Volume 3, Issue 1

Why is imagining things in words a serious business in relation to the rest of life? If it involves free fantasizing about anything whatsoever, then what does that have to do with the real? If it is instead responsive to reality and explores real possibilities, then why not explore reality directly instead? And what is the value of the imaginative rendering in words of actual objects, as in lyric poems occasioned by actual scenes or incidents? R. G. Collingwood offers a useful account of the role of art in general in relation to life, in holding that art serves as a vehicle for the clarification of feeling and the overcoming of corrupt consciousness. But he says little about exactly how this work of clarification is done in words by means of poetic figuration. G. W. F. Hegel's account of literary imagination focuses primarily on poetic figuration as it is embodied in lyric poetry. By tracing the work of poetic imagination in lyric, where that work is foregrounded in relation to actual experience (though poetic imagination is also present within the making of all works of art), Hegel helps us to see both how poetic imagination in general works in relation to feeling in all the arts and how it works in particular by means of words in works of lyric, literary art. Hegel shows specifically, in contrast with some contemporary theories of literary imagination, how poetic imagination takes up materials from actual life and subjects these materials to figuration and emplotment, in order to achieve not freedom from feeling, but freedom in feeling. The advantages of Hegel's account in showing how poetic imagination begins from actual experience and remains focused on it, as opposed to theories that appeal to more segregated pretense or simulation (Walton, Currie, Feagin), are considered, and Hegel's account is defended against some possible objections. It is crucial to grasp that Hegel treats lyric poetry as both an especially salient form of modern literary art and as proceeding from the same power of poetic imagination that is involved in the making of all works of art. That Hegel's views help us to make sense of the role of poetic imagination in life, in its engagements with the actual, is argued for by considering recent accounts of the experience of reading that have been put forward by Rita Felski, Susan Stewart, and Kirk Pillow, together with some further comparisons to Aristotle's treatment of mimetic representation and Wittgenstein's account of imaginative seeing-as. Finally, the work of poetic imagination in words, in engaging with the actual for the sake of the clarification of feeling, is illustrated through a close reading of Rilke's ›Der Panther‹. The speaker-viewer's experience of the caged, pacing panther presents emplotted modulations of thought and feeling that describe metaphorically, by dwelling on the panther and recording successive thoughts and feelings in relation to its perceived movements, the experience of reading some works of literary art. Attention is focused on the panther and its significance in relation to feeling by means of identification with the panther, emplotment, curtailed gait as a metaphor for curtailed expressive power, and the aural structure of the poem as a unified whole. In this way, the experience of the actual panther is presented imaginatively, in relation to feeling, as mattering for the experience of modern life.

This study explicates emotions as specific meanings that are encoded by means of signs. Thus, emotions are the semiotically structured counterparts of inner feelings that can be perceived by means of introspection. In semantic terms, emotions can be treated as predications: they assign to the person that experiences a feeling the property of having particular subjective psychological experiences and employing particular forms of motor behaviour in certain situational conditions. The basic concepts needed for a semiotic, in particular linguistic and literary explication were set out in detail in the first part of the study. An experiencer is the semantic argument in a predication to which the psychological experience characterized by that predication is assigned. A stimulus is the semantic argument in a predication that is assigned by that predication the property of being the trigger or subject matter of the psychological experience in question. The descriptive concept of emotional attitudes is employed to explicate generalizable properties of clusters of subjective psychological experiences and motor behaviour. The concept of emotional scenes is used to provide a systematic representation of clustered situational conditions. After a brief overview of these theoretical foundations (section 1), the present, second part of the study focuses on how emotional meanings are specified in texts. The meanings encoded lexically and by means of grammatical and textual structures in a language are treated as underspecified, which means that linguistically encoded meanings are semantically and conceptually formed and specified in stages on a series of descriptive levels that build on one another. This involves interpretation routines that require information about, for example, lexical features, the formation of grammatical structures, orthographic and phonetic (rhythmic, prosodic) forms, the structuring of texts and conversations, non-linguistic forms of expression (such as facial expression and gestures or the formatting of a text), and the contexts of statements and their reception. This investigation is concerned primarily with the linguistic encoding of emotions, which is associated with the grammatical and transgrammatical descriptive levels. It provides a foundation for more far-reaching interpretations that employ the methods of literary and cultural studies in drawing on knowledge about cultural and historical factors and pre-texts. One of the main concerns of the article is therefore to consider the concept of underspecification and some of the factors that help to shape meanings (section 2). The focus of attention then shifts to the transgrammatical encoding and specification of emotional meanings (section 3). The possible ways of presenting linguistic signals and communicating information with them differ from one medium to the other: spoken language manifests itself as a continuum of sound that unfolds in time and is aurally perceived, whereas written language manifests itself in the form of discrete units that extend through space and are visually perceived. Many of the examples are drawn from Georg Büchner's Lenz , with attention being given to the circumstances of its production and reception; in an illustration of how an analysis can proceed, it is shown what the most important emotions in Lenz are and what narrative means are used to encode them. On the one hand, the emotions encoded by Büchner distinguish the text from the comments in Oberlin's diary, one of his historical sources. On the other hand, the techniques used to structure the text in this way mean that Lenz is comparable with modern transcriptions of exchanges between doctors and patients.

Clemens Lugowski (1904; Deutsches Wirklichkeitsgefühl in der Dichtung, ZfDk, 1934; Literarische Formen und lebendiger Gehalt im »Simplizissimus«, ZfDk, 1934b; Wirklichkeit und Dichtung. Untersuchungen zur Wirklichkeitsauffassung Heinrich von Kleists, Frankfurt a. M., 1936.; Christian Dietrich Grabbe, ZfDB, 1936b; Volkstumund Dichtung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, ZfDB, 1936c; Gerhart Hauptmann als Dramatiker, ZfDB, 1937; Der junge Herder und das Volkslied. Eine Interpretation, ZfDB, 1938; Dichtung als Verkörperung deutschen Volkstums, ZfDB, 1939; Goethe, Ganymed, 1942) is seen as an objectionable yet classic writer on the study of literature. It is his resolute commitment to National Socialist views that is considered objectionable today, even though his dissertation, Form, Individuality and the Novel , published in 1932, is also seen as one of the few classics in its field. In it, Lugowski develops a set of topics and concepts for formal analysis (formal myth, process- and result-orientated suspense, retroactive motivation, and passivity) that have not only proved compatible with narrative analysis from the 1970s to the present day but have also established their creator as one of the founders of the study of alterity in literary history. The present article, however, is not concerned with discussing the potential relevance of Lugowski's ideas to contemporary literary theory; its aim is instead to explore one way in which the main publications of this ambiguous scholarly figure can be approached in terms of the history of literary studies. First (1.), the particular approach that is explored by adopting this frame of reference is outlined. The two current standard narratives in the history of literary studies about theory and criticism under National Socialism are introduced: they emphasize either the politically grounded heteronomy or the scholarly autonomy of the discipline in the period. The present study adopts a perspective intended to steer clear of these grand narratives: guided by the concepts of obstinacy and resonance, and drawing on Bourdieu's ideas about the specificity of the scientific field, it brings the idioms and semantic realignments of the scholarly protagonists to the fore in order to obtain a more nuanced picture of the complex relationship between the obstinacy of a discipline, (self-imposed) conformity, and political coercion. Next (2.), a brief impression of the diversity that defines the idioms of literary studies between 1933 and 1945 is provided so that Lugowski's position in the field of literary studies in the 1930s and 1940s can be determined more accurately. The discourse of the study of modern German literature was not compressed into a standardized complex of forcibly coordinated idioms between 1933 and 1945. The centrifugal forces resulting from competition in the field alone were enough to prevent this; they manifested themselves in the continuing disputes between individual figures over symbolic capital. Communication processes were subject to the lasting influence of modes and figures of argumentation that, if we leave aside for the present the theoretical, methodological, or contextual positions and value judgements associated with them, generally formed clusters around four crucial concepts: that of life ( Leben ), that of the people ( Volk ), that of race ( Rasse ), and that of literature ( Dichtung ). Then (3.), the analysis proper focuses on Lugowski's two main works: his doctoral dissertation, Form, Individuality and the Novel , and his Habilitationsschrift , entitled Wirklichkeit und Dichtung: Untersuchungen zur Wirklichkeitsauffassung Heinrich von Kleists (›Reality and Literature: Studies of Heinrich von Kleist's Concept of Reality‹), which was published in 1936. The semantic realignment that characterizes the development of Lugowski's concept of literature and its study after 1933 certainly seems to be striking, and it has been noted and discussed repeatedly, albeit with markedly different conclusions. There is disagreement regarding the extent to which his dissertation on formal analysis, which has since acquired canonical status, already bears the seeds of his later Habilitationsschrift and its Volkstum -based ideology. The analysis begins by identifying the ambiguity, or multiple intended audiences, that typify Lugowski's work: the modernity of an academic ethos that makes a point of its own dispassion and the modernity of the successful young scholar's interests and methods contrast with the reactionary force of the findings that he partly states and partly no more than hints at. These findings place him in the orthodox mainstream of a science of essences ( Wesenswissenschaft ) and of values whose point of orientation is the Volk – a mainstream that he sometimes, in his late works at least, seeks to outdo against the background of race. Lugowski's narrative of a primeval mythic connection between literature and Volk , of literature as embodying the essence of the German Volk , is not simply reproduced but is also elaborately reconstructed with the help of a modernized, newly objective scholarly approach to literature. This produces a sense of fragmentation that is specific to this discipline and far more striking in Lugowski's work than it is in the case of other representatives of the Volk -oriented study of literature such as Heinz Kindermann or Hermann Pongs. The aim is to show that this characteristic ambiguity was already present in Lugowski's dissertation, even though it was published before the political caesura. The intellectual stature of the work can be left intact if Lugowski's own conceptual apparatus is employed; its robustness is demonstrated by the fact that it can be applied to his own texts. In doing so, it can be shown that Lugowski's move to »German reality« as a topic of interest did not represent a real break in his thought, and that the »longing for origins« mentioned in his Habilitationsschrift had already been born in his dissertation. Certainly, Lugowski's Form, Individuality and the Novel is dominated by a laboriously foregrounded ethos of dispassionate analysis and scientific distance, but the results of his formal analyses are, in contrast to his own principle of avoiding misplaced value judgements, placed in a narrative frame and motivated by a teleology that draws on the semantic resources of an attitude, stemming from scepticism about modernity, that is critical of individualism. The individual, as one who has become self-aware, as the current final stage in an all-embracing story of decline, is always inherently a »product of disintegration « for Lugowski. History from the post-mythic age to modernity (and the present) thus presents itself as a continued process of »collapse« in which humans experience the awakening of the self, the birth of the subject, in conjunction with an increasing estrangement from that life with which they previously were one. In Lugowski's view, it is only in art and in war that there is still a place for the remnants of this primeval mythic and authentic way of life, left as it were by the wayside of human history.

In the teaching of modern European languages such as German and English, there has been renewed interest in engaging with foreign language (FL) literature in order to develop knowledge of the culture in which the text is located and to raise awareness of intercultural attitudes, values and beliefs. However, there has been a reluctance to correspondingly reconsider theories of reading and literary interpretation. In pedagogic textbooks, reading is still theorised almost exclusively in terms of cognitive or psycholinguistic approaches, especially »exemplar models« such as schema theory (Barsalou, Cognitive Processes 18: 2003, 517–519). Although less widely promulgated, approaches derived from hermeneutics and phenomenology such as reader response theory (Iser, The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, 1974; The Act Of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 1978; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, 1989; How to Do Theory, 2006) have also been used to describe the reading of FL literature. While there are similarities between exemplar models and reader response theory – for example, they are modular in their architecture, amodal in their systems of representation and are situated rather than abstract systems (after Barsalou, Cognitive Processes 18: 513–562, 2003), there are also crucial differences. First, exemplar models are taxonomic in their organisational principles since they employ a hierarchical conceptual framework. By contrast, response theory exhibits a synthetic, linear organisation whereby the meaning of the text is produced through an imaginative engagement with the signifiers of the text itself. Second, the structure of textual comprehension in exemplar models is paradigmatic . Higher level schemata search for evidence of fit from lower level schemata and so on, down to the lowest level of sensory data. By contrast, the synthesis of narrative in response theory is syntagmatic . As the reader progresses through the narrative, his/her consciousness flows from one perspective to the next: just as the present ›horizon‹ is made up of ›themes‹ that have preceded the one with which the reader is currently engaged, so the present theme will become subsumed into an emerging horizon. Third, the ontology of exemplar models is dualist . In positing a mental structuration of knowledge which precedes comprehension of the text, exemplar models are predicated on an empirical reality that exists independent of the mind. By contrast, the ontology of response theory is monist in as much as an imaginary object of the literary text does not have an exterior existence, but rather the reader is given over to the text through subsequent phases of reading in a way which transcends the subject/object dichotomy. Fourth, exemplar models are relatively stable . The same set of exemplars is available to the reader to be applied consistently in every instance of comprehension. By contrast, response theory is dynamic , since it suggests that each moment of reading entails a transformation of the reader's experience and his/her perceptions of the cultural milieu from which the text has arisen. This paper therefore argues that the two theories are indeed incommensurable and, furthermore, exemplar models appear less adequate for the description of features of FL literary texts. Not only do they fail to distinguish between denotative and connotative texts, but they also fall short of offering an account of the specific aesthetic and affective effects of a literary text. Finally, reader response theory serves to legitimate a diversity of interpretations by readers from heterogeneous cultural and linguistic backgrounds. However, it is Wofgang Iser's (The Act Of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response, 1978; Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology, 1989) description of negation, blanks and negativity that is particularly applicable to reading FL literature, particularly with respect to its capacity to describe the generation of (inter)cultural meanings. First, through heightening the reader's awareness, negation enables him/her to problemize the normative system of mores encountered in the text. Negation produces a dislocation between the familiar and the unfamiliar through which the reader can generate an emergent transitional space which constitutes the meaning of the text. Second, as the reader progresses through the text, s/he continually switches from a segment which represents one point of view to another which represents a different perspective. During this process, gaps emerge which give rise to an indeterminacy of meaning and necessitate acts of ideation on the part of the reader in order to connect the different segments. Third, blanks suspend the as-yet-unformulated connections between the different perspectives in the text so that the reader transforms them into reciprocal projections. The connections that then emerge between these perspectives enable the reader to produce a determinate relationship between each segment which gives rise to an aesthetic effect. Negation and blanks thus constitute a ›double‹ of the text, or negativity. Negativity problematizes the reader's prior assumptions through realizing the failure and deformation of human endeavour, thus impelling the creation of an as-yet-unformulated idea as to their origin; it also generates the unfamiliar elements in the text through the removal of external conditions from their real context. It is this conceptualisation of reading in terms of the aesthetic and potentially transformative experience of negativity that renders a phenomenological description of reading particularly applicable to the ›intercultural reader‹ who engages with FL literary texts.

For about fifteen years now there has been an increasingly vivid discussion of the so-called »puzzle of imaginative resistance«: we feel resistance to imagining worlds that are morally different from our world. In morally deviating worlds people do not just think differently about morality, but different things are morally good in these worlds. I will start with some introductory thoughts about the different dimensions of the problem. Then the general functioning of imagination has to be scrutinized. As I see it, imagining consists in the entertaining of a mental content without asserting it. However, this can be done in different ways: just by supposing the truth of a proposition, or in an experiential mode that involves also sensory and affective qualities. This brings us to a distinction made by Richard Moran (Philosophical Review 103: 75–106, 1994). He distinguishes two modes of imagining: a hypothetical and a dramatic one. Dramatic imagining is a form of imaginatively adopting a total perspective including thoughts, sensory qualities and emotions. From Moran's point of view, imaginative resistance depends mainly on the feelings involved in dramatic imagining. Therefore, I call it an affective account of imaginative resistance. Yet, it has been argued that imagined emotional responses are only »make-believe« or pretend. We, therefore, have to find out whether this objection is threatening the force of Moran's account. His answer to the challenge is based mostly on the affective aspect of dramatic imagining. Although he is right in emphasizing the role of feeling in emotional imagining, it does not suffice to explain the arousal of imaginative resistance. Therefore, we have to proceed from an affective to a full-fledged emotion-based account. Emotions in the full sense of the term cannot be reduced to mere feelings, they have a representational content. I suggest understanding the representational content of emotions following Kenny (Action, Emotion and Will, 1963) in terms of their formal objects which individuate emotions, make them intelligible and give their correctness conditions. If an imagined content is not presented as a viable instance of the formal object of an emotion, the imagining will fail. As a consequence, I will develop a multi-layered model of failures to imagine something emotionally due to the specific ways in which the representational content and the affective dimension interact in emotional imagining. We also have to get a firmer grip on the nature of the feelings involved in emotions in order to understand their impact on imaginative resistance. From my point of view this has to do with their nature as bodily feelings, which makes emotional imagining in a way intrusive that distinguishes it from other kinds of imagining. We will then have to reconsider how the bodily feelings involved in emotional imagining relate to their representational content. Finally, I will discuss why it is specific to imaginative resistance that the imagining does not just fail, but a feeling of repulsion is evoked.