Band 21, Heft 1

This article presents a heretofore unknown and anonymous handwritten essay, found in the ›Schwedenksite‹, the papers of the Central German Illuminati, with commentary by Karl Leonhard Reinhold. The essay - probably written in 1786 - offers a materialistic developmental psychology, according to which the sensations are physical, not mental, and pleasure triggers the development of the drives before it is restricted by the drive of conservation. It further posits that there is an instinct for ›freedom of thought‹, which promotes an everincreasing awareness of one’s own instinctual structure and thus a greater independence from it. Moral behaviour is also understood as a conscious agreement with the laws of nature and as a reciprocal co-operation for greater ›freedom of thought‹. Although the author of the essay is not known, he may have applied for admission to the Illuminati with this essay. He could be from the circle of the philanthropic movement, which connected a sensualist philosophy with educational ideals.

The term ›characteristic‹ (›Charakteristik‹) refers to a genre of essayistic prose that is very close but not equivalent to the biographical short forms, which reaches its peak in the German-speaking countries between Early Romanticism and ›Vormarz‹. By considering ›characteristic‹ as a literary genre with specific features, this paper focuses on its pre- and early history in the Long Eighteenth Century. It starts with an overview of the current state of research, followed by a brief outline of the history of the concept, with special attention to the connections between philosophical and poetological discourses. Particular attention is devoted to the definitions of ›characteristic‹ given in essays and treatises on poetics of the 18 th and early 19 th centuries. Following a comparative approach, the ›characteristic‹ is ultimately introduced in a transnational frame to reveal its proximity to other genres such as the written eulogy and the necrology.

This article examines how older research on Biedermeier is evaluated in current discourse, taking as its focus the example of recent studies on Annette von Droste-Hulshoff. One can observe a refusal of earlier knowledge claims, those that are most notably linked to the literary scholar Friedrich Sengle, which can be ascribed to various overlapping motives. Besides the criticism of specific research results, a rejection of Sengle himself can be seen, which is most likely a consequence of his personal, academic, and political actions during the Nazi era and in West Germany. However, Sengle’s works nevertheless continue to offer promising insights for current research, as is exemplified in an examination of Droste-Hulshoff’s author’s poetics. Ultimately, the article argues for a differentiated evaluation, i. e. one that is based on the history of German literary studies, older research on Biedermeier in general, and Sengles Biedermeier Period (Biedermeierzeit) in particular.

This article aims to provide an initial insight into the practical philological work of seminary students around 1900 who study German language and literature. Within a historical-praxeological case study I want to discuss one specific text, a so-called ›Seminararbeit‹, submitted by a student in 1884. Johann Zmölnig writes about Paul Fleming, a German- and Latin-writing author from the 17th century, who becomes popular for his poems in the decades after his young death. But also later on, he is seen as a figure for German-language writing in questions of language-policy - and during the 19th century in particular for philologists and their editorial work. In more than a hundred handwritten pages the student shows several aspects of philological writing-practice: studies of language and style, linguistic criticism, biographical writing as well as the ability to enhance the prevailing perception of Fleming’s poetry.

Current accounts of the aims and methods of criticism as developed in Emil Staiger’s seminal essay »Die Kunst der Interpretation« typically do not concentrate on the role of aesthetic experience. We clarify the notion of aesthetic experience employed in Staiger’s essay and point out the centrality of aesthetic experience for his view of criticism. According to Staiger, aesthetic experiences are central to the aesthetic merit of an artwork, they guide the critic’s appreciation of aesthetic properties, and literary criticism should be concerned with the elucidation of how aesthetic properties are based on other manifest properties of a work. We also review some recent alternative reconstructions of Staiger’s view, and offer some routes to a critique of his view that is based on his central assumptions concerning the aims and methods of criticism, rather than on a rejection of them.

The article discusses how cybernetic models of learning shape the development of filmic means in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I first outline the historical conditions that allowed for an adaption of scientific knowledge in film: auteur cinema, the space race, and the economic crisis of Hollywood studios. Then I introduce the major principles of this cybernetic model of learning, as it is palpable in the film. In this model, intelligence is simultaneously viewed as logical process inside a machine and as non-predictable behavior of a machine. When human and machine intelligence are in competition with each other, this twofold model serves as culmination point and interpretative cue for the film as a whole. In this interpretation, every signal of the monolith instigates new filmic means, which blur the boundaries between on-screen and off-screen vision, sound, and speech. As filmic adaption, the utopian vision of cybernetic intelligence thus portrays the search for eternal life.

Oswald Egger presents himself as both poeta vates and poeta doctus, challenging his readers with texts that have often been described as hermetic and thus hermeneutically inaccessible. In recourse to mathematical (topology) and philosophical (Johann Georg Hamann) contexts, the essay shows how poetry on the one hand, science and erudition on the other hand intersect in Egger’s texts in an aesthetically and hermeneutically ambitious way.

To enable a clear and detailed description of narrative features, narratological concepts should be well-defined and unambiguous. My paper aims to contribute to this by analyzing, reworking, and relabeling two models of ›unreliable interpreting‹. I show how these two models developed by Phelan/Martin and Margolin are based on relevant intuitions yet have problematic aspects. Building upon these approaches, it is reasonable to integrate two concepts into our theory of unreliable narration: that of ›unreliable belief‹, which, like unreliable reporting, concerns the realm of facts but affects the narrator’s cognition instead of his utterances, and that of ›inference-related unreliability‹, which is concerned with the validity of the narrator’s reasoning on both the utterance and cognitive level. By integrating these two concepts, this approach makes the theory of unreliability more robust and helps provide better answers to common questions in the field of unreliable narration.