1. Ut Pictura Poesis 9 Language and Metaphor 9 Epistemological Implications of Horace's Comparison 17 Issues of Practical Literary Criticism 28 2
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The Poetics of Historical Perspectivism COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ImUNCI Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. The Poetics of Historical Perspectivism Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst and the Neoclassic Tradition jill anne kowalik UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 114 Copyright © 1992 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Kowalik, Jill Anne. The Poetics of Historical Per- spectivism: Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst and the Neoclassic Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. doi: https:// doi.org/10.5149/9781469656632_Kowalik Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kowalik, Jill Anne. Title: The poetics of historical perspectivism : Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst and the neoclassic tradition / by Jill Anne Kowalik. Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures ; no. 114. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1992] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 91023614 | isbn 978-1-4696-5662-5 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5663-2 (ebook) Subjects: Breitinger, Johann Jakob, 1701-1776 — Critische Dichtkunst. | Poetics — History — 18th century. | Neoclassicism (Literature). Classification: lcc pn1044 .k66 1992 | dcc 801/ .951 For Hans-Hellmut and Hildegard Berthold, who introduced me to the historical world, and for my father, J. G. Warnecke, who made me curious about it Contents Acknowledgments xi A Note on Orthography xiii Introduction 1 1. Ut pictura poesis 9 Language and Metaphor 9 Epistemological Implications of Horace's Comparison 17 Issues of Practical Literary Criticism 28 2. Poetic Production and Breitinger's Notion 37 of Possible Worlds Leibniz's Concept of Possibility 41 Leibniz's Concept of Substance 44 Breitinger, Gottsched, and Wolff 50 3. Poetic Reception and la vraisemblance historique 62 Neoclassic Distortions of Aristotle's Poetics 62 Dubos and Breitinger 73 4. Perspectivism after Breitinger 87 Notes 105 Bibliography 135 Index 147 Acknowledgments This book could not have been written without the advice and sup port of Wesley Trimpi, in whose brilliant seminars on ancient literary theory at Stanford University the idea for this study was first con ceived. Since that time I have continued to benefit from his broad learning and painstaking scholarship as well as from his generosity as a teacher and friend. I am also grateful for the meticulous attention given my manuscript by the readers for the University of North Caro lina Press. Their criticism was invaluable in helping me to address, successfully I hope, some of the ina?equacies of my presentation. Thomas P. Saine read through an earlier version of the entire manu script and made a number of useful suggestions for improvement. He also freely provided a great deal of technical assistance with the elec tronic processing of the manuscript. Hinrich C. Seeba kindly agreed to review my text after a major revision. Ruth (Angress) Kluger did me the dual favor of first suggesting that I try to publish this material and then ignoring my protestations that I shouldn't bother. Nicholas Vazsonyi did an excellent job with the galley proof. I would like to thank my husband, William S. Kowalik, and my friend, Gail K. Hart, for offering constant encouragement, and always when I needed it most. Finally, I am deeply indebted to my editor, Paul T. Roberge, for his patience and enthusiasm about my work when the final revising of the text was interrupted for reasons beyond my control. xi A Note on Orthography Most of the quotations of primary works in this study evince ortho graphic conventions that deviate from modern norms. Three aspects of these deviations deserve special comment. First, the spelling of the same word may vary within the same text, as when Breitinger writes for the dative plural both "unsren" and "unsern." Such discrepancies may reflect the printer's inconsistencies. Second, antiquated spellings may occur in texts in which the orthography appears to be otherwise fairly modern, as when Wegelin writes "Geschichtschreiber" instead of "Geschichtsschreiber." Third, the orthography of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century French omits many of the diacritical marks that modern readers expect. Dubas has "reflexions" and not "reflex ions"; Leibniz has "verites" or "veritez" instead of "verites." More over, the letter o was often used in place of a. For example, the end ings -ait and -ais appear as -oit or -ois. Thus Dacier's Aristotle was "traduite en frarn;ois." All quotations have been carefully examined for their fidelity to the editions cited in the notes and bibliography. xiii The Poetics of Historical Perspectivism Introduction The development of aesthetics in late eighteenth-century Germany coincided with a strong scholarly interest in language and with a new reflection on history. The apparently sudden progress in these three fields is usually attributed to the seminal work of a brilliant philolo gist, cultural historian, literary theorist, linguist, and art critic namely, Herder. But the connections between aesthetics, the historical sciences, and the study of language, the reasons for the simultaneous attention given these disciplines in the eighteenth century, have yet to be explored adequately, primarily because scholars have often failed to examine in detail the origins of aesthetics in the early part of the century. This period was shaped by the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, which was intensely concerned with the interrelation of literary criticism, language, and history. My study is intended as a contribution to our understanding of this interrelation. By using Breitinger's text as a focal point, I hope to delineate a spe cific aspect of aesthetic thinking in the eighteenth century: how it was that poesis and historiography could increasingly come to resemble each other in their assumptions, purposes, and methods of presen tation. The concept that associates these two disciplines with each other in this period is "historical perspectivism." When applied to historiography, this notion holds that history is not accessible to us as an unrelated collection of "facts" or information, but only insofar as information can be placed in a context, a Zusammenhang. 1 The con struction of a context, however, was viewed as an essentially poetic task. The historian no longer simply writes out chronicles but "rep resents" the past. History, now understood as narrative, is a Gemiilde, an organized aesthetic whole that is not unlike the "Gemalde" that Breitinger says poets produce.2 The historical representation was, fur thermore, said to follow or be made possible by the adoption of a Gesichts-Punkt, a term that stood ready-to-hand in the poetic theory of the early Enlightenment. There the notion of perspectivism is manifest in the argument that the poet creates a literary work out of the perspective that he occupies vis-a-vis nature. When the term "his torical perspectivism" is extended to poetic interpretation, it means that the critic must account for the historical and cultural "distance" between himself and the work. A central contention of my study is that historians learned to utilize the notion of perspective after its 1 2 Introduction development as an interpretive tool by the aesthetic thinkers of the early eighteenth century, of whom Breitinger is but one albeit highly significant example. To be sure, a German version of the words "historical perspectiv ism" is nowhere to be found in Breitinger's oeuvre. Instead he relies on the term "Gesichts-Punkt," 3 which he endows with a decidedly historical quality. His. text therefore exemplifies a reflection on the relationship between historical consciousness, language, and litera ture that permeates the querelle. This has, however, not been gener ally appreciated. There are three reasons for this oversight. First, Brei tinger's concept of language, his view of the historically changing nature of.languages, has remained curiously neglected. Second, the extent of Breitinger's reliance on French sources is not well under stood. Dubos is most frequently mentioned en passant in interpreta tions of the Critische Dichtkunst, but Breitinger's appropriations from Dubos's text have never been carefully analyzed. Moreover, because Breitinger's work has been traditionally viewed as a "revolt" of sorts against neoclassic normative poetics, his use of other neoclassic crit ics, such as Le Bossu or Mme Dacier, has not been registered. Third, recent developments in Germanistik, including the disfavor into which Ideengeschichte has fallen, have discouraged attempts to interpret