Friedrich Nietzsche and René Wellek’s Concept of Literary History (Neo-Idealistic Acceptance among Slavonic Literatures)
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Miloš Zelenka
Abstract
The study highlights the conjunction of Friedrich Nietzsche and the theory of literary history in Slavonic literatures which both in the early twentieth century and in the inter-war period stood neglected within the Central European context. Through German humanities, many literary historians (M. M. Bachtin, W. Dilthey, J. Kleiner, Z. Łempicki, V. M. Zhirmunsky, etc.) whose works philosophically drew on the stream of differentiated Neo-Idealistic aesthetics were affected by a radically scathing critical approach to historicism and naturalistic scientism. A secure rank among these was occupied by the American structuralist of Czech origin René Wellek (1903–1995) as a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the founding father of New Criticism. This was apparent, for example, in accentuating the meaningful ‘energy’ of literary texts and in appreciating literary originality so as to manifest an intuitive intellect. Further, it is reflected in using ‘regulative’ concepts which (regardless of their fictional character) constitute our ‘rational’ knowledge while bringing forth Nietzsche’s notion of ‘perspectivism’ as an evaluative approach to the surveyed object that can be interpreted from various perspectives without failing to remain an objectively existing phenomenological ‘entity’. Wellek was right to regard Nietzsche’s postulate of the integrality of a literary work, along with Dilthey’s structurally ‘sympathetic’ psychology and Husserl’s phenomenological antipsychologism, as the main impetus for the application of philosophical structuralism to the area of poetics. Such a transformation was facilitated by a specific concept of structure understood as a holistic complex of ‘meanings’ determined by mutual relations of its individual parts. We presume that the analysis of the philosophical roots of Wellek’s literary research, later aspiring to the study of systems and supranational literary wholes, repels the traditionally accepted idea of a forced caesura between psychological and structural-technological approaches as they were canonised in the 1930s’ structural aesthetics.
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© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Friedrich Nietzsche and René Wellek’s Concept of Literary History (Neo-Idealistic Acceptance among Slavonic Literatures)
- « Sourire au milieu du pillage ». La dénonciation du néolibéralisme dans le théâtre d’Eudes Labrusse : Le Rêve d’Alvaro
- An Ophelia for the Anthropocene: Floral Agency and the Rewriting of Ophelia’s Victimhood in Hamlet
- Music Writing and Community Construction in A Raisin in the Sun
- Transgenerational Trauma, Belated Witnessing, and Resilience in Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone
- Nagasaki’s Scar: The Formation, Reference, and Transformation of Nuclear Explosion Memory in A Pale View of Hills
- Reviews
- Mona Körte, Elisa Ronzheimer und Sebastian Schönbeck, Hgg.: Wechselwörter. Personalpronomen in Bewegung (Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie). Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 2025. 274 S.
- James V. Morrison: Comedy in Literature and Popular Culture: From Aristophanes to Saturday Night Live. London: Routledge, 2025. ix + 233 pp.
- Jutta Müller-Tamm und Sylwia Werner, Hgg.: Mobile Avantgarden. Netzwerke der Moderne im nördlichen und östlichen Europa (WeltLiteraturen / World Literatures, Bd. 25). Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2025. 250 S.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Contributions
- Friedrich Nietzsche and René Wellek’s Concept of Literary History (Neo-Idealistic Acceptance among Slavonic Literatures)
- « Sourire au milieu du pillage ». La dénonciation du néolibéralisme dans le théâtre d’Eudes Labrusse : Le Rêve d’Alvaro
- An Ophelia for the Anthropocene: Floral Agency and the Rewriting of Ophelia’s Victimhood in Hamlet
- Music Writing and Community Construction in A Raisin in the Sun
- Transgenerational Trauma, Belated Witnessing, and Resilience in Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone
- Nagasaki’s Scar: The Formation, Reference, and Transformation of Nuclear Explosion Memory in A Pale View of Hills
- Reviews
- Mona Körte, Elisa Ronzheimer und Sebastian Schönbeck, Hgg.: Wechselwörter. Personalpronomen in Bewegung (Beiheft zur Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie). Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag 2025. 274 S.
- James V. Morrison: Comedy in Literature and Popular Culture: From Aristophanes to Saturday Night Live. London: Routledge, 2025. ix + 233 pp.
- Jutta Müller-Tamm und Sylwia Werner, Hgg.: Mobile Avantgarden. Netzwerke der Moderne im nördlichen und östlichen Europa (WeltLiteraturen / World Literatures, Bd. 25). Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter, 2025. 250 S.
