Critical analysis of Emil Staiger’s essay “The Art of Interpretation” (1955), seen here as a performative staging of the act of hermeneutical understanding by a “Virtuose der Auslegung” (Virtuoso of exegesis) in Wilhelm Dilthey’s sense in his “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” (The Rise of Hermeneutics, 1900). By this approach, a closer look reveals…[Read more]

No discussion of literature and poetry in connection with the problem of authenticity can fail to evoke their epochal shadow of suspicion of the notoriously non-authentic. This goes back to Plato’s Republic where questions regarding the inauthenticity of the mimetic arts result in a decisive verdict against poetry, which would consequently be…[Read more]

In the context of the transatlantic circulation of ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu), “America” had already become a catchword associated with the danger of a decline in aesthetical taste-culture by the end of the 19th century, which meant that American culture was now decisively linked to the dualistic system of aesthetic norms and values with its…[Read more]

Roundtable: Enlightenment in the Dutch and Swiss City Republics

Critical examination and analysis of the Canon Debates (“Canon Wars”) in the United States from the Sixties to the Nineties – seen from without. (Symposium paper [1996] published in 1998 in German under the title “Cross the Border – Close the Gap!” – Die Dekanonisierung der Elitekultur in der Postmoderne und die Rekanonisierung des Amerika-M…[Read more]

Humboldt’s Writings on Language. Selection

Dissertation under the direction of Emil Staiger, University of Zurich, 1966

Habilitationsschrift Universität Zürich. 1974

Rhythms and Sounds as Narratives from the Ancient World into Modern Times

Introduction and Annotations

Critical analysis of Emil Staiger’s programmatic essay “The Art of Interpretation” (1955) seen here as a performative staging of the act of hermeneutical understanding by a “Virtuose der Auslegung” (Virtuoso of exegesis) in Wilhelm Dilthey’s sense in his “Die Entstehung der Hermeneutik” (The Rise of Hermeneutics, 1900)

The search for authenticity in literature in view of the verdict against it in Plato’s Politeia – by means of rhetoric devices of epiphany in H. v. Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter and J. Joyce’s Stephen Hero and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Transformations and reformulations of the concept of the transfer of imperiums via myths and heroes from Greek and Roman Antiquity in the “Sister Republics” USA and Switzerland in the 18th century – translatio qua aemulatio, dissimulatio, superatio, deliberatio.

Within the framework of the conference the present article argues that the controversial territories Goethe every so often trespasses are not so much those between science and poetry – as often put forward, but rather a twilight zone between a traditional culture of narrative knowing and a modern culture of scientific knowledge, a distinction set…[Read more]

Hegel postuliert in seinen Ästhetischen Vorlesungen, dass die schöne Kunst durch Gedanke und Reflexion überflügelt worden sei, weil diese es uns heute zum Bedürfnis machten, »allgemeine Gesichtspunkte festzuhalten und danach das Besondere zu regeln, so dass allgemeine Formen, Gesetze, Pflichten, Rechte, Maximen als Bestimmungsgründe gelten und da…[Read more]

In theories about Jokes and Humour emphasis is usually laid on the aspects of aggression and degradation. In a revision of the phenomenon of joke-telling the present study tries to establish the notion that in the pragmatic context of interaction “joke-telling” the tendency for a specific kind of “transcending integration” has a far greater – if…[Read more]

The present discussion contribution argues that O. Müller not only suppresses Goethe’s declared intentions with regard to the latter’s Theory of Colors and ignores his place in what in any case is a different scientific culture than his (Müller’s) own or Newton’s, namely a premodern culture of “narrative knowledge” in the sense specified by…[Read more]

The cultural dynamics of German-Swiss literature may be conceived in terms of the following four basic forces: 1) The multilingualism of Switzerland; 2) The bilingualism of the German-Swiss region; 3) The internally disparate cultural tendencies caused by federalism and regionalism; 4) The external integration into a supranational language-culture…[Read more]