This article explores the significance of Husserlian phenomenology for literary theory against the backdrop of the renewed debate on the ›fact-fictum‹-difference. It systematically contextualizes the knowledge of truth in literature as art, which is implicitly part of the debate, and historically links it back to Plato’s theory of mimesis and to aesthetics since the first modernism around 1800. For the current question of the conditions of possibility of a levelling of fictivity and facticity, ideas relevant to the history of epistemic problems and poetic media such as early Romantic irony, an art-immanent transcendence, or an aesthetic infinity are recalled. The factual affinity to the basic epistemological reflection of pure and transcendental phenomenology that this suggests is finally made explicit through a narrow focus on the procedural moments of literature and, respectively, the scholarly approach to literature. More fundamentally than today's trend towards autofiction suggests, the poetic supplementation of the factual with the fictitious leads to a layer of the imagination, where fictionally created facts blur with effective fictions.
The paper examines the poetic and aesthetic prehistory of the phenomenological concept of ›Hemmung‹ (›inhibition‹) and advocates for an analysis of its theoretical history in modernity. It argues that figures of ›Hemmung‹ form a complex figurative network as counterforces, latent forces, or formative forces, which is of particular relevance for understanding the history of theory of the 19 th century. Here, older figures of ἐποχή (epoché) and θεωρίᾱ (theoría) are not only reactivated but are also interwoven with novelistic and dramatic as well as aesthetic figures - such as decline, astonishment, or the escalation of forces. Investigating the role this theoretical paradigm plays in modernity and its significance for the intellectual discourses of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries - including phenomenology - remains an open task.
The article first reconstructs the dialectical humanism that Melanchthon encountered through his reading of Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica. Second, it demonstrates how Melanchthon’s rhetoric and dialectic function as complementary components of a theory of argumentation. The third section addresses the dialectical and rhetorical foundations of the Loci communes theologici (1521) and Melanchthon’s development of a theologically grounded, dialectical hermeneutics. The fundamental rationalism of this hermeneutics becomes evident when - fourth -Melanchthon’s treatment of the »mysteria divinitatis« in the first edition of the Loci communes theologici from 1521 is compared with the positions of Reuchlin, Muntzer, or Karlstadt. Fifth, the early Luther, with his rejection of reason and logic, holds convictions that clearly contradict those of Melanchthon. A final section then sketches the development of these divergent positions up to the confrontation between Enlightenment and Pietism.
The article examines the relationship between style and kitsch around 1900. By analyzing contemporary debates about the topic, it develops the thesis that both terms became effective simultaneously in the contemporary aesthetic-literary discourse as well as functioned as oppositional categories. However, style and kitsch around 1900 should not only be understood in terms of their opposition, but also through their points of contact. The article shows this by focusing on the politics of Stefan George’s works, which are located on the border between style and kitsch. Frank Wedekind’s drama-fragment Kitsch is then read as a satire on the stylistic efforts of his time. Wedekind not only mocks the contemporary ubiquitous accusation of kitsch, but also draws aesthetic consequences from it: he makes kitsch the starting point for his drama.
Herman Grimm (1828-1901) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), whose personal relationship is reconstructed here with new evidence, were both interested in the connection between life and work in the biographies they wrote of poets, artists, and theologians. But their writings had different emphases: While Grimm highlighted the active testing of genius in complex social contexts of Michelangelo and Goethe, Dilthey questioned the laws of creativity, especially of spiritual characters (Novalis, Schleiermacher). The theoretical claim in Dilthey’s scientific work led to a growing estrangement between the two friends. As Dilthey’s pseudonymously- published artist’s novella »Lebenskämpfe und Lebensfriede« (1867) is initially very close to Grimm, only the enigmatic conclusion breaks up the usual biographical framework.
Deliberations relating to genre theory as conducted in the GDR laboured under a twofold burden: the declared ›cultural heritage‹, and the historical-philosophical and ideological understanding of ›form‹. This concept of form, the legacy of Georg Lukacs, was committed to socialist aesthetics such as ›socialist realism‹ and was able to maintain its position as a dialectic of ›content and form‹ until the 1980s. The attempts to develop a Marxist genre theory employing structuralist or semiotic approaches found in Western theory also came to an ideological dead end because the principles of ›mirroring‹ and ›partisanship‹ remained an irrevocable element of genre studies in the GDR, leading to the failure of all attempts to establish a system of genre classification.
