Description
Book SynopsisOriginally published in 1970. For Sigurd Burckhardt, literary interpretation began with the discovery of an inconsistency in a text. Minimizing the possibility that the writer has unconsciously fallen into an inconsistency in the use of material, the true interpreter, Burckhardt believes, abandons a tendency to correct the writer and seeks instead a new formulation by which the inconsistency can be seen as a part of a work's essential unity. Whether I search for the meaning of a word or for the meaning of my life, he wrote, I am looking for something under which I can subsume the otherwise unrelated and meaningless particular so as to place it in a larger order. That method, so characteristic of Burckhardt's criticism, underlies his studies of Goethe and Kleist and unifies the essays of this volume. Prior to his death in December 1966, Professor Burckhardt had considered the possibility of collecting his writings on Goethe and Kleist. One essay had never been published; others had appe
Table of ContentsForeword
Introduction: Of Order, Abstraction, and Language
Chapter 1. Language as Form in Goethe's Prometheus and Pandora
Chapter 2. "The voice of truth and of humanity": Goethe's Iphigenie
Chapter 3. The Consistency of Goethe's Tasso
Chapter 4. Die natiirliche Tochter: Goethe's Iphigenie in Aulis?
Chapter 5. Egmont and Prinz Friedrich van Homburg: Expostulation and Reply
Chapter 6. Heinrich von Kleist: The Poet as Prussian
Chapter 7. Kleist's Hermannsschlacht: The Lock and the Key
Notes
Index
