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Emil Staiger, Basic Concepts Of Poetics, Edward K. Berggren

Swiss American Historical Society Review

Originally published in · 1946, Staiger's Basic Concepts of Poetics is ostensibly an alternative introduction to traditional theories of poetics and genre criticism. However, the work actually proposes an entire reconceptualization of these theories, linking them to a more "fundamental" philosophical and anthropological project which, Staiger tells us, might more appropriately read as a work of philosophical anthropology attempting to answer the question, "What is man?" Its answer comes by way of an investigation of the existential world of poetics, because he sees poetics as one of our primary openings onto Being as well as an expression of humankind's most …