Beyond Novels—Beyond Theory?

This final chapter of case studies goes beyond theory in novels by looking at a book of poems and a film. Jan Wagner’s collection of poems The Owl Haters in the Hall Houses presents three fictional poets and their texts—and also the first, partly ironic, partly useful steps of literary criticism working on them. An interpretation of Wagner’s poems must therefore take into account that they have already been ‘processed’ by analysis before criticism has even had a chance to deal with them. Interpretation is thus at best possible on a second-order level, which comprises a perspective on the first level of interpretation preformed within the literary text itself. Marc Forster’s film Stranger than Fiction can be seen as a cinematic presentation of literary theory, dealing with the relationship between narrator, character, and reader, and ironically crossing the boundaries between the three. The film is about observations and the influence of the observer on the observation. In the end, the film emphasizes the importance of life in relation to literature and theory and can therefore be considered a continuous oscillation between presenting theory, ironizing it, or abandoning it in favor of ‘the real’.