History of Literature, Fragment of a Vanished Totality?

Abstract

rT r HE RELATION between the concepts of and has a history; the genesis of the concept of of literature and its interpretation as a symptom, part, or fragment of form a chapter from the more recent phases of this history of a relation. There are at least two conditions for the possibility of conceiving the notion of literature. One of them is the appearance of the collective singular history: it has been interpreted by Reinhart Koselleck as the answer of the early Enlightenment to the new experience of a plurality of historical developments. This is an experience which has as its historical presupposition the enlargement of the environment that was relevant to the world of Europe; projected into the future, the collective singular history becomes one of those concepts whereby European thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in developing a teleological picture of history, was able to free itself from the authority of antiquity and the idea of historical cycles. The other condition for the notion of of literature is the formation of a consciousness concerning the special character of and art as forms of practice that have moved away from the pragmatics of daily life; this consciousness, as an experience embracing different social levels, probably first set in during the transition from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Against the background of the new overall concept of history there arose-unnoticed, as it were, by contemporaries-two versions of the concept of literature, which have remained self-evident to this