Abundance today is strongly connected with the attribute superfluous in its negative evaluation. It mainly describes problems related to ‚too much‘: too much data to process, too much CO2 to ever compensate, too many big banks to save, or too many books to ever read. We live – according to a pessimistic diagnosis associated with abundance – in a negatively understood abundance society, in which the utopian side of the term has precisely not been realized, but rather crisis follows crisis. This negative understanding, however, neglects the positive, even utopian side of the concept, which has always been an integral part of the ambivalence of abundance. It is precisely in this ambivalence that the theoretical potential of the concept resides. Literature reflects the ambivalence at the very extremes of abundance – be they positive or negative. The talk proposes a reconfiguration of the literary history of modernity under the sign of abundance. To this end, it analyzes texts by Gustav Freytag, Thomas Mann, and Vicki Baum.
Sebastian Meixner is Oberassistent at the University of Zurich and principal investigator of his research group “Poetics of Abundance” funded through the Swiss National Science Foundation.
