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Arts & Communication

PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE
How to read Hölderlin in a literary exhibition

Heike Gfrereis*
Department of Modern German Literature, Institute of Literary Studies, University of Stuttgart,
Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany

Abstract

With over 150 exhibits and various installations, the exhibition Hölderlin, Celan, and the
Languages of Poetry (2020/21) at the Museum of Modern Literature of the Deutsches
Literaturarchiv Marbach showcases different ways of reading Hölderlin: close
reading, distant reading, scalable reading, hermeneutic and formalist-structuralist
reading, text-genetic reading, production- and material-esthetic reading, as well as
reception-historical-oriented reading. In addition, the exhibition explores the reading
of Hölderlin’s poems with the involvement of its visitors through empirical reading
research. In essence, it delves into the experience of reading Hölderlin in both the
archive and in the laboratory. This article presents these Hölderlin readings in relation
to literary-scientific and cognitive-psychological dimensions, and scrutinizes them
concerning the particularities of the “literature exhibition” genre. It raises questions
about which forms of reading and aesthetic experience of literature are at all possible
in a literature exhibition, and what defines their distinctiveness in this context.

Keywords: Hölderlin; Poetry; Reading research; Exhibition; Archive; Esthetic experience

*Corresponding author:
Heike Gfrereis 1. Introduction
(heike.gfrereis@ilw.uni-stuttgart.de)
When contemplating literature exhibitions, one sentence seems inevitable: literature
Citation: Gfrereis H, 2023, How
to read Hölderlin in a literary cannot be exhibited. The argument goes that literary texts, unlike works of fine arts,
exhibition. Arts & Communication, are not meant for display. This assertion is grounded in their scope, their association
1(2): 1467.
https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1467 with the medium of the book, and their linguistic nature, which serves the purpose of
inventing and imagining stories. Consequently, it is argued that literature cannot be
Received: August 7, 2023 exhibited because its goal is to provide a specific literary experience — the identifying,
[1]
Accepted: September 20, 2023 immersive reading from the first to the last page and the continuous flow of deep

[2]
Published Online: November 3, 2023 reading . This justification is based on the novel as the literary guiding genre but ignores
many other forms of literature, such as the small, concise form “poem,” defined, among
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s).
This is an Open Access article other things, by its pictorial and manageable structure, as well as all forms of scenic oral
distributed under the terms of the expressions such as drama, epic, wit, anecdote, and song. This perspective also overlooks
Creative Commons Attribution other literary experiences beyond deep reading, including close reading, distant reading,
License, permitting distribution,
and reproduction in any medium, cross-reading, discontinuous, digressive, and social reading, which is networked with
provided the original work is other readers. All of these literary experiences are not consequences of digital change
properly cited. that are remote from literature; rather, they are consequences of the medium of the
[3]
Publisher’s Note: AccScience book. Peter Stallybrass refers to the “brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history
Publishing remains neutral with of discontinuous reading” as sunken reading, which has developed alongside reading
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional circles, excerpting methods, and book-reading machines. Thus, it is precisely within the
affiliations. initially trivial genre of the novel and its undisciplined reading that an idea of literature

Volume 1 Issue 2 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/ac.1467