Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft

1. Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft Methoden der Literaturwissenschaft

2. Aufgaben • Durchdringung der Schichten des Textes • Klärung der Funktion der Literaturwissenschaft • David Lodge: Small World. New York 1984, S. 26: • „Theory?“ Philip Swallow’s ears quivered under their silvery thatch, a few places further up the table. „That word brings out the Goering in me. When I hear it I reach for my revolver.“„Then you’re not going to like my lecture, Philip,“ said Morris Zapp.

3. Geschichte der Literaturwissenschaft • vor dem 19. Jahrhundert Vorstellungen und Regeln der antiken Tradition • Romantik: Idee von nationaler Kunst als Ausdruck eines Volkes • ab Mitte 19. Jh. Positivismus • Sammeln, Sichten und Einordnen von Fakten • Übertragung von naturwiss. Prinzipien auf GKW • Suche nach kausalen Gesetzen • Taine: race, milieu, moment; Sainte-Beuve: tel arbre, tel fruit • Blütezeit-Theorie von Wilhelm Scherer: • Wellenberge der deutschen Literatur um 1200 und 1800; Zyklentheorien • Biographien, Quellenforschung, Editionen…

4. Marxistische Literaturwissenschaft • Frage nach gesellschaftlicher Funktion der Literatur • Text ist Produkt menschlicher Arbeit • spiegelt die bestehenden materiellen Verhältnisse wider und greift in sie ein • materielle Basis bedingt ideologischen Überbau • Kultur eigene innere Entwicklung

5. Textimmanente Literaturkritik • verneint Einflüsse von außen auf den Rezipienten • Interpretation als Auseinandersetzung des Subjekts mit dem Werk • Einzigartigkeit des Kunstwerks auf subjektiver Basis erleben • Leser als Tabula rasa

6. Hermeneutik • Einbeziehung der Subjektivität der lesenden Person und des historischen Horizonts • Hermeneutische Spirale (Zirkel) • Interpret verfügt über Vorverständnis • 1. Lektüre – Projektion eines Sinnzusammenhanges • Überprüfung dieser Hypothesen durch 2. Lektüre usw. • Ergebnisse an „Vorurteile“ des Subjekts gebunden • Vorurteile sind Produkt unserer Geschichte (Gadamer) • ständiger Wechsel von Induktion und Deduktion (ausgestreckter Arm – Nase)

7. System oder nicht ? • Strukturalismus und Systemtheorie • Dichtung als System • literarisches Werk = Summe aller stilistischen Mittel • Struktur ist das innere Gefüge des sprachlichen Textes, Beziehungsnetz von stilistischen Relationen hinter der äußeren Kette (Eiffelturm) • Konstruktivismus leitet aus dem „Gedächtnis der Wörter“ Sinn ab • Fetisch = Fee + Tisch. • Dekonstruktivismus: Neues aus der Zerlegung

8. Semiotik • Verknüpfung der Sinneinheiten im Text • Modelle der narrativen Organisation • Mythen (Cl. Lévi-Strauss) oder Märchen (V. Propp) • Aktantenmodell von A. J. Greimas: • Aktant = Träger von Handlungsrollen, erfüllt bestimmte Funktion, agens oder patiens • narrative Organisation nach Handlungsregeln • tragische Gefühlskette bei Racine (A liebt B, B liebt C und C liebt A) • Intrigenstruktur einer Dreiecksgeschichte: A handelt so, dass B verführt und C betrogen wird; B leistet A zuerst Widerstand, wechselt aber Position nach äußerem Einfluss; C rächt sich an B, indem er A beseitigt.

9. Enthüllung des Sinnes • To understand a message is to decode it. Language is a code. But every decoding is another encoding. If you say something to me I check that I have understood your message by saying it back to you in my own words, that is, different words from the ones you used, for if I repeat your own words exactly you will doubt whether I have really understood you. [...] • Reading, of course, is different from conversation. It is more passive in the sense that we can’t interact with the text, we can’t affect the development of the text by our own words, since the text’s words are already given. That is what perhaps encourages the quest for interpretation. If the words are fixed once and for all, on the page, may not their meaning be fixed also? Not so, because the same axiom, every decoding is another encoding, applies to literary criticism even more stringently than it does to ordinary spoken discourse. [...] The reader plays with himself as the text plays upon him, plays upon his curiosity, desire, as a striptease dancer plays upon her audience’s curiosity and desire. [...]

10. Enthüllung des Sinnes • The classical tradition of striptease, which goes back to Salome’s dance of the seven veils and beyond, offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. [...] To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; [...]

11. Wozu ? • „I have just one question,“ said Philip Swallow. „It is this: what, with the greatest respect, is the point of our discussing your paper if, according to your own theory, we should not be discussing what you actually said at all, but discussing some imperfect memory or subjective interpretation of what you said?“„There is no point,“ said Morris Zapp blithely. „If by point you mean the hope of arriving at some certain truth. But when did you ever discover that in a question-and-discussion session? Be honest, have you ever been to a lecture or seminar at the end of which you could have found two people present who could agree on the simplest précis of what had been said?“„Then what in God’s name is the point of it all?“ cried Philip Swallow, throwing his hands into the air.„The point, of course, is to uphold the institution of academic literary studies. [...]“

12. Englische Schule • eklektisch, romantische Hermeneutik mit moralischen Ideen • Philip Swallow was the first to speak. He said the function of criticism was to assist in the function of literature itself, which Dr. Johnson had famously defined as enabling us better to enjoy life, or better to endure it. The great writers were men and women of exceptional wisdom, insight and understanding. Their novels, plays and poems were inexhaustible reservoirs of values, ideas, images, which, when properly understood and appreciated, allowed us to live more fully, more finely, more intensely. But literary conventions changed, history changed, language changed, and these treasures too easily became locked away in libraries, covered with dust, neglected and forgotten. It was the job of the critic to unlock the drawers, blow away the dust, bring out the treasures into the light of day. Of course, he needed certain specialist skills to do this: a knowledge of history, a knowledge of philology, of generic convention and textual editing. But above all he needed enthusiasm, the love of books. It was by the demonstration of this enthusiasm in action that the critic forged a bridge between the great writers and the general reader.

13. Französische Schule • strukturalistisch • Michel Tardieu said that the function of criticism was not to add new interpretations and appreciations of Hamlet or Le Misanthrope or Madame Bovary or Wuthering Heights to the hundreds that already existed in print or the thousands that had been uttered in classrooms and lecture theatres, but to uncover the fundamental laws that enabled such works to be produced and understood. If literary criticism was supposed to be knowledge, it could not be founded on interpretation, since interpretation was endless, subjective, unverifiable, unfalsifiable. What was permanent, reliable, accessible to scientific study, once we ignored the distracting surface of actual texts, were the deep structural principles and binary oppositions that underlay all texts that had ever been written and that ever would be written: paradigm and syntagm, metaphor and metonymy, mimesis and diegesis, stressed and unstressed, subject and object, culture and nature.

14. Deutsche Schule • idealistisch, textimmanent • Siegfried von Turpitz said that, while he sympathized with the scientific spirit in which his French colleague approached the difficult question of defining the essential function of criticism in both its ontological and teleological aspects, he was obliged to point out that the attempt to derive such a definition from the formal properties of the literary art-object as such was doomed to failure, since such art-objects enjoyed only an as it were virtual existence until they were realized in the mind of a reader. (When he reached the word ’reader’ he thumped the table with his black-gloved fist.)

15. Italienische Schule • marxistisch • Fulvia Morgana said that the function of criticism was to wage undying war on the very concept of ’literature’ itself, which was nothing more than an instrument of bourgeois hegemony, a fetichistic reification of so-called aesthetic values erected and maintained through an elitist educational system in order to conceal the brutal facts of class oppression under industrial capitalism. • Amerikanische Schule: textsemiotisch • Morris Zapp said more or less what he had said at the Rumming conference.

16. Expressive theories • a. have a ‘metaphysical’ conception of the function of art; they are individualistic (stress originality), anti-rationalistic, anti-imitative, anti-rhetorical; conceive of writing as a creative act; accentuate the primacy of the suggestive, symbolic, image (the use of ‘indirections’); consider the lyrical poem to be the literary norm; • b. emphasize spontaneity and the role of feelings in the creative process; • c. the poet in their view is entirely subjective; he expresses his individual feelings and thereby the essence of life and the universe (poet as prophet); the poem is the result of organic growth.

17. Objective theories • a. share the aspect mentioned sub a. with expressive theories; • b. emphasize conscious, cool workmanship in writing; strive for clearness; • c. consider the poem itself, separated from its author (‘un objet de consistance propre’ – Valéry) as the potential incorporation of the metaphysical secret; the poem creates its own reality; the poet uses words as raw material, but at a certain stage he surrenders the initiative to the language; the poem has to be clear, but cannot be simple (‘une énigme de cristal’ – Valéry); the poet often is obsessed by the possibilities and limitations of language – numerous poems are centred upon the writing of poetry.

18. Mimetic theories • a. have a practical, worldly, conception of the function of art; they aspire at an objective representation of reality, at impersonality, stress the typical rather than the individual; are often didactic, moralistic - non-lyrical; • b. to a certain extent they often share b. with expressive theories (no preoccupation by conscious elaborate craftsmanship); • c. show no special concern for genre, for the separation of levels of style, or of subjects.

19. Pragmatic theories • a. / b. share a. with mimetic and b. with objective conceptions; • c. pursue their effects by a consciously applied rhetoric strategy, orderly and well-defined, often ignoring the social implications – though not the moral aspect – of mimetic theories, and show a particular concern for consistent use of language. • It goes without saying that the four diachronic columns are not without their interrelations. [...] any reasonably adequate theory takes some account of all four elements.

20. Herbert Seidler • Was ist Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft ? • Vortrag, Akademie der Wissenschaften 1973 • Einführung • Aktualität, gegenwärtige Lage • Fragen • Historischer Rückblick • Weltliteratur bis zur Romantik • ab Romantik patriotische Fixierung auf Nationalliteratur

21. Littérature comparée: Einflussforschung bilaterale Bilanzen positivistisch Comparative Literature: multikulturelle Gesellschaft der USA Stilvergleiche und Theorie New Criticism Deutschland nach 1945: Bewältigung des Nationalsozialismus Stoffgeschichte Osteuropa: Kontakt- und Wechselbeziehungen typologische Analogien Begriffe ? Gefahren ? Möglichkeiten ? Historische Entwicklung

22. Begriff: Objekt Literatur, über eine Sprache hinaus Literatur eines mehrsprachigen Staates ? Allgemeine / Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft ? Gefahren: Veräußerlichung oberflächliche Einflussforschung übertriebene Anforderungen zu großes Forschungsgebiet ideologische Vereinnahmung Argumentation

23. Wirkungsforschung gegen Veräußerlichung auf Epochen begrenzte Projekte gegen übertriebene Anforderungen Bedeutung der Sprache und ihrer Unterschiede gegen Ideologisierung Ausblick: Konzentration auf Homologien der Entwicklung, Epochen, Gattungen usw. Regionale Spezialitäten Mitteleuropa Ergänzung und Zusammenführung der einzelnen Philologien Möglichkeiten