How does a blog become a novel? How do small forms relate to large ones? How does the present turn into history? And how do theory and praxis intersect in the daily act of writing? These are some of the questions addressed in Rainald Goetz's 1999 novel Abfall fur Alle that had started out as an Internet diary. Between February 1998 and January 1999, Goetz kept a practice of taking notes that he posted on his website on a daily basis. Consisting of various materials from shopping lists, descriptions of quotidian routines to more elaborate but mostly fragmented poetological reflections, these notes capture the everyday practice of writing and can therefore be emphatically characterized as Gegenwartsliteratur in a literal sense. The publication of the collected written material as a novel changes this perspective on the act of writing and confronts the literary practice with its formal demands, presence with repeatability, and praxis with theory. This paper focuses on Abfall fur Alle as a novel and discusses the poetological consequences that go along with the media transfer. In particular it focuses on the Poetikvorlesungen that Goetz presented at the University of Frankfurt and that he decided to include in the novel where they confront the daily attempts to capture the everyday reality of writing with the - failing but productive - attempts to reproduce this practice under the conditions of academic and poetic discourse.
