When we speak of "Temporal Communities" and "Competing Communities" (the titles, respectively, of Freie Universität’s Cluster of Excellence and its Research Area 1), what do we mean by community? This terminology advances a methodological claim. Abstractly put, to study community according to the praxis-centred model proposed by the Cluster means to tap into the historical reflexivity of temporal communities. It means to ask if and how specific literary collectives thought and wrote about themselves as communities. It means to reconstruct how they conceived of their collectivity, how they imagined a sense of cohesion for themselves, and how they kept doing so over time, developing competing identities and serialised intelligibilities (rather than expressing a unified communal essence). Communities are dependent on praxis – a dimension of their existence that needs to be studied for each case anew, before offering a definition on one’s own terms, but also without relinquishing the possibility of a generalising perspective as it emerges from a dialogue of historical-praxeological projects. In fact, the projective integration of bottom-up approaches may be a particularly appropriate method for the study of literary communities, because it acknowledges that the term community is itself a literary one: a term inflected by stories, fantasies, and all kinds of mental constructs.