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By imagining realities, literature comments on the world. The presentation of literature provides us with a key to these realities. To remain vibrant, forms of presenting literature constantly need to adapt to the needs of a changing society. The conventional reading, with the author on a podium in front of an audience, draws a spatial boundary between author and audience and is based on an assumed hierarchy of communication where the author, the presenter, and the audience all have their fixed roles. The author is asked as an authority to explain their own text, and their prerogative of interpretation is rarely questioned. By contrast, the people who attend the reading generally remain passive listeners confined to the space in front of the podium. Their conventionalised format and roles make such readings predictable. But it is in fact productive interruptions that give rise to a personal engagement with texts where literature begins to have an impact.
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What concrete forms can the vibrant presentation of literature take today? What new images can be used to convey the aesthetic fascination with literature? What opportunities for presenting literature effectively in the public sphere does this create? And how can such vibrant forms of presenting literature help to spark young people’s interest in literature in the cultural metropolis of Berlin, integrating them as vocal participants into the city’s multifaceted and international cultural life while they are still at school?
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The project “¿comment! – Reading is Writing is Reading”poses that “how”-question (in French) and simultaneously calls (in English) for a “comment” as one possibility of engaging with the literary text. Berlin writers suggest writers from the French- and English-speaking worlds, who are as yet unknown in Germany. These writers and their works (poetry or prose) are then presented to a German audience for the first time by way of reader commentaries. Together with small groups of schoolchildren, professional German-speaking readers – translators, actors, literary critics, editors, scholars, writers, and publishers – leave their comments as a symbolic expression of their personal engagement with the text. Depending on the inclinations of the young participants, these comments may be in writing or they may take the form of filmic/visual or acoustic presentations, which are documented in a blog on the project website.
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In this way the interpretations that the translator, the actor and others inscribe into the text, which already attract the audience’s attention in many readings, are explicitly revealed as a continuation of the original text. The entry of different reader commentaries relativizes the author’s prerogative of interpretation, and perhaps even calls it into question. Thus traces accrue in the text, which pave new ways to the audience. Be they analytical elucidations, provocative objections, imagined sequels, or points of literary criticism, the commentaries on the margins of the text form discursive crossroads, fast lanes, and dead ends, which invite the audience to follow or contradict.
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In virtual space and in real space during the four literary events planned for November 2014, the commentaries of readers – professionals and schoolchildren – will be on an equal footing with the author, the original text, and various translations of it. Depending on the characteristics of the original texts and the commentaries, these literary events – each of which is curated by a different Berlin writer – will adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to experiment with the spatial situation and work with visual and acoustic means: the reading as a polyphonic reading concert, as a room installation, as a performance, etc. Here, the vibrant presentation of literature manifests itself as an open-ended search for forms of representing and communicating that are appropriate to the text at hand, as an attempt to answer the question “comment?” formulated in the title of the project.