Karl Eibl (Germanist)

Karl Eibl (born January 28, 1940 , † February 18, 2014 in Gröbenzell ) was a German literary scholar .

life and work

Eibl received his doctorate in 1967 under Ingrid Strohschneider-Kohrs in Bochum on the language criticism in the work of Gustav Sack . In 1973 he became a full professor for modern German literature at the University of Trier . In 1990 he was appointed to Munich . He was retired in 2008 .

In the methodological debates of literary studies during the 1970s, Eibl advocated a "critical-rational" explanatory literary study based on Karl Popper's Logic of Research (1934). In numerous essays and summarized in his monograph The Origin of Poetry from 1995, he put this program into practice, which primarily consisted of an evolutionary and ethological research into the fundamentals of human artistic behavior and a socio-historical explanation of cultural change. The biological approach was in his bookAnimal poeta (2004) revisited and expanded to include more recent approaches from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology . With regard to traditional philological methods, too , he showed himself to be a controversial representative of an empirically oriented literary study and, in 1985, had a discussion with his Tübingen colleague Jochen Schmidt in the yearbook of the German Schiller Society .

In addition to these programmatic initiatives, Eibl made numerous individual studies on the literature of the Enlightenment , the Goethe era, and the 19th and early 20th centuries. He published in particular on the authors Gotthold Ephraim Lessing , Johann Wolfgang Goethe , Friedrich Hölderlin , Johann Nestroy , Franz Grillparzer and Robert Musil . In the Goethe edition of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag , he published the volumes of poetry that have since been considered the leading edition of Goethe's poems. In the edition philology he also made himself noticeable through early experiments with electronic editions on CD-ROM . Already in 1992 he published his literary estate on CD together with other Musils . In 1998, an electronic edition of the works of the young Goethe followed with extensive material and context information. In 1999 he co-founded the Computational Philology Yearbook .

Karl Eibl was married to his wife Anje Eibl, née Heidenreich, sister of the writer and journalist Gert Heidenreich , until his death .

Important writings and editions

• Language skepticism in the work of Gustav Sack , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1970
• Critical-rational literary studies. Basics for the explanatory history of literature , Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1976 ( UTB 583), ISBN 3-7705-1370-3
• Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Poems , 2 vols., Deutscher Klassiker Verlag , Frankfurt am Main 1987/88
• Back to Darwin. Building blocks for determining the historical function of poetry , in: Michael Titzmann (ed.), Models of literary structural change , Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 1991, pp. 374–366
• Robert Musil: The literary estate. CD-ROM edition, ed. by Friedbert Aspetsberger, Karl Eibl and Adolf Frisé , Rowohlt Verlag , Reinbek near Hamburg 1992
• Are interpretations falsifiable? , in: Lutz Danneberg and Friedrich Vollhardt (eds.), On dealing with literature and literary history , Stuttgart 1992, pp. 169–184
• Structured non-worlds. On the biology of poetry , in: International Archive for Social History of German Literature 18/2 (1993), pp. 1–36
• The emergence of poetry , Insel Verlag , Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-458-16696-3
• History of literature, history of ideas, history of society - and "The Why of Development" , in: International Archive for Social History of German Literature 21/2 (1996), pp. 1–26
• The young Goethe in his time. All works, letters, diaries and writings up to 1775 , 2 volumes and CD-ROM, ed. by Karl Eibl, Fotis Jannidis and Marianne Willems, Insel Verlag , Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 1998, ISBN 3-458-33800-4
• The monumental me. Ways to Goethe's "Faust" , Insel Verlag , Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig 2000, ISBN 3-458-34363-6
• Animal poeta. Building blocks for biological culture and literary theory , Mentis Verlag, Paderborn 2004. ISBN 3-89785-450-3
• Culture as an Intermediate World: An Evolutionary Biology Perspective . Frankfurt 2009

Web links

• Literature by and about Karl Eibl in the catalog of the German National Library
• Short biography and reviews of works by Karl Eibl at perlentaucher.de
• Homepage of Karl Eibl
• Font directory
• Interview in the magazine Parapluie from 2004
• Portrait in the magazine Der Spiegel from 2007
• Review of Animal poeta