Causerie
The causerie ( Latin causa '(original) thing' ; French causer 'chat' ) is an entertaining, educated chat in a literary or sociable form. Most of them are short, informal essayistic works or lectures; mostly it is about journalistic or literary topics.
Origin, history
The expression, common throughout Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, originally comes from a famous collection of essays by the French author and literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869), titled Causeries du lundi . This collection, then comprising 28 volumes, initially appeared steadily from 1849–1869 in a weekly column of around 3000 words each. It brought its author a professorship , the appointment of a senator and permanent celebrity (see article in the Encyclopedia Britannica ).
Theodor Fontane describes the literary method of conveying the way of thinking of his characters through dialogues as the technique of causerie .
Contemporary examples
In today's successor to the journalistic causerie, z. B. The Streiflicht of the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the political feature section on Deutschlandfunk Kultur . In book form, some of Sir Peter Ustinov's books and the literary critical works of Marcel Reich-Ranicki can be assigned to this form. On the Internet, the more demanding blogs (Internet diaries) correspond to it .
In Switzerland (especially in the German-speaking cantons), France and Great Britain, the term is very common for informal discussion groups and meetings. This ranges from mother self-help groups to medium-sized company presentations to vernissages , soirées about neoliberalism , literary circles or musician sessions called jazz causerie . In southern Germany and in the eastern German federal states, the term can also be found alive as a local social event. Institutional forms dominate here, e.g. B. as academic causerie of the Academy of Sciences, as cultural causerie of the city clerk in Mainz ( Mainz city clerk ), as causerie litteraire or musicale of the local adult education centers. Even in Finland and Japan, this term stands for a constant tradition of cultural exchange, which the web research shows.
See also
literature
- Wolf Lepenies : Sainte-Beuve. On the threshold of modernity . Hanser, C / VM, ISBN 3-446-19121-6 . Review: Manufacture of the Mind in the Age of Industrialization . In: Berliner Zeitung , October 14, 1997
- Dagmar Burkhart: Instead of an introduction: Causerie about the cultural topic of food in Polish literary texts. In: D. Burkhart, W. Klemm (ed.): Natura naturata. Objective world and cultures in Polish literature from the 19th century to the present. Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta 1997, ISBN 90-420-0129-1 , pp. 5-27 (Studies in Slavic Literature and Poetics; Vol. 29).
- Boris Mersson: A little chat = Petite causerie = Little intimity , version for 6 cellos (sheet music). Edition Modern, Karlsruhe 1996, ISMN M-2000-0084-9.
- Academic chat at the Axel Springer publishing house . In: Die Welt , May 16, 2003; Example as a German social event
Web links
- Causerie as a tradition of table talk
- Kultur-Causerie by Stadtschreiber Mainz 2003
- E-zine: Causerie
- Example web journalist. Causerie (English)
- Jazz causerie in Switzerland
- Student competition A golden day at school . Causerie in Finland
- Academic Causerie - Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
- Example of Japanese causeries