Johann Jakob Breitinger
born March 1, 1701, Zürich, Switz.
died Dec. 13, 1776, Zürich
Swiss-German writer, one of the most
influential 18th-century literary
critics in the German-speaking world.
He studied theology and became
professor at the Collegium Carolinum in
Zürich. He lectured on Hebrew, Greek,
Latin, logic, and rhetoric; showed
excellence as a philologist in many
editions; and advocated education on
humanist lines (Zürich school reform,
1765–75).
Under the inspiration of The
Spectator papers of England’s Joseph
Addison and Richard Steele, Breitinger
founded and wrote essays for the weekly
Discourse der Mahlern (1721–23). In
Critische Dichtkunst (1740), one of the
most important of his many publications,
he attacked the narrowly rationalist
Dichtkunst (1730) of the Leipzig
“literary pope” Johann Christoph
Gottsched. Breitinger stressed the place
of the imagination and the wonderful in
poetry; fired the German-speaking public
with enthusiasm for Homer; and spread
the ideas of John Locke, Lord
Shaftesbury, and Alexander Pope. He was
visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
and others, and his pupils included the
poet and prose writer Johann Kaspar
Lavater and the writer and educator
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi.
