SOURCE: "Dualistic Analogues: Claudius's Notion of Language and Its Relationship to His View of Nature and Man," in Matthias Claudius: Language as "Infamous Funnel" and Its Imperatives, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997, pp. 17-53.

In the following essay, Rowland examines the theoretical implications of Claudius's writings for a philosophy of language and attempts to position him in the history of semiotic thought, describing Claudius's attitude toward language as "a compound consisting of an Augustinian base, an element of Lutheran biblicism, another of Pietist inwardness, and a healthy dose of Enlightenment skepticism."

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Since the 1960s, literary study in America and Europe has been dominated by theoretical considerations that aim at a methodological synthesis founded on the study of language structure and its function.¹ These considerations have assumed the form of a debate between two schools of thought. Semiotics, in Seeba's words, "appears to dissect the whole world into systems of...