Intra- and Intercultural Translation

Abstract

It sounds a trivial or rhetorical question. In fact, however, one can assume, at least for the countries familiar to a German student of Romance literature like myself, that the enormous quantitative expansion of academic literary studies has tended rather to harm internal cultural development, and has hardly promoted intercultural exchange either. The reason is simple: although developments such as the expansion of 'literature' as a field of research to proletarian, trivial, and minority-culture texts, the improvement of metalanguage achieved by literary theory, and the attempts to correlate literary systems with social ones, may have been productive in some respects, they have been made mostly under the auspices of 'hermeneutics.' The 'science of literature' is a science of passive understanding, which has since the eighteenth century been moving steadily away from practical knowledge about text production, text processing, and meaning-generation. In other words, literary studies have paid little attention to the tradition of rhetoric and poetics, if they have not abandoned it altogether. Only in the structuralist-semiotic school of the last few decades has a reversal of this process been foreshadowed (see further Kloepfer, 1978 and 1979a). The academic study of literature, therefore, some time ago lost contact with the people who produced the texts. Its definition of itself as an institution for the investigation of understanding and reading or of text-reception in general has now been underpinned by the development of a few theories of a scientistic (S.J. Schmidt, N. Gr6ben, etc.) or neo-hermeneutic (H.R. Jauss, W. Iser, etc.) kind. But making literary studies 'scientific' in this way is more likely to scare people off. There is little or nothing in such a discipline for literary criticism, the essay,