Performative competency as basis for economically successful activity in Spanish and French novels of the early modern age. A historic discourse analysis of the correlation between theatrality, economics and subjectivity in 'minor' novelistic literature from Lazarillo de Tormes to Gil Blas

• Applicant: Dr. Urs Urban
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313598971

The planned study wants to retrieve the literary knowledge about of the economic man in texts which have come into existence in the age 'before literature' (i.e. before the development of a literary field or system in the 18th century). The history of the entrepreneurial self reaches far back into history: it can be traced back till the moment when an early antetype of the bourgeois subject emanates from the interplay of theatrical and economic behaviour and becomes visible in the mediatic dispositive - i.e. on the scenes of theatres or in the literary text. Already in the Spanish literature of the second half of the 16th century such a constellation can be observed: In the picaresque novel (Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmán de Alfarache, Pícara Justina, Buscón, Marcos de Obregón), subject, theatrality and economics meet in a paradigmatically new way. Here, the promise of the providential oikonomia that interconnects feudal and divine order is eroded by a new social logic which correlates exchange (Tausch) and the production of illusion (Täuschung) and that is market and spectacle. In the picaresque novel (already), that is what I want to affirm, performative competency turns out to be the basis of economically successful activity - already here exchange (Tausch) and the production of illusion (Täuschung) are functionally interlocked. And, this complex of problems shifts into 17th century French novel (Histoire comique de Francion, Le Page disgracié, Le Roman comique, Le Roman bourgeois) in order to give birth to the bourgeois subject that finds its final expression in the modern novel. The Lazarillo thus marks the beginning of a history of the literary modellation of the economic man. The study aims at reconstructing the literary genealogy of this subject with simultaneous consideration of its profiling in economically determined discursive contexts (which, they too, exist 'before economy': from Luis Ortiz, Montchrestien and Jacques Savary to Adam Smith and Jung-Stilling).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants