Lehrreiche Literatur

While the distinction between literary work and didactic textbooks seems clear-cut today, in antiquity it was not. Particularly in the second century AD, when education was extremely important to society, literature and the imparting of knowledge were very close. Plutarch's Quaestiones Graecae and Romanae and Gellius' Noctes Atticae , for example, are to be understood as collections of knowledge on the one hand but also have a recognizable literary design on the other. Christian Neumann places this supposed contrast at the center of his study. Using the concept of the didactic triangle between student, teacher, and object, he analyzes each position of the literary act of communication (reader, speaker, and subject) in terms of its didactic function and thus captures the precise relationship between literary design and didactic function.