Institute for German Studies

In order to answer the question of understanding literature, it is first necessary to clarify what 'understanding' actually means and whether (and which!) literature has an inherent aesthetic, political or 'transcendental' potential that can be understood in a similar way to a historical or scientific fact, and can therefore be intellectually comprehended and recognized as accurate. Understanding understood in this way has to do with following intellectual rules and social affirmation. It stands up to empirical scrutiny, but it lacks the 'stubbornness' that poetry can provoke.

Literature also has aspects that can be analyzed, which can be precisely identified in the case of motifs, ironic allusions or stylistic peculiarities. Literature can thus be understood on this partly content-related, partly formal level. However, poetry can make further demands on readers, for example in the form of non-consensual objections, unusual perspectives on the seemingly familiar or surprising refusals of meaning, which can only be understood beyond regulated processes of comprehension. In this case, we are dealing with individual interpretations for which hermeneutic 'tricks' are available. Furthermore, such interpretations can be communicated in an understandable way. And finally, a certain group of readers (German teachers, professors or literary societies) can agree on a certain view of a work, for example because they consider it to be particularly appropriate at the time. In all of these cases, however, it is not literature but its 'translation' into what is commode or ideologically appropriate that is understood.

In order to avoid such hegemonic acts of reading, it seems more appropriate to think of the interpretation of literature as always only a partial, but creative appropriation of a text. Without wanting to speak of the irrational, timeless or auratic in art, the question of whether and how literature can be understood can now be answered with 'no'. If one accepts the thesis that it only wants to remain 'meaningful' anyway, poetry would also be released from the compulsion to be understood. However, it is not only literary works that benefit from this exemption, but also all readers who fill something that is only hinted at in a novel or poem with meaning from a real, historically describable perspective. On the one hand, they experience themselves as meaning-creating subjects who act on poetry out of a finally 'understood' purpose, completing it as it were. On the other hand, they can now encounter literature that is limited to affirmation and consensualism with sheer incomprehension.

Literature and stubbornness by Stefan Greif (pdf download)