Abstract
This essay relates Schutz’s sketch on the “Sociological Aspect of Literature” to his analysis of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote for biographical and theoretical reasons. It shows that the various forms of social relationship experienced by Don Quixote on his three expeditions are taken as interaction modes of different situations of reception by Schutz in order to characterize different types of literary art forms. This idea of an analogous construction of intersubjective modes of reality construction and the classic triadic model of literary art forms (poetry, drama, and the novel) makes Schutz a predecessor of the modern “reader-response theory.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 2, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 136. Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “II.”
Lester Embree, ed., “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s ‘Sociological Aspect of Literature,” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature ”: Construction and Complementary Essays, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 34 ff., 50 f., 52 ff., 55 f. Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “Construction.”
In Schutz’s literary estate we find about 54 pages with excerpts referring to Cervantes’s Don Quixote dated from July 1953 (pp. 1040–1093). A first version of his paper—subtitled “unedited and unabridged”—is dated July/August (pp. 1094–1165) and his so-called fourth version is dated November/December of the same year (pp. 1166–1206; typed version: pp. 1207–1251). Unfortunately, there are no letters from Schutz to Gurwitsch of this period between June 15 to October 2, 1953, so we have no further information about this first phase of his work on Don Quixote. Also, his two letters to Gurwitsch of December 3 and 20 go neither into the preparation nor the performance of the talk nor its resonance. They completely focus on the question of a possible appointment of Gurwitsch to the New School. See Schutz and Gurwitsch, Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence ofA fred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, 1939–1959, ed. Richard Grathoffand trans. J. Claude Evans (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 217 & 220. (Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “PE.”) There is just one letter written by Schutz to Fritz Machlup dated December 4, 1953, in which he says: “Ich glaube, das ist ein guter Aufsatz geworden, der einmal Philosophie in amüsanter Form treibt [I think this has become a good paper, doing philosophy in an amusing way for once].”
Schutz had tried to publish his essay elsewhere and earlier. First he got a negative response from the Kenyon Review dating from January 30, 1954, saying the paper “will not fit in.” And on May 5, 1954, he asked the Yale Review whether they were interested in publishing his essay. An answer to this letter cannot be found in the estate but has to be assumed to have been negative.
Cf. “Don Quijote y el Problema de la Realidad,” trans. M. D. de León de Recaséns and L. Recaséns-Siches, Dianoia. Anuario de Filosofia 1 (1955): 312–330. The original English version was first published posthumously in Collected Papers, vol. 2, in 1964 (II 135–158). See also Schutz’s letter to Aron Gurwitsch of April 14, 1955: “Endlich ist das Jahrbuch der mexikanischen philosophischen Fakultät ‘Dianoia’ (Hsg. von Nicol) mit der spanischen Übersetzung meines ‘Don Quixote’ herausgekommen [Now at last the yearbook of the Mexican philosophical faculty Dianoia (ed. Nicol) has come out with the Spanish translation of my ‘Don Quixote’]” (PE 241).
See the letter from Hans Staudinger to Schutz of December 9, 1953.
See Schutz’s letter to the Alumni Association of the New School concerning this event of January 28, 1955.
See the untitled paper on “the worlds of daily life, working, imageries, dreams and of theoretical contemplation” (Schutz’s estate, pp. 14197–14228), at the end dated August 7, 1943. Reference to Don Quixote on p. 14214. This text may also be found in Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 4, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas, and Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 39 f.
Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 236 f. Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “I.”
Alfred Schutz, Theorie derLebensformen, ed. Ilja Srubar (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 251–278; Life Forms and Meaning Structure, ed. Ilja Srubar and trans. Helmut R. Wagner (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 158–179 . Hereafter this work will be cited textually as “LFMS,” with German pagination preceding English pagination.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1950). Hereafter, this work will be cited textually as “DQ.” This is the translation used by Schutz himself. See, for example, the novels concerning the story of Marcela and Chrysostom (pt. I, chaps. 11–14), the love story between Don Ferdinand, Dorothea, Cardenio and Lucinda (pt. I, chaps. 29–32 and 36–38), the narrative about “the foolish curiosity” [törichten Vorwitz] (pt. I, chaps. 33–35), the story of the slave of the Algiers, called “The Captive’s tale” (pt. I, chaps. 39–41) and the story of the superior judge and his daughter (pt. I, chaps. 42 f.).
Cf. especially the appendix to the “Prologue” of the book’s first part (not included in the Cohen translation used by Schutz), but also for example the poem “Antonio to Olalla” (DQ, pt. I, chap. 11) or “Chrysostom’s Song” (DQ, pt. I, chap. 14), a poem to Dulcinea (DQ, pt. I, chap. 26); see also DQ, pt. I, chaps. 23, 27, 33, 34, 40, 43, 52 and DQ, pt. II, chaps. 12, 18, 20, 35, 44, 46, 57, 68, 69, 74, etc.
See especially DQ, pt. II, chap. 26, although Cervantes generally alternates between reportingcommenting description and dramatic dialogues.
See, for example, Kurt Reichenberger, “Cervantes und die literarischen Gattungen,” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift N. F. 13 (1963): 233–246.
See Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks 1797–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (London: Athlone, 1957); originally published as Literarische Notizen 1979–1801, ed. Hans Eichner (Frankfurt/Wien: Ullstein, 1980), Fragments No. 322 [around 1797], 1750 [around 1799], and 2065 [around 1800].
Cf. Georg Wilhelm; Friedrich Hegel, “Die Poesie,” Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 1817–1829, vol. 15 of Werke in zwanzig Banden (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 222–575, esp. 318 ff; here, see 321–324.
See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, West-östlicher Divan (1819), Goethe Werke, vol. 2, ed. Erich Trunz (Munchen: Beck, 1981), containing in the second part under the title “Noten und Abhandlungen” a remark on “Naturformen der Dichtung” (pp. 187–189).
It is really suitable to call this approach the “reader-response theory” as Wendell V. Harris does in his Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory (New York: Greenwood, 1992) 318–323.
See, for example, DQ, pt. I, chap. 10, 80; pt. I, chap. 17, 128; pt. I, chap. 45, 410.
See for example: “A knight I am and a knight I shall die,” as well as: “Persecuted I have been by enchanters. Enchanters persecute me, and enchanters will persecute me till they sink me and my high chivalries into the profound abyss of oblivion.” (DQ, pt. II, chap. 32, 674, 680)
See Schlegel, Literary Notebooks, Frag. No. 322: “Die lyrische [Form] ist bloß subjektiv [The lyric [form] is merely subjective];” Hegel, “Die Poesie,” 322: “Lyrik. Ihr Inhalt ist das Subjektive [Lyric. Its content is the subjective];” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 187: Lyrik als “die enthusiastisch aufgeregte” Poesie [Lyric as “the enthusiastically excited” poetry] (cf., in this context, Harri Meier, “Zur Entwicklung der europäischen Ouijote-Deutung,” Romanische Forschungen 54 [1940]: 227–264).
In this context, Embree also calls attention to Schutz’s remark about opera as a dramatic art at II 195 (“Construction,” 34).
See Peter L. Berger, “The Problem of Multiple Realities: Alfred Schutz and Robert Musil,” in Phenomenology and Social Reality. Essays in Memory of Alfred Schutz, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 213–233, especially 227 f.
II 155; cf. 144, 153. This insight goes back to Schutz’s “Bergsonian period.” Thus, in the fragment entitled “Sinnstruktur der Novelle” (“Meaning Structure of Literary Art Forms,” LFMS 251 ff. / 15 8 ff.), he emphasizes that “the world of the speaking I . . . is quite remote from the original experience of pure duration. It has become a space-time world, a world filled with consociates, with things named, with actions which can be expressed.” (LFMS 252/160)
LFMS 255/162. See also Alfred Schutz in “Making Music Together” (1951): “In polyphonic writing each voice has its particular meaning; each represents a series of, so to speak, autarchic musical events” (II 173).
For Schutz’s use of the term “beholder,” cf. II, 169.
In this respect, it should be considered that Schutz published “Language. Language Disturbances and the Texture of Consciousness” (I 260–286), discussing Kurt Goldstein’s theory of language and referring to Saussure and Wygotski, five years before he spoke at the Alumni Association. In 1950, Schutz also gave his first course on “Problems of a Sociology of Language” at the New School for Social Research.
See for example Hans Robert Jauss, Literaturgeschichte als Provokation (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), esp. 162 ff. & 189 ff. (first delivered in 1967). See also Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), esp. 2 f. & 98 f. In this context it is of considerable importance to mention that in 1955 Schutz was not familiar with Roman Ingarden’s Das literarische Kunstwerk, first published in 1931, which builds a bridge between phenomenological analysis and formalist literary criticism (in a letter to Roman Ingarden written January 25, 1958, Schutz said that he so far was not able to study Ingarden’s work intensively).
See especially Jauss, Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), 202 ff. & 753 ff.
Richard L. Lanigan, “A Treasure House of Preconstituted Types: Alfred Schutz on Communicology,” Wordly Phenomenology. The Continuing Influence of Alfred Schutz on North American Human Science, ed. Lester Embree (Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), 50. See also 58: Schutz’s “focus and terminology of course, suggests a compatibility with the model of communication made famous by Schutz’s colleague at The New School for Social Research, Roman Jakobson.” No hint can be found, however, that Schutz and Jakobson came into contact with each other.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Endreß, M. (1998). Alfred Schutz’s Interpretation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and his Microsociological View on Literature. In: Embree, L. (eds) Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature”. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9042-6_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4947-6
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9042-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive