Words and Things

Hardly any other field in museum practice has changed so fundamentally in the last few decades as the exhibiting of literature. The move away from an author-centred view of literature has led the longstanding recipe of “the life and work” to lose some of its appeal – and thus the cult of personality which worked, not least, through the auratisation of authentic objects, residences, and workplaces of writers. Today, literature exhibitions are posing entirely new questions. They are discovering other, polyvocal connections between biography and text. They are giving a new role to “things” from literary estates. They revolve around the question of what actually happens if we dispense with the author as the exclusive vanishing point of literary texts. Can a novel, for instance, be exhibited? How can the immateriality of literature and writing processes be captured in space? And to what extent does exhibiting, as a material medium, have the potential to become its own form of knowledge in the process? The workshop aims to present and discuss different exhibition concepts. Based on the various permanent and temporary exhibitions in the German Literature Archive in Marbach am Neckar, we shall work together to explore the number of ways in which the relationship between author, text, and object can be thought.