Konzepte der Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft

The study develops a set of instruments for the analysis and criticism of literary interpretations and applies it to interpretations of Goethe's novel »Die Wahlverwandtschaften« (»Elective Affinities«) (1809). Interpretive statements are reduced to their component parts and allocated to a range of possible forms. At the same time, they are described as speech acts with a communicative function, e.g., the expression of understanding, the explanation of meanings in the text, or compliance with interpretive conventions. There is also inquiry into whether the interpretations lay claim to the truth, and, if so, whether they live up to that claim.

A striking feature of polemic disputes is the high degree of meta-communication they display. This is primarily enacted by the participants as a dispute about each other's dispute behaviour. The book analyzes the manifestations, functions, and above all the normative foundations of this 'dispute at one remove' on the basis of some 250 polemical texts published in Germany between the mid 18th and late 20th century.

Since the 1960s, Cesare Segre, founder of the 'Pavia school', has figured among the Italian semioticians of international renown. The volume presents a selection of his writings from the last 20 years. Central topics are the semiotic approach to medieval European literature and culture, the development of a semiotics of drama from Shakespeare to Pirandello, and theoretical contemplations and case studies on modern narratology and literary criticism from hermeneutics to American deconstructionism.

The relationship between literature and culture is described here in terms of an ecologically defined functional model of literary texts. Fictional texts are not only sensors identifying questionable cultural developments and hence representing an indispensable medium for cultural criticism. In addition, they are loci for the renewal of cultural creativity. The first part of the book supplies the theoretical substantiation for this approach and develops it into a fully-fledged literary ecology in the framework of present-day tendencies. The second part demonstrates the plausibility and sustaining power of the approach with reference to six representative American novels from different periods.

One of the aims of this study is to establish foundations for a ready and clearly defined appreciation of authenticity as an 'effect of presentation' and the instrumentalization of authenticity as a utopian category in cultural criticism from the beginnings of modernism age to today. In line with the identification of the logic and dynamics of the authenticity effect as a reflection of ultimate individuality and with explicit reference to pre- and post-Romantic sentimentalism, the study takes a comprehensive view of the wide-ranging genealogy of the need for authenticity, covering the feminist concept of 'subjective authenticity', early Enlightenment criticism of courtly traditions, Romantic criticism of philistinism, the concept of eloquentia cordis in the age of Empfindsamkeit, Winckelmann's celebration of 'noble simplicity', Herder's philosophy of the 'haptic', Mereau's, Grimm's, Moritz' and Goethe's visions of the childlike and youthful, Foucault's 'Parrhesia', and finally Sulzer's and Schiller's temporalizations of authenticity in the framework of their philosophies of history.

Proceeding from the assumption that 'how' we think about something (reflection and reasoning) has a decisive influence on 'what' we know about it, the study attempts a microanalytic reconstruction of the practical reasoning potential of participants in conversations. There is major focus on three areas: 1. standard situations in everyday communication (e.g. greeting sequences, mother-child interaction); 2. communication in class (teaching grammar, role-play); 3. East-West communication (conference exchanges, talk-shows). The conclusion the author comes to is that, as a product of heterogeneous forms of reasoning and reflection, the language awareness of speakers deviates from established linguistic insights about language in a way which is not random but systematic.

The traditional concept of rhythm equates it with metre and consequently separates off rhythm from meaning, the subject, and indeed language altogether. This is illustrated with reference to existing discussion of rhythm (as exemplified by Heusler) and various linguistic concepts of rhythm dealt with in the first part of the study. The second part takes its bearings from Henri Meschonnic's concept of rhythm, which in line with the pre-Platonic meaning of the word conceives of rhythm as the given shaping of meaning in discourse. The study closes with an analysis of three texts (Goethe, Benn, Grimm) in terms of the semantic function performed by rhythm.

"The Problem of Interpretation" provides an introduction to the fundamental issues of literary studies against the background of the challenge posed by 'post-modernism'. Present-day theoretical concepts and the way they hang together are described, discussed and classified in terms of the history of theory, scienctific/academic thinking and society. This foregrounds problems, preconditions and procedures in literary studies that are an integral and indispensable feature of present-day discussion in this field.

The book is a systematic and presentation of the theoretical, methodological and terminological fundamentals of modern sociolinguistics and an overview of the history of the discipline in its present-day form. Against the backdrop of the latest research it uses an abundance of examples to illustrate and explain sociolinguistic concepts (e.g language community, diglossia, status and function of languages) and the basic terms used in the study of language varieties (e.g. standard, dialect, sociolect, register, style). The exercises are designed to monitor learning progress and can be used by individuals or in seminars.

This volume is an introduction to the two most influential versions of syntactic theory to have emerged during the last decade - Government and Binding Theory evolving from Chomsky's generative grammar, and the two latest forms of phrase structure grammar, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The German version of the book (the original was published by Edward Arnold in 1991 as "Syntactic Theory - A Unified Approach") is greatly expanded in comparison to the English original in that it discusses the various problems of syntactic theory not only with reference to English but also to German. This gives the reader an interesting opportunity for comparisons between the structural features of the two languages. It also transpires that in some instances the differences in structure between the two languages call for modifications to the theoretical approach.

Tzvetan Todorov's approach to symbols is historical rather than theoretical, providing a survey of the interpretations of this concept to be found in the writings of authors as various as Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, St. Augustine, Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, Novalis, Moritz, the brothers Schlegel, Freud and Jakobson. With a wealth of penetrating individual analyses the author traces a line of development in the history of ideas that ranges from Classical Antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment and from Romanticism to the present.

Literature is not only polyvalent and enigmatic, as the prevailing theoretical paradigm in literary studies insists. For all its polyvalence it is still experienced as meaningful and significant because it is determined, aesthetically remarkable and rule-bound. In this sense it can be seen as having major similarities to ritual, can indeed be described in terms of ritual activity. Ritual, after all, is an aesthetically contoured, symbolic action designed for repetition, and as such has retained its fundamental importance in human life to this day.

Even 50 years after the publication of the first edition, the basic concept of this book is still valid namely to establish the determining contours of fundamental narrative forms, which the author understands as morphological archetypes – in the Goethean sense. With mainly anonymous authors, they occupy an intermediate position between “popular” and “literary” writing, as evidenced by the fact that they are an object of research for both ethnologists and literary scholars.