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RITUAL AND AESTHETIC PRESENTIVITY autosuggestion of pietistic inwardness looked for the social space created by a community of people who shared their opinions, enabling them to articulate their thoughts and thereby bring themselves to being. Consequently, pietistic rituals were equally productive in the literary sphere. Religions are always discourses of aesthetic experience. This is why religion and art are so closely linked. Sacred and profane rituals alike both require and create aesthetics. In this regard, substantial evidence from ritual theory suggests that religion, on the one hand, and art, literature, music, and (sacred) theater, on the other, developed in parallel during the cultural evolution. They constantly referred to each other, and then continued to differentiate themselves from one another. They cannot simply be derived from one another (for example, ritual cannot be derived from myth, and myth cannot be derived from ritual, as the old dispute in ritual studies goes). Even today, all dimensions of literature reveal “its numerous links to the ritual, whether in its production and reception, its aesthetic form, its structure, its content and thematic positioning, its social connection, its social placement, and its social organization.” This list speaks of the potential held by aesthetic affirmation, which literature always has, too. This is particularly evident in literature which is “applied” to a ritual and directly included within it as functional literature. Literature must therefore be researched within this context, which shapes its aesthetics and poetics. This is especially true for ritual texts that play a role within a religious context (liturgical texts, psalms, litanies, Christmas and Easter texts). However, even when used in profane social ways, literary texts are made accessible for ritual practices and used under the auspices of such practices (writers’ unions, writers’ cults, the honouring of writers, readings, clubs and literary associations, book fairs, etc.). “Cult books” and “cult authors” are currently playing a key role in literary modernity (Salinger, Hesse).° The matter appears to become much more complex when an individual’s reception of literature is considered. However, the reader still participates in the aesthetic of the ritual, which gives a sense of community. People who write and read form part of a symbolic community, even though the reader remains an independent individual. Establishing a community by remaining an individual is the ritual secret of literature. This secret is indebted to the force of form and expression, which gives both order and direction. A major new challenge arises when the systems of literature and art differentiate themselves from one another and change their focus, taking subjectivity as their specific 5 Wolfgang Braungart: Ritual und Literatur, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1996, 17. ° Christian Klein: Kultbücher: Theoretische Zugänge und exemplarische Analysen, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2014. + ]7 +
