Komparatistik : Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft ; 2017
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Genealogy and philology
(2018)
The present paper deals with the use of the term "genealogy" in theory. Markus Winkler first tries to highlight the hidden metaphorical status of this use and the ambiguity that it conveys. In doing so, Winkler tries to outline how this metaphoricity and its inherent ambiguity may be brought to fruition in the philological analysis of texts and in theory itself. The paper is subdivided as follows: 1. The use of the term "genealogy" in theory and the interest of this use to philology. 2. A philological comment on the metaphorical status of this use and its inherent ambiguity inherited from mythical genealogy as a form of founding narrative. 3. The imitation of mythical genealogy and its inherent ambiguity in theory (Nietzsche) and literature (Goethe). 4. Genealogy's ambiguity in theory: an example taken from current political discourse. 5. Conclusion.
One characteristic of the work of Roland Barthes - and of that of other structuralist theorists - is the attempt to replace traditional forms of academic criticism, its unreflected claim of objectivity, and its dominant methods of 'text explanation' by science-based approaches which draw extensively on the ideas and terminology of theoretical corpora. [...] The relation between Barthes' position and philology deserves a closer look, however. What exactly is Barthes opposing under the label 'philology'? And do Barthes' theoretical advancements actually present a radical rupture with philology or do they not, at least to some extent, also build on philological methodology? To put it differently: do Barthes' works not, rather than entirely refuting philological methods of reading, serve to re-orientate philology itself - in line with or going beyond other contemporary views? To answer these questions, it will be necessary to sketch out at least roughly which notions of philology are and which are not compatible with Barthes' theory of the text, and which notions of philology may even form an integral part of his approach. If we come to the conclusion that philological interpretation does indeed form a part of Barthes' theoretical as well as practical endeavour, it will be important to determine its exact place and function. What happens to philology in such a theoretical environment? Is it simply given a 'facelift' or is it adapted to theoretical insights that cannot be dismissed? Ultimately, these questions point toward the aesthetic aspects of Barthes' theoretical language. Therefore, Regine Strätling examines whether a particular relation between theory and philology has had a part in the overwhelming success and the obvious attractiveness of Barthes' language of theory. Her emphasis will be on Barthes' essay S/Z, one of his most technical literary analyses as well as his most extensive and meticulous analysis of a literary text. Barthes himself promoted his 1970 essay as the first exhaustive structural analysis of a narrative text. With regard to the state of the art of structuralist textual analysis, Barthes claimed that after a period dedicated to extracting the macro-structures of texts, structuralism now had to face a new challenge: it had to proceed to a more comprehensive approach, also taking into account the micro-structures of a given text. And indeed, although Barthes in S/Z does not proceed literally word by word, he very nearly does so.
In recent times a whole range of theoretical approaches in literary and cultural studies have been inspired by linguistic and philological issues, by questions concerning the functioning of language as well as the conceptual history of cardinal terms of our cultural heritage. Among these approaches the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben stands out as a particularly interesting case. Indeed, Agamben's approach can serve to illustrate how a concern with language animates the making of theory. This becomes perhaps most evident in one of Agamben's less widely read texts, namely his "Sacrament of language", an investigation of the historical genealogy and cultural significance of the oath. [...] In Agamben's inquiry into the genealogy of the 'sacramento' he seeks to find out how the oath functions as a linguistic procedure and what issues are involved in this operation. In the following explanations Linda Simonis proceeds in three steps: First, she retraces Agamben's historical and linguistic analysis of the oath and tries to expose the basic lines and principal thrust of his reasoning (I). In a second step, she then turns to a concrete literary example, i. e. the oath-taking scene in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (II). In an attempt to re-interpret this famous scene, the proposed analysis aims to unfold, in the light of Agamben's approach, some of its less obvious aspects of meaning and implications. To conclude, Simonis asks what insights and conclusions can be drawn from this analysis with regard to Agamben's theoretical approach and in how far the latter can be said to gain from its linguistic awareness and its concern with commissive speech (III).
The rise of the New Historicism or Cultural Poetics in the nineteen-eighties introduced a new school of cultural theory and inaugurated the end of the so-called New Criticism in English studies at American universities and beyond. As a founding member of the movement Stephen Greenblatt is closely associated with the New Historicism, which emerged in the 1980s. [...] What, then, are the key terms and principal aims of Greenblatt's innovative approach? The contextualization of poetic texts within cultural and political history as well as within an intellectual network of different discourses seemed vital and productive. [...] New Historicists operate by fusing two key issues in criticism since the 1960s: the 'linguistic turn' of post-structuralist and deconstructive criticism, and a return to historical readings. [...] Moreover, Stephen Greenblatt, proves to be very language-oriented in his studies. [...] In the following, Annette Simonis' contribution investigates on which levels and in what different respects Greenblatt focuses on (poetic) language and script as key elements and the foundation stone of modern cultures in his recent book "The Swerve. How the World Became Modern" (2011). Moreover, it explores in how far Greenblatt, in the wake of a recent material turn in the studies of culture, considers the process of writing itself as a crucial component in the analysis of cultural development, which he therefore closely examines in its particular material and aesthetic dimensions. As will become evident, the author is fascinated by Renaissance book culture serving simultaneously as a vehicle of intellectual ideas and a medium of art. It seems rewarding in many respects to analyze more closely Greenblatt's recent publication on the Renaissance. On the one hand the work indicates a careful reorientation in new historicist methodology, reflected in the author's attitude towards the texts themselves, which now takes into consideration the material basics and environments of writing as a cultural technique sui generis; on the other the book testifies Greenblatt's surprising accomplishments as an essayist and storyteller, as he elegantly moves on the borderline between fiction and non-fiction.
This paper will explore in how far 'political speech' in the emphatic sense Rancière gives these terms can be found in current discourses of migration. After a discussion of Rancière's theories in relation to language and politics, Kathrin Schödel turns to paradigmatic examples of engagements with migration, especially those trying to establish a more positive view of migrants. These will be analysed with regard to two main questions: firstly, what kinds of interventions can be seen as 'political speech acts,' that is, as constituting a particular rupture in existing discourses. Secondly, what does this rupture entail as to reconsidering migration and ultimately envisioning political possibilities beyond the exclusionary 'partitions' established by national(ist) politics and a global economy of inequality.
In the age of globalization, we cannot reflect about Comparative Literary Studies and "Languages of Theory" without contemplating how cross-liminality and transculturality might be lived in a mobile, medialized and rapidly changing world. Art and literature have always mirrored, transmitted and evaluated critically social, moral, and aesthetical values. How, then, can this task be fulfilled on a transnational literary and cultural level in a rapidly growing world community of letters, authors and readers? In this paper, Dagmar Reichardt promotes the notion of "transculturality", first proposed as a basic model of conviviality by the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969) in the 1940s and then, from the 1990s onwards, taken up and adapted, both terminologically and conceptually, to Third Millennium culture by the German philosopher and theorist of postmodernity Wolfgang Welsch (b. 1946). Reichardt argues that at this moment in history, in the interest of peacemaking and sustainability and for the sake of humanity, transcultural skills and a shared understanding of transcultural coexistence, both theoretical and practical, are indispensable. From a methodological point of view that is related to the History of Knowledge, Reichardt begins chronologically by introducing the work of Fernando Ortiz and then briefly tracing the reception of his most crucial cultural analysis in order to connect, in a second sub-chapter, its theoretical interests to Wolfgang Welsch's publications. In a third step, Reichardt briefly demonstrates the potential of the transcultural approach by showing paradigmatically its applicability to a colonial (Italian) novel, reread, as it were, through a transcultural lens, before coming to her conclusions.
It may indeed seem that while the late 1970s and early 1980s were the period when theory was successfully established in western academic discourse, we have now entered an era "after theory" in which not only 'cultural theory' has come to an end but also a specific culture of theory has vanished from our seminars, departments, and universities: a culture of reflection, abstraction, and self-referentiality that had been at the heart of the humanities from the very beginning. And yet, theory is not so easily abolished but rather stored and maintained within each individual reading of a literary text in spite of empirical trends such as DH or pessimistic manifestos. Therefore, in what follows, Nicolas Pethes is interested in an additional aspect of the textual resistance of theory against the institutional resistance to theory: the relation between theory and practice, that is: the question whether acting is also one of the many languages of theory.
Theory's engagement with language on the one hand, with literature's potential to generate knowledge that is theoretically relevant on the other, has a long history. One of its roots lies in the approach to culture and society developed by enlightenment anthropology and philosophy. In this paper Christian Moser intends to analyze the function attributed to language in eighteenth-century theories of the origin of culture and society. What we nowadays call 'cultural theory' is genealogically related to these early investigations into the constitution of human society. Social theories of the enlightenment first emerged in the contexts of a secularized universal history and the nascent discourses of anthropology and the philosophy of history. They often took the form of a 'conjectural history': speculations about the origin of society and its institutions; the origin of government, of law, and of social inequality; all of them linked systematically to the origin of language. While present-day cultural theory no longer harbours this obsession with origins, it still carries with it a rich legacy of enlightenment thought, not least its idea that social structure and linguistic structure are interconnected. Therefore it seems apposite to trace back current 'languages of theory' to eighteenth-century 'theories of language' and their interplay with 'theories of society.'
In recent years, the interest in theory which has once been a moving force of academic research in the field of literary studies appears to have decreased. The status of theory, its relevance and appropriateness for the understanding of literature have been put into doubt. Faced with this observation, some critics have even suggested that we have now entered into a new era of research which can retrospectively be identified as the era "after theory". Against the background of such pronouncements and to a certain extent in opposition to them, the investigations proposed here wish to uphold the idea of the utility and indeed the need for theoretical approaches to literature. To appreciate the status of theory and its possible contribution to a deepened understanding of literature, it is useful not to focus exclusively on the distinction or supposed divide between literature and theory. Instead we should pay attention to what links and unites them. This common ground or common denominator of literature and theory consists in the dimension of language. Furnishing, so to speak, the intellectual material from which both domains of articulation are formed, language constitutes at once the key element of literature and a principal concern of theory.
Borges : philology as poetry
(2018)
The titles of many of Borges's poems refer to canonical texts of world literature. One poem, for example, deals with the ending of the Odyssey and is simply called "A scholion"; others are called "Inferno V, 129" and "Paradise XXXI, 108", referring both to Dante's "Divine Comedy". These titles indicate that in his poems, Borges often keeps his distance from traditional poetical matters such as love, or, more generally, immediate emotions. Instead, he writes poems that gloss other texts, some of which actually relate love stories. Thus, Borges's poems stage themselves as philological commentaries rather than as poetry in its own right. In a similar vein and on a more general level, Borges likes to present himself in poems, interviews, and essays as a fervent reader of world literature, playing down his role as an original author. [...] In the following two sections of his paper, Joachim Harst tackles this question by commenting on two of Borges's philological poems, namely, the two texts on Dante's "Comedy". A ready objection to the idea of "philological poetry" is that despite Borges's selfstaging as reader, his texts obviously aren't philological in any academic sense. [...] The fundamental role of love for Dante's cosmological vision leads Harst to another understanding of the term "philology," namely, its more or less literal translation as "love of the lógos," the "lógos" being the cosmic principle and the divine word. Dante's Comedy can be considered a "philological" text in the sense that it is fueled by the "love of the lógos," and it discusses this love by citing, glossing and correcting other texts on love. Returning to Borges, Harst suggests that his two "philological" poems on Dante refer to this understanding of "philology." But by modifying the epic's theological underpinnings, they work to integrate Dante into a larger system which Borges calls "universal literature." Harst claims that this notion of literature, just like Dante's cosmos, is also centered on a lógos—albeit differently structured—and in this sense "philological."