Of Past as the Future of Criticism: “Performative Competence” and “Forms of Writing” in Literary Studies

Abstract

From Northrop Frye’s classical metacritical reflections in the “Polemical introduction” of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which Frye defends a concept of “criticism as science” against the understanding of “criticism as literature”, we turned to the Ottmar Ette’s ÜberLebenswissen: die Aufgabe der Philologie (2004). In his recent metacritical reflections, the author proposes an “specialized history of writing forms” in Literary Studies, one that generates “a critical perspectivation of its tradition”, aiming at its “reinvention”. Rereading Erich Auerbach’s methodological considerations in Mimesis (1946), in contrast to Ette’s own reading of it, we present the concept of method-as-play perceived as something inherent to the “performative competence” to be developed by a new aesthetic formation (Bildung) at the present time.