6 - The Information of Communication

Summary

Was unsre geistige Lage kennzeichnet und bestimmt, ist aber gerade der nicht mehr zu bewältigende Reichtum an Inhalten, das angeschwollene Tatsachenwissen […], dieses Auseinanderfließen der Erfahrung an der Oberfläche der Natur, das Unübersehbare, das Chaos des Nichtwegzuleugnenden. […] Wir werden daran zugrunde gehn oder als ein seelisch stärkerer Menschenschlag es überwinden.

(GW 8, 1045)

LITERARY CRITICISM IN THE postwar period has been marked by two major shifts of emphasis. On the one hand, views resting on the authority of the author were displaced in the early postwar period by a wider interest in the social aspects of writing — particularly with respect to the novel. By the early 1970s, questions focused on the individual and individual identity had to some extent given way to a concern about the social whole, and, increasingly, the directions being pursued by that social whole. This new emphasis on social concerns, however, did not end all interest in the author, although it certainly appeared to weaken it. Writers could no longer be trusted as self-conscious authors of individual experience — in fact their self-consciousness was seen as part of the problem. In the aesthetic discussion of writing in the postwar period, the self-consciousness of authors was increasingly linked to the issue of textual production, rather than to the nature of the authorial sensibility that informed it. For this reason, a second “slippage” — from work of literature to text, or from the work of art to the art of (literary) work — took place as the interest in the nature of literary production gained a foothold in the postwar period.