Collected Papers VI. Literary Reality and Relationships (Phaenomenologica Book 206)

This book contains texts devoted by Alfred Schutz to the "normative" areas of literature and ethics. It includes writings dealing with the author-reader relationship, multiple realities, the literary province of meaning, and Schutz's views on equality. Never published in English commentaries on Goethe's novel and the account of personality in the social world appear in this volume. The three essays in this volume illuminate Alfred Schutz's understanding of literature and literary relationships. The first, 'Life Forms and Meaning Structures, ' presents such ideal life-forms as duration, memory, the speaking ego, and the I in relation to the Thou. This essay also describes the fundamental nature of human experience, its pluralized realms, the passage of time, perspectival interpretation, action and its impediments-all concepts which make possible an understanding of literature and literary themes. The essay goes on to discuss opera, and the relationship between music and language in opera. The second essay, 'The Problem of Personality in the Social World, ' offers insights into the unity the social person achieves, temporality, and the role of the body and the importance of pragmatic relevances. This shows how, even before he arrived in the United States, Schutz went beyond his 1932 Phenomenology of the Social World in a pragmatic direction. This essay anticipates Schutz's 1945 essay, 'On Multiple Realities, ' by discussing reality-spheres of working, phantasy, dreams, and theory. Reality-spheres are vital for understanding literature, as shown in the third essay, which translates for the first time two Goethe manuscripts produced by Schutz in 1948. The first text, on Lehrjahre, reveals Schutz actually interpreting a piece of literature, tracing the themes of art and life and fate and freedom through the text. The second, a commentary on Goethe's Wanderjahre, presents an inchoate theory of literature. Defending Goethe's 1829 version of the Wanderjahre novel, Schutz argues that critics miss the point that readers of literature adopt a specific kind of epoché in which they enter a reality-sphere governed by 'the logic of the poetic event, ' whose rules are not those of everyday life or theoretical contemplation. In sum, this volume brings out the distinctive character of literary reality and the relationships between author and reader, and invites the reader to derive a sense of how Schutz himself read literature Front Matter....Pages i-vi Editorial Introduction....Pages 1-7 Front Matter....Pages 9-9 Editor’s Introduction....Pages 11-18 The Outline of the Project....Pages 19-21 Author’s Introduction....Pages 23-33 Part I Theory of Life Forms and Symbol Concept....Pages 35-36 Life Forms and Meaning Structures....Pages 37-115 Part II Theory of the Structure of the Objectification of Meaning....Pages 117-119 Meaning Structures of Language....Pages 121-150 Meaning Structures of Literary Art Forms....Pages 151-170 Meaning Structures of Drama and Opera....Pages 171-195 Part III Object and Methods of the Social Sciences....Pages 197-198 The Problem of Personality in the Social World....Pages 199-240 Front Matter....Pages 241-241 Chapter Three The Social Person and the Thou-Problem....Pages 243-256 Chapter One [I. General Development of the Problems of the Unity of the Person]....Pages 257-263 Chapter Two Genesis of the Social Person in the Solitary Self....Pages 265-309 Front Matter....Pages 311-311 Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre....Pages 313-330 VI. On Wilhelm Meister’s Years of Travel....Pages 331-405 Back Matter....Pages 407-414 This book shows how phenomenology of the social sciences differs from positivistic approaches, and presents Schutz's theory of relevances--a key feature of his own phenomenology of the social world.