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Title: Literary Studies from Hermeneutics to Media Culture Studies (Essay)
Author : Siegfried J. Schmidt
Release Date : January 01, 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 94 KB

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In this article I discuss and describe the long travel some literary scholars in Germany and in other countries have undertaken in order to proceed from traditional hermeneutics to empirical and contextual studies of literature and finally to media culture studies. My first sentence already indicates the complexity of what I am going to describe. First, the development I present has not been followed and subscribed by all or even by a majority of literary scholars and only some have taken this decision. However, in my view they succeeded to transform literary studies in a way and to a degree that has lately been discussed intensely on the international landscape of scholarship. This transformation occurred in the framework and in interaction with political, social, economic, and cultural developments since the end of World War II. In Germany, the so-called Adenauer Era was dominated by the concentration of all energies on the material reconstruction of West Germany, heavily destroyed during the war. The "German economic miracle," assisted by the U.S. Marshall Plan and based on an effective capitalism and the ideology of neoliberalism, the aggressive anti-communist propaganda of the political leaders in West Germany, and the circumstances of the Cold War suppressed most attempts to thematize recent German history, World War II, and, above all, the Holocaust. West Germany became integrated in the Western world dominated by the USA, and it supported first steps towards European integration together with France. At the same time, the younger generation rediscovered the rich diversity of modern literature, art, and music since 1920, which had been deliberately suppressed during the Third Reich. Based on these discoveries some of them developed new tendencies in art which opposed aggressively traditional bourgeois, fascist, and communist arts, e.g. the Vienna School, Concrete Art and Poetry, abstract and experimental art, etc. Constructivism, suprematism, the Bauhaus, Dadaism, or surrealism fascinated the new generation as if these tendencies were contemporary and not historical movements. The political and economic leaders in West Germany clearly and quickly realized the strategic potential of abstract art favored above all by the elites in France and the USA. In their eyes, abstraction equalled exclusion of thematic contents or suppression of semantics. Supporting abstract arts thus allowed them to reach two aims: The supporters (i. e., the capitalists) could on the one hand gather cultural capital by economic investments in international art events like the Documenta in Kassel or the Donaueschinger Musikwochen and they could at the same time suppress--by the help of seemingly cultural arguments--a critical confrontation with the past (i.e., mostly their past). More or less the same tendency can be observed in German post-war literary studies. Scholars such as Richard Alewyn, Wolfgang Kayser, or Benno von Wiese, or philosophers like Martin Heidegger continued their work as if nothing had happened. Despite their sympathy with the nazi Reich and not discussed before the mid-1960s, they became prominent in the Bundesrepublik (Federal Republic of Germany) seemingly without any problems. They favored exclusively text-immanent analysis or hermeneutic approaches which excluded the contexts in which literary texts are produced, distributed, received, and post-processed. Literary texts were treated as if they were ontological self-contained entities whose interpretation could only be achieved by specially gifted scholars, since--as e.g., Kayser proclaimed--interpretation cannot be learned (5). As a consequence, literary scholarship was closely connected with structures of social hierarchies of leadership and followership: the "great interpreters" were adored and imitated--thus social patterns from recent German history were continued.