Abstract

This dissertation traces the religious roots of literary aesthetics. I argue that the Pietist conversion narrative invents a new hermeneutics of indirect communication that is foundational to the modern idea of literature as an expression of the ineffable. In particular, I contend that A. H. Francke's "Lebenslauf" promotes a mode of reading that relies on what Kierkegaard would later term "doubly reflected thinking." The "Lebenslauf"---in which Francke narrates his conversion---is remarkable in that it is simultaneously hermeneutics and "anti-hermeneutics." It necessitates the creation of an interpretive system only to reveal that system to be fundamentally flawed, thereby demonstrating the bounds of understanding. This failure of interpretation drives Francke's hermeneutics of Erfahrung that understands the Bible through a direct experience of its truth. Like Luther's exegetical writings and Augustine's Confessions, Francke's "Lebenslauf" reconfigures reading to mean being open to, interpreted by, and converted by a text. In this way the conversion narrative highlights the ineffectuality of traditional hermeneutics and locates the real significance of Scripture in the reader's personal experience of the text---an experience which, as the use of autobiography attests, is both utterly life changing and unable to be communicated directly. As an Antiaufklarer and Germany's most famous "modern mystic," Hamann deploys the conversion narrative's new hermeneutics to create an affective model of aesthetics according to which the literary text reaches in and transforms the reader. When understood as an application of the communicative model of the Pietist conversion narrative, Hamann's aesthetic writings can be seen to have made a much more significant contribution to literary history than is generally acknowledged. By introducing the idea that poetic writing expresses something that escapes explanation, Hamann deeply shaped the entire modern discourse of literary aesthetics on two levels. First, his revival of the conversion narrative's "anti-hermeneutics" fed into the growing suspicion of rational knowledge and, as with Novalis and F. Schlegel, a fascination with the fantastic and the incomprehensible. And second, in marked contrast to this association with the irrational, the basic communicative model of Hamann's aesthetics was transmitted through the philosophical aesthetics of his friend and colleague Immanuel Kant