Robert Weimann and GDR Literary Theory

Abstract

In the course of the 1960s Robert Weimann emerged as a major literary theorist in the GDR. An Anglist, who has expanded his interest in English literature into more general fields, Weimann has published three major works since 1962: und die Entwicklung biurgerlicher Literaturwissenschaft, Literaturgeschichte und Mythologie, and Structure and Society in Literary History, written in English and published last fall by the University of Virginia Press. As a practical critic he has also written several studies on Shakespeare and Defoe, and his essays covering a wide range of literary topics appear frequently in leading GDR periodicals such as Sinn und Form und Weimarer Beitrdge. A member of the Zentralinstitut fiir Literaturgeschichte at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in East Berlin, Weimann is closely associated with Werner Mittenzwei, Manfred Naumann and Dieter Schlenstedt, who also number among the GDR's most important literary scholars. Weimann's work is thus worth examining because it is representative of certain major directions in recent GDR literary theory, particularly in its interest in theoretical developments in the West and in its concern with developing a new aesthetics based on literary function to replace the older GDR emphasis on literary genesis. Weimann's work also displays some of the limitations as well as the positive qualities of the most advanced GDR theory, and these problems will restrict its usefulness for scholars outside the GDR. As Peter Hohendahl has pointed out in Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR,1 the concern of GDR critics like Weimann with western literary theory is characterized by their attempt to examine western theories for their usefulness to GDR thought while at the same time critiquing these theories from what they regard as a Marxist perspective. This tendency has existed in Weimann's work from the beginning, though in his earliest writing perhaps more implicitly than explicitly. His I.nd die Entwicklung biirgerlicher Literaturwissenschaft is an analysis of the ideological components of Anglo-American formalism and the impoverishment of literary interpretation which results from a refusal to make the work's relationship to history and society a central element in literary analysis.2 Though this early work was concerned primarily with a critique of the formalist method, Weimann's involvement with the methods of New Criticism also left its positive traces on his own work. From New Criticism, Weimann appears to have