The Hermeneutic Significance of Auerbach's Ansatz
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4270682 |
|---|---|
| Authors | W Wolfgang Holdheim (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 627 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/468844 |
| OpenAlex | W2320726650 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
I WANT TO FOCUS on central notion in Erich Auerbach's critical practice and concomitant theoretical self-reflection: on that concrete and well-defined key problem (often literary passage) which serves him literary-historical analysis. He calls it Ansatz, and no single English term could possibly convey the multifariously refracted shades meaning that the German word (together with its corresponding verb, ansetzen) suggests. Their exhaustive investigation would take me beyond reasonable limits. But selective to-and-fro between some those shadings and Auerbach's statements on the matter, seen against the horizon his practice, may carry cumulative suggestion what this critic may mean to us today. I have already cited the most obvious translation: point departure (or, perhaps, of initiation). For all its schematic paucity, this term has the implication expanding, going beyond. In the original, this implication is much stronger: Ansatz is also addition or appendage; ansetzen carries the nuance thriving, growing, even gaining weight. Especially growing: the process is not mechanical but temporal, denotes development from the potential to the actual, natural expansion the part into the whole. Auerbach likes to intensify this aspect by using metaphor radiation: the Ansatz must radiate, that world history can be carried on from its basis [von ihm aus].' The whole is potentially contained in the part; the part is a partial phenomenon describable with technical-philological that permits synthesizing unfolding the totality, until the radiating light as it were illuminates an entire historical landscape.2 Let us note that the characteristic particularity the Ansatz is by no means schematic and arbitrary individuation but genuine given concreteness and thus temporal concrescence, growing together various strands within the process time. But the whole, though it is in the part, is approachable only through the part, in aspects and nuances. Ansatz also implies arrangement, further disposition or tendency, and finally almost attack. It is (thus Auerbach) so to speak handle that permits one to attack the
Ansatz · Epistemology · Psychoanalysis · Critical Theory and Political Philosophy · Mathematical Physics · Mathematics · Philosophy · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 1996 - 2026 (31) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |