The legitimacy of literature: Metaliterary reflection in Hermann Broch's 'The Death of Virgil' and Peter Weiss's 'The Aesthetics of Resistance'

This dissertation examines how Hermann Broch and Peter Weiss treat the question of the legitimacy of literature. It presents an analysis of metaliterary reflections---contemplations on literature conveyed through literature---in Broch's Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil) (1945) and Weiss's Die Asthetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance) (1975--1981) and examines theoretical and personal positions articulated in these authors' non-fiction works, notes and correspondence.;The question of the legitimacy of literature occupied writers such as Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann und Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who concluded that the legitimacy question functions as much as a foundation for literature in the twentieth century as it simultaneously challenges it. The question of whether literature is a legitimate expressive form must be carried in literature and expressed as literature. This is what Der Tod des Vergil and Die Asthetik des Widerstands offer: a literary investigation into the question as to literature's own legitimacy. In both works, the autonomous nature of art---its freedom from all constraints imposed from outside the mechanisms of its own existence---is played out against the expectation of its participation in human reality while at the same time being shown to complement it.;Broch and Weiss saw in literature a means to access fundamental knowledge about reality. What Weiss characterizes as a 'revealing,' or rational learning process through which one can recognize inherently inhumane power structures (acquiring the means with which to counter them), takes place in Broch's conception as a metaphysical breakthrough into new spheres of knowledge. Here, the acquisition of knowledge is a transcendent experience, an overcoming of death [via "Todeserkenntnis"] and the symbolic realization of the eternal.;Despite momentary (Weiss) or longer-lasting (Broch) bouts of doubt as to whether writing literature might be considered a worthwhile, legitimate pursuit, both authors wrote literature until the end of their lives. Their distinct humanity and their drive to aid mankind in inhuman times allowed them no other possibility than to search for the humane and to nurture it where they found it most highly concentrated; this was and remained for them literature.