ADrian Daub is a literary scholar, and in his new book he examines:Texts. He writes about poetics, genres and the power of the fictional, refers to Gottsched and Lessing, pursues hermeneutics and conceptual history. But Daub’s book is not a textbook. It is not or only marginally about literary texts, but about a genre that is only identified as such here, as a peculiar form of depicting peculiar content that is recurring and recognizable and has been very present and prominent for some time .
It’s about “cancel culture texts” – texts that warn against cancel culture or lament it. They are preferably published as articles in newspapers, in the USA, as Daub emphasizes, mainly in political departments, in German-speaking countries more in feature articles. Their authors and many of their readers consider them to be indications of an impending reality or one that has already occurred, but according to Daub, Cancel Culture texts rely on imagination and fiction, obscuring realities instead of depicting them. And thereby create realities that Daub’s text warns against.
