Style. Past and Present

One of the hallmarks of liberal democracies is the protection of stylistic diversity on all levels, from ways of life to art. However, one person’s style has always been another’s lack of style. This has, in recent times, led to intensified competition, an accelerating logic of outbidding styles, and the isolation of style communities in echo chambers, culminating in the hypostasization of their own style. Combined with the social and medial, ecological and economic shifts that have been disrupting the global stage for a number of years now, this has also strengthened populism in Germany. Taboos have been broken that were unthinkable for a long time in Germany—especially with regard to its culture of remembrance. The loss of style occasionally apostrophized as ‘brutalization’ has now been followed by actions. When styles lose their typical leeway between flexible normativity and rule-based freedom or selfdestruct through their claims to exclusivity, questions of style become questions of life (and even survival). Against this background, the project explores the long history of style in the arts, sciences and society.

The indestructibility of the concept of style, from the elocutio of ancient rhetoric to our present day ‘lifestyles,’ is directly related to its irritating vagueness and, accordingly, its diverse applications. Because style as a concept is difficult to grasp, it is used primarily where definitions and arguments fail. ‘Style’ embraces unstable phenomena of coherence and consistency that remain unresolved in distinctions between norm and obligation, on the one hand, and freedom and choice on the other or between individuality and sociality. Friedrich Möbius spoke in 1984 of the “synthesizing synopsis of even disparate phenomena,” Robert Musil in 1921 of style as a “prosthesis of truth,” and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, following Flaubert in 1986, called style “a way of seeing things that is detached from objects.” The fact that style as a concept is overdetermined and inaccessible to discursive argumentation does not mean, however, that its phenomena and effects cannot be analyzed in a context-dependent and functional way. The instruments offered by literary stylistics shall be examined, modified and expanded historically and systematically in an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective. To this end, a reading group on the topic of style has been meeting since the winter semester 2018/2019.

Current Research

Style Pluralism and the Longing for Style around 1900 and in the Present

Since the 19th century (Semper, Flaubert, Nietzsche, Proust), it has been precisely stylistic pluralism, the multiplying of stylistic options, that has fostered a desire for the ‘one’ or ‘true’ style. The “will for style” (Wustmann), prominent around 1900, can also be understood as a reaction to the vast proliferation of (artistic) media. As artists felt the need to orientate their artistic style to the medium—Alfred Döblin proclaimed the ‘cinema style’ for the modern novel as early as 1913—or at least to react to the changing media landscape, raises the question of whether this historical constellation provides a meaningful basis for comparing the significance of style today. Doubtlessly the interactive and collaborative elements of Web 2.0 have influenced the style(s) of contemporary literature. Authors, for instance, publish their work in advance or even exclusively on the Internet, integrate digital writing practices appropriated from social networks into their texts and/or react, reflect and criticize the impact that new writing and communication styles have on the way we perceive the present. Last but not least, readers are endowed with new roles, for example evaluating and sharing (authors’) posts or tweets, thus contributing to the success—and the style—of writers.

Thought Style and Collective Style

Drawing on Ludwik Fleck (but also Thomas S. Kuhn and Bruno Latour), the concept of a thought style has been made productive in the history of science, first for the history of the natural sciences, and more recently also for the history of linguistics. Thus, the heuristic potential of an appropriately sharpened concept of thought style can be mobilized for investigating a ‘school of writing’-style in contemporary literature. Do university courses such as ‘creative’ or ‘scenic’ writing impose what Fleck called a “thought constraint,” resulting in a specific, uniform style? How does this relate to the older tradition of writing as a craft? And how is the contemporary literary tendency of centring the author connected to these issues?

Style and narratology

While literary studies (with the exception of Romance studies) have long neglected style and stylistics, they are currently, following linguistics and in addition to empirical aesthetics, making greater efforts to explore the possibilities of digitally supported and primarily quantitatively organized stylometry. However, such interests often remain secretly tied to narratological parameters, thus obscuring a possible competition between style and narrative procedures, both in the literary tradition itself and its scholarship. It was narratology, methodologically more advanced than style analysis, that in recent decades placed style in the blind spot of scientific reflection.

Rupture of Style

Canonizing in art and literature is dependent on stylistic ruptures, if only because a style can mostly be identified only after its demise. Since the privileging of originality in the last third of the 18th century, literary historiography has been oriented towards what is new in each case, but without recognising the alleged breakthrough as a stylistic break. As a result, stereotypical juxtapositions such as rhetoric vs. style or organic artwork of the classical vs. fragmentary modernism still organize the field today. With the concept of stylistic rupture,  conventional innovation-centric models can be enriched dialectically. However, ever since Susan Sontag’s investigations into Camp and the emergence of pop literature, manner, jargon, attitude can no longer readily be regarded as the ‘other’ of style. Rather, a conformist style can be subversive and, conversely, the rupture of style can solidify into a convention. On the one hand, this makes the potential of the stylistic rupture visible as an analytical historical category, but on the other hand, by including its counter-concepts, it also imports new problems: its relational character turns into relativism.

Drasticism

Within the framework of the key project, a proposal on the phenomenon of drasticism in contemporary philosophy and literature is currently underway (applicants: Eva Geulen, Ludger Schwarte; researchers: Georg Dickmann, Pola Groß; collaboration: Claude Haas). Contemporary media such as Twitter and social networks promote a certain, drastic form of speech, one which populist politics in particular attempt to use for their own purposes. This project explores what this implies for literary and theoretical texts that make use of comparable stylistic procedures. After all, breaking taboos, transgressing, or ‘speaking the truth’ (parrhesia), often presented as reckless, provocative speech, have a long tradition. The currently recurring linguistic escapades, however,  confront this philosophical and literary practice with considerable challenges, challenges that the project seeks to address systematically. Is it still possible, in view of the developments of recent years, to employ authentic forms of drastic speaking and writing? Which stylistic register must they display in order to be distinguishable from popular or populist forms of drastic writing?