Staiger saw interpretation as proving a poem’s internal coherence
Evidence
Staiger thought the task of interpretation was to provide evidence, from a poem that addresses us with peculiar beauty, to show that its appeal to us is justifiedthat is to prove `how everything accords within the whole and how the whole accords with the details’. This was to be done by using philology, biography and intellectual and general historyall the various achievements of so-called positivist literary studies. The classicist lines by Mörike he selected suggested to Staiger the image of a poet standing on the threshold between two ages, at the end of Romanticism and the beginning of an epoch whose dullness was painful to him. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2225
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines the method and aim of ‘work-immanent’ interpretation — coherence proof using positivist philology but refusing social grounding.
- XREF: connects to: Staiger and Adorno split over whether interpretation accepts or interrogates conditions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2228; Understanding a discourse’s coherence explains its force without justifying it