Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762) is known in intellectual history for having established the discourse of philosophical aesthetics with his "Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus" (Reflections on Poetry) and "Aesthetica" (Aesthetics), which consists of two books and is considered Baumgarten's most important work. But this book amends that history. It shows that Baumgarten's aesthetics is a science of literature that demonstrates the value of literature to philosophy. Baumgarten did not intend to pursue such a task, but in working on his philosophical texts and lectures, he ends up analyzing, synthesizing, and contextualizing literature. He thereby treats it not as belles lettres or as a moral institution but rather as an epistemic object. His aesthetics is thus the first modern literary theory, and his articulation of this theory would never again be matched in its complexity and systematicity. Baumgarten's theory of literature has never been discovered. It waits latently to take its place in intellectual history.

Between 1730 and 1770 the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten and the poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock described in their writings the characteristic features of literary texts using examples of passages which were striking in a pictorial or descriptive, auditory and/or graphical way. Both drew attention to the ability of sensory signs and images with the aid of which man discovers his world. As a result, literature moved from the periphery to the central focus of epistemology and was re-evaluated in its abilities, actions, obligations and intentions.

The life-stories of problematic central figures as recounted in Moritz' AAnton ReiserA, Keller's ADer grA1/4ne HeinrichA and Raabe's AAkten des VogelsangsA serve as a basis for mapping out ambitiously extensive topologies of memory. Behind the narrative AI rememberA ploy, topologically structured models of the cultural organization and imaging of knowledge are discernible. Literary com-memoration makes one thing clear: prior to any kind of individual materialization, memory requires an archive of images to draw on, an archive containing the rhetorical formulas of both mythological and christological initiation narratives as well as of iconography. The literary figuration of AmodernA memory thus calls for reexamination and reevaluation.