[lit-ideas] Ideengeschichte

I was re-reading my quotes in "META META ..." (the title was meant as the
'regressus ad infinitum' suggested by J. Wager) and am thinking of hybrids.
Meta-literature, meta-literary, seem hybrid (Greek-Latin),
'metagrammatikos' is  fine. Since this is 'lit-ideas', I thought 
'meta-ideology', and then
thought of  Andreas:

_www.andreas.com/books.html_ (http://www.andreas.com/books.html)

IdeengeschichteGerman noun. The research into the history of ideas. Ideas
don't fall from the sky. For example, the idea that God doesn't exist only
first  occurred in the 18th century. It was made possible by the idea that
one could  prove that God existed and that only first happened in the 14th and
15th  century. Before that, no one thought to prove that God existed
because it was  obvious that he did exist. The Bible never considered whether he
existed nor did  it try to prove this. The Rationalists thought they were
doing a favor to  theology by proving his existence. This however brought his
very existence into  doubt, and thus shortly afterwards the entire matter
became irrelevant. Germans  research the centuries of history, politics,
literature, languages, philosophy,  and history to trace back the origins,
development, meaning, relations, and  impact of ideas.

-----

So there seems to be something essentially 'meta-' about a discipline like
"History of Ideas" that Isaiah Berlin, of all people, held the chair for at
 Oxford.

Cheers,

J. L. Speranza
    Buenos Aires, Argentina.

------

1965 Man 65 29

The reappearance in the myth of Lake  Munkamba of the Welsh, Pyrenean, and
Cameroonian theme of the drowned city,  reminds us..that the universalities
of content in stories of this kind will  always raise them to a level better
called meta-literary than literary.

1976 T. EAGLETON Crit. & Ideol. i. 18

As a meta-literary  practice, a metaphor of the text, criticism writes
large the text's inability to  think the conditions of its own possibility.

1991 E. J. SMYTH  Postmodernism & Contemp. Fiction iv. 77

Two very intelligent  novels..both of which have a metaliterary dimension
which links them to  Calvino's other influential late novel.

For the use of  'meta-literature'

[< META- prefix + LITERATURE n., perhaps after  French métalittérature
(1925).

1966 Jrnl. Politics 28 482

The  conventional concerns of political philosophy receive a delightful
treatment  free of the murky meta-literature often found in such texts.

1972 P.  HODGSON in Pacific Coast Philol. 7 36 (title)

Metaliterature: an excerpt  from the anatomy of a Chekhovian narrator.

1988 MLN 103 449 Doña Berta  exists simultaneously as literary object and
as metaliterature.

1995  Symposium (Electronic ed.) 1 Mar., Cargiale's writings often
accentuate..direct  address and metaliterature, linguistic play and postmodern
discursive  amalgamation.

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