To Be in or Not to Be: A Critical-Theoretical Framing of Liminality, Deviance, and Reading Practices in German-Language Modernism (1890–1940).

The article elaborates a critical-theoretical framework for the analysis of German-language modernist prose (1890–1940) by articulating a triadic nexus between the figuration of marginality (liminal and deviant subject-positions), the formal means through which such figuration is rendered intelligible (openness, indeterminacy, intertextuality, metalepsis), and the hermeneutic-historiographical regimes that have governed their reception and canonization. Drawing on Victor Turner’s concept of the liminoid and Howard S. Becker’s sociology of deviance, marginality is reconceptualized not as thematic content but as an immanent aesthetic operator that organizes narrative form and interpretive protocols. Through three case studies (Margarete Böhme, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Helene Böhlau), the essay demonstrates that the representation of deviance is structurally coextensive with formal strategies that suspend adjudication, dislocate epistemic authority, and destabilize juridical, medical, and moral discourse. Deviance emerges as a processual effect of ‘labeling’ and narrative mediation, while liminality is formalized as structural non-closure: fragmentation, parataxis, perspectival disjunction, and recursive framing produce texts that resist epistemic stabilization. In this sense, modernist form operates as an “open work” (Eco 1962; 1989) and as a site of co-constitutive meaning production (Iser 1974), wherein reading is repositioned as an ethically charged practice of negotiating indeterminacy rather than resolving it. At the level of critical methodology, the article advances the concept of ‘fake reading’ to designate interpretive regimes that instrumentalize literary texts by subsuming them under pre-given schemas, thereby enacting forms of epistemic injustice. Against such reductive appropriations, the framework integrates formalist analysis, sociological theory, and reception aesthetics into a mode of reading that is both analytically rigorous and politically reflexive. Reading is thus theorized as a site of epistemic struggle, in which the reproduction or suspension of normative categories is at stake. From this perspective, the margins of the canon are reconfigured as zones of heightened formal and epistemic productivity, where modernism’s constitutive operations – its refusal of closure, redistribution of interpretive agency, and interrogation of institutional knowledge – are most legible. German modernism thereby emerges not as a purely stylistic formation but as an epistemic apparatus that rearticulates the conditions under which marginality can be represented, interpreted, and known.