Peter Szondi

On Textual Understanding, and Other Essays

Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marked the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century. The book's three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poem. "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 105" investigates a historical turn from a poetry that claims to present its object to a poetry that only promises to do so. "Reading 'Engführung'" follows the movement of poetic language into territory undisclosed to epistemic reason. "Eden" addresses "Du liegst," a poem on the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; Szondi actually was with Celan when the poem was written. It analyzes the relation between the historical facts to which a poem refers and its composition. The book contains, as appendixes, Szondi's notes for three more projected studies of Celan poems, left unwritten at the time of his death in 1971.

Celan Studies

Lct Szondi

Peter Szondi is widely regarded as being among the most distinguished post-war literary critics. This first English edition of one of his most lucid and interesting series of lectures opens up his work in hermeneutics for English-speaking readers. The question of what is involved in understanding a text occupied Biblical and legal scholars long before it became a concern of literary critics. Peter Szondi here traces the development of hermeneutics through examination of the work of eighteenth-century German scholars. Ordinarily treated only as prefigurations of Schleiermacher, the work of Enlightenment theorists Johann Martin Chladenius, George Friedrich Meier, and Friedrich Ast yields valuable insight into the 'material theory' of interpretation, on which a practical interpretive methodology might be built.

Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics

On Textual Understanding and Other Essays

This is a succinct and elegant argument for the specificity of a philosophy of tragedy, as opposed to a poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle.

An Essay on the Tragic

Klaus Reichert

Eberhard Lämmert

Karlheinz Stierle

Jurij Striedter

Der unbegünstigte Magier

Aus: Euphorion (1965), 59

This book is a brilliant analysis of the emergence and development of modern drama from the Renaissance to the present day. This concise but wide-ranging book discusses the work of Ibsen, Chekhov, Strindberg, Satre, Brecht and Wilder, among others.

Peter Szondi

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