2008/2009

Christoph König, Dr. phil.

Professor of Contemporary German Literature

University of Osnabrück

Geboren 1956 in Innsbruck, Österreich
Studium der Philosophie, Germanistik und Amerikanistik an der Universität Innsbruck

Project

"How to Create Nations With Words": Towards a Critical History of Philological Scholarship in Europe

Der Gedanke, dass die Philologien ihre eigene Geschichte sind, bleibt ein Aperçu, solange man nicht - gegenläufig - in der Geschichtlichkeit (und Relativität) philologischer Praxis und Theorie allgemeine Formen der Fächer, ihre "Universalien" auszumachen sucht. Zudem gilt es, das kritische Potential der Philologien für eine Aktualität zu wecken, die Forschung, Politik und Kultur gleichermaßen erfasst. Im 19. Jahrhundert lag die Aktualität in der Anleitung, "Wie man Nationen am Schreibtisch erfindet", und die disziplinäre Innenseite, das Metier in der Analyse von Sprache, Textzeugnis und Literatur, kam dagegen oft nicht an. Gerade in diesem Konflikt von Funktion und Handwerk oder Methodologie manifestiert sich indes der wissenschaftstheoretische, allgemeine Kern der Philologien, der mit den deutschen Modellen (ob national, komparatistisch oder ästhetisch-sprachphilosophisch) in die Länder Europas wanderte. In der Analyse des Transfers kehrt man zur Geschichte und zur Aufgabe zurück, geistesgegenwärtig Begründungsfiguren für die philologische Praxis in einem mehrsprachigen Europa zu schaffen. Da sich die Problematik vorzüglich im Verstehensvorgang konzentriert, lautet die Hauptfrage meines geplanten Buchs: Welche Philologie möchte man - zugunsten literarischer Werke und ihrer Individualität - heute verteidigen?

Lektüreempfehlung

König, Christoph. Hofmannsthal: Ein moderner Dichter unter den Philologen. (2001), 2. Aufl., Götttingen: Wallstein, 2006 (Marbacher Wissenschaftsgeschichte 2.)
König, Christoph. "'Stockungen' - Wilhelm von Humboldt liest Schillers Gedicht 'Der Spaziergang'. Plädoyer für eine Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Literatur." Euphorion 101, 1 (2007): 1-32.
König, Christoph. "Reflections of Reading: On Paul Celan and Peter Szondi." Telos 140 (2007): 147-175.
König, Christoph. Häme als literarisches Verfahren: Günter Grass, Walter Jens und die Mühen des Erinnerns. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008. (Göttinger Sudelblätter.)

Colloquium, 31.03.2009

On the Interpretation of Rilke's Sonnet "O komm und geh"

At the center of my talk is the sonnet II.28 "O komm und geh" from Rainer Maria Rilke's poem-cycle Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) which was published in 1922. The wording "On the Interpretation" in the lecture's title is a proviso. It means: Can the individual meaning of a poem be better understood if we first reflect on the notion of understanding itself? And further: What form should this reflection take?

Understanding is an activity, a practice, that employs workmanlike rules but which has no rules as to the application of these rules. The reader comes to grips with every literary work as if it were for the very first time and as if he himself were a raw beginner. Practice is to be distinguished from derivation of the work through theories. My discipline has accustomed itself to employing works as diagnoses of theoretical (philosophical, sociological, psychological, linguistic) assumptions: Owing to its (rapidly changing) theories, literary criticism today sees itself as a science-at the cost of misjudging the individuality of the literary works it studies.

Historically speaking, literary criticism is a latecomer. It first developed within philologies-and in opposition to them-from a practice consisting of the editing of literary works as well as commentary on them. The methodological naivete of philologists was proverbial, for in their scholarly dilegence they had managed to forget that certain theory pertaining to their practice and which was fully developed and available circa 1810-namely Friedrich Schleiermacher's Hermeneutik und Kritik. Schleiermacher's hermeneutics is critical in Kant's sense of the term, as it formulates the conditions for "correctly understanding the discourse, particularly in written form, of another person," and in so doing it dedicates itself to the complexities that hinder understanding, above all the individuality of the alien discourse.

My lecture will be devoted to present-day problems of hermeneutics. How are literary works that come to us from a great historical, cultural and geographic distance still able to speak to us? In order to answer this question, we must sharpen our sense for a) the idiomatic nature of the work-that is, its ability to develop its own "frame of reference" (often with its own lexikon and grammar) and within which is constituted the meaning of the particular work; and for b) the historicity of understanding, which shows itself precisely in the weakness of the scholarly discourse. In his "Dialektik," Schleiermacher was in accord with other interpreters who believed in the claim to truth of a reading; today we have been made cautious by the history of science and wish to test readings for their strategic and normative independence. My thesis is that, by virtue of their idiomatic nature, literary works are able to reflect, rupture and adapt historical material (including later readings). This critical practice, which produces a certain relationship, is accessible to understanding.

My interpretation will demonstrate whether or not Rilke's poem can be understood in this way; and it would be inappropriate to summarize it here, for that would contradict the first commandment of philological practice, namely that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.