Abstract
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! O times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime enchantress – to assist the work, Which then was going forward in her name! (Wordsworth 1850, 401)
Highlights
What wouldn’t we give for a paradigm shift! A scholar’s life, like everyone else’s, is valued by its lasting influence on future generations
Frank Kelleter scholarship, to confront an approach not one’s own usually means to engage in polemics, trying to establish the fundamental authority of one’s own chosen theory and method
What wouldn’t we give for a real – a final – paradigm shift! Such seems to be the subliminal chorus behind the cacophony of current theoretical debates
Summary
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! O times, In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance! When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights, When most intent on making of herself A prime enchantress – to assist the work, Which was going forward in her name! (Wordsworth 1850, 401). Neo-naturalist approaches almost instinctively stress the standards of what in German is called Wissenschaftlichkeit, i.e. transparent terminology, verifiability of claims, self-reflexivity about instruments and aims, coherence in argumentation, precision and economy in expression, appropriateness of methods to chosen object These standards are not exclusively scientific in origin – the German word Wissenschaft includes both science and scholarship – but humanist research has recently tended to disavow its share in methodological reason. Literary Darwinism, and their many subsidiaries claim to illuminate »the conditions and functions that make possible or even force into existence something like literature in the first place« (Zymner/ Engel 2004, 7).1 This is the third and most challenging promise of neo-naturalism: its recognition that human culture depends, in ways still to be clarified, on the prior existence of human bodies with basic biological needs and capacities. It has to do with the neo-naturalist claim of establishing literary and cultural scholarship as a science
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