Literary Criticism and Philosophy: Yearbook of Contemporary Criticism (Yearbook of comparative criticism)

The interconnections between literary criticism and philosophy are, as editor Strelka mentions, "manifold and far-reaching." A view of these relationships is presented from three broad stations in this volume of the yearbook. First, the standpoint that principles of literary scholarship are formulated by philosophical means is explored, with credence given to the pioneering work of Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden. The second angle, that practical criticism is both influenced by and based on philosophy, is reinforced by Aristotle's early connections with philosophy and literary theory, and by the identification of the methods and the craft of criticism with philosophy. Finally, the scholar's tasks of exposing philosophical ideas buried within a text and of then defining these ideas are considered.

Critical revelation of philosophical thought can pose various problems; Morris Weitz points out, for example, that the discovery of several philosophical ideas in one literary work leads the scholar to ask whether any one is the idea of the piece.

Joseph P. Strelka, born May 3, 1927 in Wiener Neustadt, Lower Austria, received his PhD from the University of Vienna in 1950. After the untimely death of his academic mentor, Oskar Benda, he became a freelance critic and worked for Austrian Broadcasting and for a publishing house. He became the Austrian representative at the Centre International des Etudes Poétiques in Brussels and is a member of the Austrian PEN-Club. He received awards from the Theodor Koerner Foundation, a prize from the city of Vienna, and a special research fellowship in Paris. In 1964 he came to the United States as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. In 1966 he moved to The Pennsylvania State University, and he is now Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Albany.

Professor Strelka is a member of the editorial boards of the North Carolina Comparative Literature Series and of the Colloquia Germanica.