posted on 2024-11-18, 15:20authored byInaugural addresses
Inaugural lecture--Department of German Language and Literature, Rand Afrikaans University, 10 September 1968@@This lecture gave a short survey of the different approaches to literature by German academics since the nineteenth century. Chronologically, their aims were shortly as follows: the reconstruction
of reliable texts; the positivistic attempt to explain all literary products in the light of biographical detail relating to the author; the subsequent arguments advanced by Wilhelm Dilthey and his followers who interpreted all literature as symptomatic
of the "Zeitgeist"; the past and present Marxistic efforts to explain literature as a product of class consciousness and a weapon in the struggle for social progress; other efforts to see the "Volksgeist" as a basic determinant; attempts, shortly before and particularly after World War II, to see literature itself as the focal point of literary criticism, attempts which led to "workimmanent
interpretation" on the one hand and to new theories of evaluation on the other. Each of these interpretations aimed at specific kinds of truth, or rather different aspects of the absolute truth which as such seems unattainable to mere human beings.
With regard to the theory of literature the following conclusions
were arrived at:
Firstly, that the "truths" to which a study of literature leads do not only differ from the normal mathematical-scientific concept of truth which is based on empiric investigations and deductions made from observations, the purpose of which is the formulation of laws, but that several methods of approach are possible, each of which implies "truths" peculiar to itself;
secondly, that in the study of literature all aspects, including the biographical, the historical, the ethnological, the sociological and the like, must be taken into consideration;
thirdly, that departments which are concerned with the study of a literature and teaching through a medium different from the officiallanguage(s) of the country have to pay particular attention to those aspects which are peculiar to that language, because through such a confrontation a deeper awareness of both cultures is achieved.