Witz in Enlightenment thought and in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's critical theory and literary practice

Witz--widely known in the eighteenth century as the ability to perceive similarities between disparates--came to be seen in the Enlightenment as the primary creative source of authors. By mid-century, however, attitudes toward Witz had clearly begun to change. What was once esteemed as the supreme poetic gift came to be seen as something mundane and inadequate in the literary world. Scholars have long recognized that Lessing played a central role in the shift from a Witz culture to a cult of genius. Yet there is a marked lack of consensus regarding his specific contribution to the shift. This dissertation examines Lessing's Witz inductively and chronologically, and treats his theory and practice separately. It reveals that Lessing's so-called "farewell to wit" is neither absolute nor is it due to an association of Witz with rationalism, baroque disorder, or French culture, as previous studies claim. His criticism of Witz is qualified and it ensues as a result of changes in his aesthetic thinking during the 1760s. Following his separation of the visual arts and literature based on their divergent modes of expression and due to his increasing differentiation between literary genres based on their intended effects, Lessing finds that a productive technique based on the detection of coincident similarity does not meet the needs of every kind of literature. While Witz remains useful for the production of some genres, it can no longer maintain its status as the supreme talent of the poet. An examination of Lessing's literary works reveals that he applied Witz in accordance with his theory.;A revised view of Enlightenment Witz helps fill the deficits present in twentieth-century Witz theories. Scholars from a broad range of disciplines have attempted to define the contours of Witz, but with contradictory results. Because theorists tend to view Witz exclusively as a subform of the comical, they disregard the contribution which a historical study can make to our understanding of Witz today. When twentieth-century Witz is analyzed against the background of the eighteenth century, continuities between past and present semantics become evident, making a common definition of Witz today possible.