Literaturwissenschaft als Ideengeschichte: Über topisches Lesen in den Ordnungen des Denkens

In my article, I am taking Erich Auerbach’s postulate of a transnational history of ideas as a starting point to examine current potentials of a literary studies shaped by the history of ideas. On the one hand, based on the reorientation of the history of ideas in terms of social history or linguistic criticism, as can be associated with the key year 1969 and the names of Foucault and Skinner, and on the other hand, considering its expansion into cultural studies, my paper explores the possibilities of a history of ideas, which again turns more strongly to the interpretation of meaning, of ideas as intellectual facts. To this end, I would like to propose a topical-rhetorical conception of textual acts that allows the reader to approach the author as the eclectic user and rearranger of available knowledge. In this way, literary studies could recommend itself as a hermeneutic guiding method of the history of ideas, by means of which the status of a sovereign reader-subject can be maintained even vis-à-vis text-context formations that tend towards complexity.