Read moods. About a hidden reality of literature

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Read moods. About a hidden reality in literature (2011) is a volume with essays by the German-American literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht , some of which had previously appeared as a series of articles in the FAZ . The volume of essays has received a lot of attention and has produced contradicting reading experiences.

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In the introduction, the author initially works with an argumentatively unencumbered recommendation when considering “how one can think the reality of literature today”. He argues that “tone” and “atmosphere” and “mood” are laid out in the texts and advocates mood-oriented reading of literary texts, whose effect (on himself) he shows. In exemplary essays he shows which mood qualities of works and epochs can be read as habitualized moods and how these are reflected in literary forms. Gumbrecht advocates concentrating on the physical-affective basis of text-reader communication.

To songs by Walther von der Vogelweide (around 1200)

In the songs of Walther von der Vogelweide, Gumbrecht deciphered a nervous tone that he believes was the author's reaction to the political conflicts around 1200. He believes that he feels a “persistent pain over the experience that his world was in tension with the order wanted by God” (p. 41), and moments of calm attest “a special intensity, indeed a dignity of its own” (p . 43), and makes the following assumption about the author: "His longing for cosmological correctness and political calm was never satisfied and, reversed into wakeful irritability, seems to stand before all poems as a mood sign" (p. 43) he states that his reaction to the texts contradicts the knowledge of modern medieval studies, which is considered correct, which rejects biographical reading of the texts, also because the suggestion of individuality in the role languages ​​of the lyrical texts is an illusion. But Gumbrecht wants it to be true that around 1200 there was a longing for a joyful life in a time that was out of joint and that he can therefore be touched by the irritability that he diagnoses as the mood in the text.

To the first picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (anonymous, 1554)

In his essay on the first picaresque novel , La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades , which was published anonymously in 1554, Gumbrecht describes how his impression arises "that we can trust the hero as little as he can himself." (P. 55) He traces peculiar tensions, an irritated "mood of duplicity" (p. 52), which expresses a basic tension between everyday experience and religious orthodoxy, in mechanisms of comic disillusionment.

On William Shakespeare's Sonnett XVIII (1609)

In this essay Gumbrecht gives an account of a lifelong fascination. Using the example of his reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII , Gumbrecht formulates the realization that “the moment of aesthetic experience remains an individual event”, “the occurrence of which cannot be brought about or even guaranteed” (p. 73) and, more generally - in view of the fact that that the reader's attention can focus on a certain layer of meaning or oscillate between different ones: “there is no 'correct' attitude towards the poem.” (p. 70) In Sonett XVIII he creates a special intensity of “harmony between content and rhythm ”(P. 71), and that's why the magic“ I think is so difficult to grasp. ”(P. 71)“ [D] in his sonnets we can directly touch the world of a certain present and its mood ”( P. 59), there is no doubt for Gumbrecht.

On María de Zayas' novellas (1635–1650)

In María de Zayas 'first novella , Gumbrecht distinguishes her volume Novelas amorosas y ejemplares , in which fictional ones are characterized by a description, in María de Zayas ' first novella, an intensity of different moods, generated by the accumulated effect of “luxuriant descriptions” “in rhetorical pomp” Listening to "a dense mood of amorous melancholy" "unfolds" (p. 79), which in the framework of the story also "captures" those present while they have "eagerly listened to" a melancholy novella. Gumbrecht suggests that a writer whom he counts as one of “the great authors of that time” and who “was admired by the great men of her time” is not represented with her works in the classical canon of literature for a certain reason: “ Perhaps for a long time we were focused too exclusively on the actions of dramas and stories and so overlooked the fact that [other well-known works] stand for the intensity of distinctively different moods in which we can - and want to immerse ourselves. " 80) Maria de Zajas is to be rediscovered as a “master in conjuring up such literary moods” (p. 79), and for this Gumbrecht focuses primarily on “the very rhetorical charm of the novels” (p. 80).

More essays

In other essays, Gumbrecht deals, among other things, with the effect of bad weather and a loud voice in Denis Diderot's philosophical dialogue Rameau's nephew , with the beautiful form of sadness in Diary of Farewell (1908), the last novel by the Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and Thomas Mann's mood of gravity ( Death in Venice , 1911). The argument is expanded to include images based on broken harmony in the representation of light by the painter Caspar David Friedrich and acoustics based on reflections on freedom in Janis Joplin's voice when she sings " Me and Bobby McGee ".

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Gumbrecht formulates without footnotes and in “we”, although he writes about personal matters. To put it the other way around, this observation can be found in a review by Steffen Martus : “It must have been a happy time, when [...] one only had to say“ I ”loudly enough, trusting in one's own representativeness, to understand the meaning of“ We " to create."

The often journalistically terse essays, sometimes mentally redundant, according to Martus, provoke literary studies with their light-footedness: Gumbrecht offers "tender, compassionate, almost loving readings that flatter the works with a light touch, advertise them."

Assessments of the tape

Mark-Georg Dehrmann ( SZ , 2011)

Mark-Georg Dehrmann thinks that Gumbrecht wrote about the “immediacy of experience” in literature because he actually wanted to answer the question of how literary studies could attract the interest of a larger number of “non-professional literary readers”. For this purpose, Gumbrecht referred to a conception of “mood” with which strange times and places could be physically experienced if the whole of the zeitgeist is shown in the details of a work. According to Dehrmann's assessment, Gumbrecht sketches literary-historical scenes as “as if they had never been written about”, albeit skillfully with the aim of “bringing the past to life.” Scientific complexity is left out of the equation, Gumbrecht pretending to be necessary Don't text a process of understanding first. In the course of this, Gumbrecht tries, apparently free of hermeneutics, to make plausible a new paradigm in literary studies with which the persistence of literary studies in a stalemate between deconstructivism and cultural studies that he diagnosed could be overcome. Dehrmann, on the other hand, doubts that such a mutual blockage even exists.

Manfred Koch ( NZZ , 2011)

Manfred Koch is of the opinion that “speech that evokes the atmosphere of literature also remains an interpretive speech” and Gumbrecht's mood readings seem too short for him to “allow the scope of his approach to be assessed now”. Koch finds it provocative that Gumbrecht, as a scientist, thinks he can transform himself back into a “non-professional reader”.

Detlev Schöttker ( FAZ , 2011)

In Reading Moods , Gumbrecht unfolds “the full breadth and depth of his historical and aesthetic education,” says Detlev Schöttker. With his concept of mood, he ties in with Heidegger's recoding, as shown by David Wellbery in the entry “mood” for the lexicon of basic aesthetic terms .

Wolfgang Schneider ( DR Culture , 2011)

Wolfgang Schneider understood Gumbrecht to mean that literary works, songs and paintings can literally absorb moods - and thus "reality", the existential aroma of which, as objectifiable collective moods, has been neglected by literary studies. Schneider thinks that it is for good reason, because moods are difficult to pin down. Since Gumbrecht knew “about the dangers of such theses for the academic reputation”, he turned to Hegel to be on the safe side, in order to ignore his warnings about the “pulp of the heart”.

Steffen Martus ( Die Zeit , 2012)

Gumbrecht thinks it is not about naive satisfaction with the subjective impression. The author emphasizes that an "mood-oriented" analysis must have historiographical quality in order to clarify the moods of the times that the works testify and with which the moods of the readers merge, because the poetry radiates atmospheric energies. The mood analysis remains, however, only their emotional certainty: Even if moods defy generalization, one has the impression that they exude evidence. From a historical perspective, Martus suggests that Gumbrecht echoes something that Emil Staiger , as the “figurehead of the so-called work-immanent interpretation”, demanded: “understand what grasps us” (Staiger) or “what touches us while reading” (Gumbrecht ) at the center of the analysis.

Stefan Hajduk ( KulturPoetik , 2012)

Stefan Hajduk believes that with a view to the practical reading value of the term “mood”, Gumbrecht only wants to use it to mediate between perceptual aesthetic and literary aesthetic experience, as a “reading figure of an imagination that resonates without a concept.” He is critical of Gumbrecht's fading out of the cognitive dimension of mood and also his demand to only get involved affectively in the text presence, because, according to Hajduk's position, literary moods are not meaning-neutral and mood-oriented reading is not theory-free. He therefore rightly sees Gumbrecht hesitating to want to establish mood as a poetological figure who would have to be conceptualized in the transition between the experience of the senses and the experience of the meaning, whereby, from Hajduk's point of view, the aesthetic materiality of literature should also be reflected. In the essay on Thomas Mann's death in Venice, Hajduk would have found Wilhelm Dilthey's ›experience‹ concept, which was created around the same time, worth mentioning, as well as the work of current mood research by Kerstin Thomas and Angelika Jacobs in the essay on Caspar David Friedrich. The final part of three contemporary diagnostic articles on historical moods should be “almost bold” because, according to Hajduk, Gumbrecht's “central reference thinker” Foucault , it would have been hopeless to read empirically inaccessible moods of collective sensitivities with historical meaning and understanding < to want. Such an intention seems monstrous to today's historiologically reflected thinking. Hajduk argues that Gumbrecht's approach brings something into view that remains inaccessible to scientifically proceeding analytics and he comes to the conclusion that the polemical framework chosen by Gumbrecht appears to be overly forced, but mood-oriented reading as an aesthetic basis for professional reading Reading is to make it productive.

Andrei Corbea-Hoişie ( Arcadia , 2013)

From the point of view of Andrei Corbea-Hoişie , Gumbrecht's derivation of the mood since the early romantic period, that the distance between subject and object becomes greater, is “thoroughly stimulating and convincing” when it is shown in the essays that the human being is for his understanding of the relationship of things to the world relies on his senses as well as on his consciousness producing his concepts. Corbea-Hoişie regards it as questionable that a literary scholar who concentrates on moods has the same freedom as the “real reader” to perceive reading-guided experience in an intensive concreteness.

reception

Read moods. A hidden reality in literature has attracted attention in the major newspapers and national public broadcasting as well as in specialist literature. Reviews appeared in Süddeutsche Zeitung , Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , Deutschlandradio Kultur and Die Zeit as well as in KulturPoetik and in Arcadia: international journal of literary culture .

Reading experience

Gumbrecht's book encourages sensual reading, reports Manfred Koch, and he would like to know more about what its author has to say when he tries “to capture the immediate aesthetic experience” for which he expects hints from his intuition. Detlev Schöttker states that the book can convey many enriching insights to its readers, such as the one that "even the master thinker among contemporary philologists has not banished the sentimental mood from his emotional budget". The “mood” of the book itself is irritating, reports Steffen Martus, because the air of melancholy that surrounds the readings seems “not really confident” for the future of a “mood-oriented” literary study.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Steffen Martus, deciphering longing, conjuring up summer. The Romance scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls for a new, more “mood-oriented” literary study , in: Die Zeit , June 9, 2011, p. 50
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Stefan Hajduk, mood-oriented reading and its hidden theory Open Access in: KulturPoetik: Zeitschrift zur kulturgeschichtliche Literaturwissenschaft , Volume 12 (2012), Issue 1, Pages 142–146
  3. ↑ a b c d Wolfgang Schneider, When literature absorbs reality , Deutschlandradio Kultur , June 9, 2011
  4. ↑ In very isolated cases Gumbrecht wrote in this way: "Also in these verses, I mean ..." (p. 66) or: "This is how the pathos and the solemn colors in the painting affect me ..." (p. 92)
  5. ↑ a b Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Kisses that do not deliver. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht reads “Moods” , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , March 22, 2011
  6. ↑ a b Manfred Koch, Show what grips us. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's rediscovery of the aesthetic mood , in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 9, 2011, p. 66
  7. ↑ a b c Detlev Schöttker, Heidegger in your pocket. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht reads with feeling , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , April 16, 2011, No. 90, p. Z5
  8. ↑ Review
  9. ^ Jacobs' latest study, habilitation thesis 2010, published as Angelika Jacobs: Atmospheric Art. From Novalis to Hofmannsthal . Igel-Verlag, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86815-524-2
  10. ↑ Andrei Corbea-Hoişie, Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich: Reading moods , in: Arcadia: international journal of literary culture , Volume 48 (2013), Issue 1, pages 214-216

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