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MLN 115.3 (2000) 551-554



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Book Review

Grundlagen der Literaturwissenschaft:
Exemplarische Texte


Bernhard J. Dotzler, ed. Grundlagen der Literaturwissenschaft: Exemplarische Texte.. Köln: Böhlau, 1999, 421 pages.

This is a very stimulating, yet also unusual book. Commonly, introductions to literary studies introduce students to methodologies and explain their application. They attempt to teach their readers how to analyze literary texts, and they present current approaches which are considered state of the art. The structure of the present book is very different. In spite of its title, it does not intend any direct didactic uses. Rather, Grundlagen der Literaturwissenschaft: Exemplarische Texte presents the basic principles of literary studies indirectly by reprinting exemplary texts about literature--interpretations as well as methodological reflections--written by German literary critics during the last two hundred years. But who is to decide what is exemplary? Instead of positing an explicit and therefore debatable criterium of selection, the editor has asked a number of contemporary German literary critics to choose and introduce texts which they consider illuminating and still relevant. The result is an interesting and useful collection of essays. While the sequence does not add up to a consistent history of literary studies in Germany, it introduces the reader to a well-chosen cross-section of the spectrum of literary thought in Germany during the last two centuries, emphasizing the twentieth-century.

What, however, are the uses of reading earlier criticism, texts to which we are positioned in a double relation of hermeneutical difference? Do they still tell us something about the primary literary texts, or are these critical essays primarily documents of the history of the discipline? And, if this were the case, who should care, except intellectual historians? I think that there are more than merely historical reasons (which in themselves would be important) to study the history of the discipline at this moment, and these have to do with the present juncture in its development. The editor Bernhard Dotzler emphasizes this point when he remarks that the subtext of the book is a reconsideration of the history of literary criticism, its spectrum of approaches, implicit presumptions, and historical variety at a time when literary studies are being transformed into cultural studies: "Im Gewand der Anthologie älterer Texte geht es mithin [. . .] um den Nutzen ebendieser Texte im Zusammenhang neuer Fragestellungen. Welche Arbeiten aus dem Archiv althergebrachter Literaturwissenschaft bleiben beachtenswert, wenn denn tatsächlich--wie derzeit angestrebt wird--die ehemals sogenannten [End Page 551] Geistewissenschaften ihren Platz zugunsten von Kulturwissenschaften geräumt haben werden?" (VII). Therefore, the collection implicitly aims at the Geistesgeschichte of literary studies considered in terms of cultural history (VIII). The sequence of essays can thus be read as being symptomatic of the changing cultural functions of the scholarly interpretation and analysis of literature. Consequently, the design of the book invites two parallel, yet complementary reading approaches. The essays can be read with regard to the cultural and political contexts in which they were written, but they can also be used as concrete interpretations of literary and cultural phenomena.

Historically, the essays range from the eighteenth century to the 1980s. The earliest texts are two "Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend" by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1759-1765), followed by Johann Gottlieb Münch's study: Ueber den Einfluß der Criminal-Psychologie auf ein System des Criminal-Rechts, auf menschliche Gesetze und Cultur der Verbrecher published in 1799, which points forward to today's new historicism and "law and literature" studies and struck me as highly relevant for present cultural studies. August Wilhelm von Schlegel's "Abriß von den europäischen Verhältnissen der deutschen Litteratur"(1825) which proposes a comparatist program as the principle of "historical critique," and Georg Gottfried Gervinius's "Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung" (1835), an early and decisive example of German literary history, which stresses national characteristics (he has been called the "father" of German literary history), are both crucial documents of early literary criticism in Germany.

All other essays were written in the twentieth century. There are three essays on Goethe (by Karl Reinhardt, Max Kommerell, and Ernst Robert Curtius); a short...

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