reconstructed past and operative continuation. Building on Gayatri Spivak’s concept of future anteriority, the third section of the essay develops an understanding of literary theory in the mode of the future perfect. Theory as textual practice keeps the future open. It makes its own historicity visible, thereby keeping contingent paths open. This meaningful textuality of theory is indispensable especially against algorithmic constructions of reality. The essay advocates, in both research and teaching, an understanding of literary theory that relates it to media-ecological infrastructures and practices of reading and writing. The proposed conceptual differentiation between theory, method and object has concrete implications for research and teaching: in teaching ›methods and theories of literature‹, these could be reflected in relation to concrete architectures of writing and reading instead of ordering them according to big names. In research, concrete projects can use the reflection on the relationship between object, method, and theory to keep the spatio-temporal location of speaking and writing recognizable.
Abstract The article examines Jurij M. Lotman’s Universe of the Mind from the perspective of productive misinterpretation. Proceeding from the observation that misunderstanding, incomplete translation, and communicative disruption are conceptualised by Lotman not as deficiencies but as constitutive conditions of cultural dynamics, the study offers a metalinguistic reading of Lotman’s model of cultural semiotics. By shifting the focus from the level of the message to the code and analysing the epistemological status of the figurative and spatial models that structure his argumentation, the approach centers on three figures of reflection (›Reflexionsfiguren‹) – the thinking of the text (›das Denken des Textes‹), nesting (›Verschachtelung‹), and oscillation (›Oszillation‹) – through which Lotman conceptualises cultural processes as dialogic operations grounded in partial untranslatability. The figure of the thinking text presents texts as dynamic systems of storing, generating, and transmitting information whose productive capacities emerge only through interaction with their readers. Nesting refers to the recursive structure of the semiosphere, in which individuals, texts, and cultures are mutually embedded and continuously transformed through acts of translation. Oscillation describes the tension between code and message, as well as between understanding and non-understanding, that characterises the artistic text as an inherently open and interpretively indeterminate object. The article argues that interpretation in Lotman’s thought must be understood as a form of translation that can never be fully successful and that therefore inevitably generates new information. Misinterpretations thus appear not as marginal phenomena but as productive moments of semiosis and cultural development. Although the three figures of reflection occupy a relatively peripheral position within Lotman’s conceptual vocabulary, they prove to be fundamental structures that connect key concepts such as boundary, translation, and semiosphere. The article concludes by showing that Lotman’s work provides a valuable heuristic framework for literary studies approaches concerned with ambiguity, exclusion, and fragmentation, foregrounding the productive force of difference, alterity, and misunderstanding in the construction of meaning.
Abstract I outline a conception of literary theory according to which it is concerned with explicating the very concepts used to describe literature or our engagement with literature. Literary theory, then, is a ›second-order‹ activity aimed at conceptual explication, and it is subject to specific norms governing such activity. One such norm is the criterion of theoretical fruitfulness. A concept is theoretically fruitful if it embodies an empirical generalization. Such empirical generalizations depend on empirical research. Thus, in order to produce theoretically fruitful conceptual explications, one needs to draw on empirical research that yields empirical generalizations. The relevant expertise in the methodology of conceptual explication lies in philosophy, whereas the expertise required for empirical research aimed at empirical generalizations lies in disciplines such as psychology, the social sciences, and Digital Humanities. While this conclusion marks literary theory as a genuinely interdisciplinary endeavor, I also suggest a conclusion concerning the professional ethos of the literary theorist. Drawing on an ethics of knowledge transmission that reaches back to Plato’s reflections on why the poet is not a reliable source of knowledge, I suggest that the literary theorist has no choice but to remain silent on subjects on which they are not expert.
Abstract This article develops fallibilist universalism as a theoretical model for ethical judgment in literary interpretation. It addresses a central problem in contemporary literary theory: the tension between relativist approaches that suspend evaluation in the name of historical situatedness and universalist approaches that risk imposing external moral standards. Against this opposition, the article argues that ethical judgment in literature is best understood as a temporally structured process of interpretation that remains both normatively oriented and open to revision. Drawing on Paul Ricœur’s account of narrative identity, Martha Nussbaum’s conception of literary ethics, and Derek Attridge’s theory of ethical reading, the article reconceptualizes interpretation as a dynamic practice in which provisional judgments are continually re-evaluated in light of unfolding narrative contexts. Within this framework, recognition of historically constituted identities does not entail their normative immunity. Rather, it becomes the condition for a form of critique that remains sensitive to context while preserving the possibility of evaluation. The article demonstrates this model through comparative readings. In Othello , interpretive certainty leads to catastrophic moral misrecognition as identity-based assumptions harden into unquestioned conclusions. In Disgrace , by contrast, ethical awareness emerges through the destabilization of interpretive frameworks and the gradual revision of judgment. These contrasting trajectories illustrate how narrative form stages the conditions under which moral understanding becomes possible and revisable. By foregrounding the temporal and fallible character of interpretation, the article proposes a theoretical account of ethical criticism that integrates recognition and critique without collapsing into either relativism or dogmatism. Literature thus emerges as a site in which ethical judgment is not suspended but continuously negotiated through processes of interpretive revision.
