The Literary Canon in the Age of New Media

The article offers a comparative overview of the diverging courses of the canon debate in Anglophone and Germanophone contexts. While the Anglophone canon debate has focused on the politics of canon composition, the Germanophone canon debate has been more concerned with the malleability and mediality of the canon. In a development that has largely gone unnoticed outside German speaking countries, new approaches for discussing current and future processes of canonization have been developed in recent years. One pivotal element of this process has been a thorough re-evaluation new media as a touchstone for both defining literature in the digital age and inquiring into the mechanisms of contemporary canon formation. The article is thus aimed at introducing both the specifically German approach to canon developed in recent years and its results to a larger scholarly community.