Sprecher
Beschreibung
Literary agencies rarely appear in the archive as actors in their own right. They surface as senders of offers, as clauses in contracts, as recipients of statements. This paper takes that marginal position as its starting point and asks what mediation actually consists of when it is examined as work rather than judged by its outcome. Drawing on correspondence between Ruth Liepman and Fritz J. Raddatz and on the Baldwin contract files in the Rowohlt holdings, it reconstructs how a Zurich agency that represented publishers and other agencies, rather than authors, came to hold and defend a precarious position in a four-cornered network stretching from New York to London. The Baldwin case spans three decades and is unusually turbulent: representation is repeatedly contested, two theatre contracts take four years to sign, translation begins before any contract exists, and an advance is halved when the publisher doubts a play with a Black cast can be staged in German. However, the agency placed Baldwin's entire German-language œuvre with a publisher that backed him for twenty-five years, and it did so through precisely the frictions the files record: through arguing clause by clause, through repairing relationships, through waiting. Reading agency work from its conflicts makes visible a form of labour that success narratives, including the agency's own, tend to smooth away.
Speaker bio
Erika Thomalla is Assistant Professor of Book Studies and Digital Book Culture at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where she is based at the Zentrum für Buchwissenschaft. With Carlos Spoerhase she co-directs subproject A09 of the Collaborative Research Centre 1369 "Cultures of Vigilance," which investigates sensitive reading practices and hermeneutic vigilance between 1880 and 1970. Her current book project examines literary journalism in German-language periodicals from 1970 to 2010. Her research combines literary and media history with book studies, grounding questions of literary circulation in publication economics, circulation figures, press law, and the material conditions of production; recurring interests include recommendation networks, blurbs, publishers' catalogues, and informal censorship. She is the author of Gegenwart machen: Eine Oral History des Popjournalismus and the editor of a Text+Kritik volume on literary journalism. She also writes as a literary journalist and essayist.