Auto reflexivity

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Autoreflexibility , literally self-referential, is a technical term from literary studies and describes an aspect of the reference of literary texts: It always intends an object that lies beyond the text - praise of the ruler, representation of heroic deeds, invocation of loved ones, criticism of social conditions - and at the same time itself This text function is also called “self-reference”, “ self-referentiality ”, “self-reflection” or “self-reflection”.

Literary examples

“The term autoreflectivity is often used in literary studies, but it is seldom defined,” says the website of the book journal for Christoph Schamm's study The Poem in the Mirror of Itself , and further: “Self-referentiality is often referred to as an essential characteristic of modern poetry . ”- This certainly also applies to the other genres of literary modernism . It remains to be noted, however, that autoreflectivity is a structural dimension of every literary text, in every epoch . In this context, Bakhtin says: “In the novel, language not only represents, but also serves as the object of representation.” Lotman formulates a little more succinctly : “The linguistic structure appears as a condition, as a means of transferring information, the literary structure on the other hand as their goal and content . "

The type of literary process and "text formants" chosen - perspective of representation, structure, syntax , lexicons , sound (possibly rhyme ), rhythm (possibly metrics ) - place the text in a literary tradition (see intertextuality ) to which it is more likely behave affirmatively or rather in opposition. An implicit genre and literary theory manifests itself in how generic norms are met or broken and how the text positions itself in relation to horizons of expectation. Signals for auto-reflective connotations are any form of alienation in the structure of the text and the use of rhetorical figures , in particular repetitions, leitmotifs, references, retrospectives, anticipations, procedures such as time lapse and time expansion, etc.

An obvious case of autoreflectivity is the self-quotation: In Bernhard's extinction it says: "I had asked Gambetti [...] to study these five books very carefully [...]: Siebenkäs by Jean Paul, The Trial by Franz Kafka , Amras by Thomas Bernhard, Die Portugiesin von Musil, Esch or Die Anarchy von Broch “. Not only does the narrator place his own story in a literary context, but a Bernhard text refers to another Bernhard text and ennobles both by canonizing and - with a histrionic twist, of course not without irony or self-irony - and in a row with classics of world literature.

Less striking, but no less obvious, is the self-referential gesture of Max Frisch's novel Stiller , which already begins with the exclamatory opening sentence "I am not Stiller!" denies the authenticity of its title and thus of itself.

Kleist's Penthesilea is used as a further example of autoreflectivity : Renate Homann divides the text into the following stations: 1. Fight, 2. Rose scene, 3. Achilles' murder, 4. Penthesilea's suicide. Then she correlates the second station with the Greco-Roman natural poetry , the third with the classical Greek tragedy and the fourth with the medieval passion play . The implicit theory of the genre places the drama in the tradition of the “ Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes ”. In this context, the dominant opposition in Penthesilea between Eros and Thanatos , between struggle and pleasure, means on the one hand the opposition between Homeric poetry and post-Homeric reception, and on the other hand the abolition, namely representation and overcoming of this opposition in the "aesthetic tragedy".

Even texts that are not suspected of claiming literary quality, such as - as an arbitrary example - David Read's novel Waters of the Sanjan , in which the protagonist, a Maasai , has to assert himself against various adversities and thus become a respected leader matures in its age group and in which the narrative subject seems to be the representation and preservation of traditional ways of life and customs of the Maasai - even such texts do not lack an autoreflective dimension or an implicit text theory. The author is certainly not wronged to summarize the latter in the formula 'storytelling is a quasi photographic representation of reality' - with all the consequences for the literary value of the text.

Other art forms

Reference has already been made to the field of fine arts. What has been said about literature naturally also applies to painting, sculpture, music, dance and every artistic expression in general. A work of art always places itself in or against a genre tradition and a social-historical context and at the same time claims the power to define what a work of art is, so that a meta-level must always be taken into account.

Philosophical Aspects

All human actions or acts - external as well as internal - are accompanied by an "act consciousness", as it is called in phenomenological literature. When I lift a stone, I know that I am lifting that stone. When I doubt, I know that I doubt - and even that I am there, exist (see Descartes' methodological doubt). Obviously, it is this - anthropologically speaking - dual nature of human actions that manifests itself in the artistic field: narration knows that it is telling, i.e. H. it knows and at the same time proclaims what narration is and what a narration is.

literature

Primary literature

  • Bernhard, Thomas, extinction. Ein Zerfall , Frankfurt am Main 1988 (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 1563), ISBN 3-518-38063-X
  • Fresh, Max, Stiller. Roman , Frankfurt am Main 1954, 36. – 55. Tausend 1974 (Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 105), ISBN 3-518-06605-6
  • Kleist, Heinrich von, Complete Works and Letters , ed. Helmut Sembdner, seventh, expanded and revised edition, Darmstadt 1983
  • Read, David, and Pamela Brown, Waters of the Sanjan. A Historical Novel of the Masai , self-published by David Read 1982, revised. 1989 edition, ISBN 9987-8920-1-9

Secondary literature

  • Marc Bauch : Self-reflexivity in an American musical, Cologne 2013 (Chapter 2: Self-reflexivity in literature)
  • Homann, Renate: Self-reflection of literature. Studies on dramas by GE Lessing and H. von Kleist, Munich 1986
  • Schamm, Christoph, The poem in the mirror of itself. Auto-reflexivity in Italian poetry from aesthetic decadence to futuristic avant-garde , Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-89975-565-7
  • Stadler, Hermann (ed.), German. Understanding-speaking-writing , 3rd edition, Frankfurt am Main 1976 (= FischerKolleg Das Abitur-Wissen , Vol. 6), ISBN 3-436-01786-8
  • Zima, Peter V. (ed.), Text semiotics as ideological criticism , Frankfurt am Main 1977

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the title by Renate Homann.
  2. ↑ Michail Bachtin, Das Wort im Roman , in: Zima, p. 191
  3. ↑ Jurij M. Lotman, On the distinction between the linguistic and the literary structural concept , in: Zima, p. 146; Italics in the original.
  4. ↑ Stadler, p. 187
  5. ↑ Extinction , p. 7f.
  6. ↑ Stiller , p. 9
  7. ↑ We know the same paradoxical gesture from the fine arts when we think of Magritte and his painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe .
  8. ↑ Homann, pp. 306f.
  9. ↑ ibid.
  10. ↑ René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode. From the method of the correct use of reason , trans. u. hg.v. Lüder Gäbe, Hamburg 1969 (= Philosophical Library Volume 261)

Web links