ABSTRACT

It should be evident from the preceding chapters that even the most radical versions of recent literary theory are responses to questions about language, truth, art and interpretation which are intrinsic to modern philosophy, rather than a complete novum. The fact that debates over literary theory have been so controversial has, especially in the English-speaking world, not least to do with two intellectual failures. 1 The analytical tradition of philosophy has until recently failed to assimilate any of the insights of hermeneutics into the importance of aesthetics for questions of language, truth and interpretation. At the same time traditional forms of literary study have also failed to engage with philosophical resources which, in the case of Jacobi, Novalis and Schlegel, were even produced by authors whose literary texts are deemed appropriate objects of academic study. The disparate nature of these disciplines itself suggests a divide which literary theory has rightly begun to question. If approaches to meaning and communication exclude either the literary in the name of a scientistic conception of semantic explanation, or the philosophical in the name of the uncritical common-sense assumption that there are no serious methodological—as opposed, say, to historical or biographical—problems involved in understanding works of art, the result is a completely unrealistic image of how problems of meaning and communication emerge in real societies. These problems, as the Romantics already realised, inherently involve dimensions which must draw on the whole range of resources from philosophy and literary studies, and the best contemporary literary theory has now again begun to realise this. 2