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The series Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Studies in German Literature) presents outstanding analyses of German-speaking literature from the early modern period to the present day. It particularly embraces comparative, cultural and historical-epistemological questions and serves as a tradition-steeped forum for innovative literary research.
All submitted manuscripts undergo a double peer-review process.
"The future is open": This is a basic assumption of modernity. It originated in the 18th century and still shapes our self-image today. This study uncovers another tradition: the effort to close the future again, to ‘fill it up’ with orders, models and political expectations. The theoretical and literary procedures of this closure from the period around 1800 recur in later phases of modernity as well.
This book writes theory. It looks at the example of the texts written by Wilhelm Raabe between 1856 and 1902 to develop the outlines of an ontological narratology that claims a systematic validity going beyond its historical subject matter. Its starting point is the question: what is world?
The structural connection and semantic ambivalence of revolution as a cosmological and political concept puts the principle of the genre underlying it to the test. This volume examines the revolutionary drama in individual studies on Gryphius, Schiller, Hölderlin, Büchner, Brecht, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller as a stellar issue that, in its circular structure of repetition, inquires into the paradigm of sovereignty.
Vorstellungsmuster, die von den Mitgliedern einer Kulturgemeinschaft geteilt, rezipiert und tradiert werden, lassen sich als Topoi beschreiben. Damit kommt ein Begriff ins Spiel, der bereits 1948 durch Ernst Robert Curtius in die Literaturwissenschaft eingeführt wurde. Dennoch liegt bis heute keine allgemein akzeptierte fachwissenschaftliche Definition vor. Diese Untersuchung entwirft auf der Grundlage rhetorischer und semiotischer Konzepte ein Toposmodell, das zwischen der abstrakten Definition von Topoi und deren Ausprägung in literarischen Texten unterscheidet, arbeitet zentrale Vorstellungsmuster im Erzählwerk Adalbert Stifters heraus und setzt diese ein, um die literarische Gestaltung von Bildungsgängen zu beschreiben.
Welche Funktionen haben etwa der Schauspieler James Dean, die Zeitschrift Reader’s Digest oder eine Werbeanzeige für Persil in Gottfried Benns später Lyrik, in Heinrich Bölls Kriegsprosa sowie in Alfred Anderschs Rundfunkarbeiten?
Dem Populären der 1950er Jahre wurde von literaturwissenschaftlicher Seite bislang allenfalls sporadische Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, systematisch hat man seine Rolle für die Literatur der Zeit kaum befragt. Die Untersuchung profi liert das Populäre als einen neuralgischen Punkt der Literatur der frühen Bundesrepublik. Einerseits wird es von den literarischen Texten vielseitig produktiv gemacht, andererseits stellt seine Banalität ein eminentes Problem dar. Auf diese Weise lässt sich eine Literatur des Bedeutsamen in den Blick nehmen, die aus dem reichhaltigen Reservoir populärer Kultur schöpft.
Concepts of rhythm that shape how literary scholars approach verse to this day crystallized in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in poetological and aesthetic discourse and in literary experiments with meter. Based on the analysis of verse texts, this study explores the theoretical potential contained within the meter.
Science and the imaginary are not mutually exclusive: Even scientific methods such as collecting and experimentation have an imaginary backside. In the works of Elias Canetti and Roger Caillois, which are situated between science and literature, the book traces an alternative conceptual tradition of the imaginary that undermines central dichotomies of 20th century thinking – nature/culture, identity/difference, fact/fiction.
Adorno’s works revolve around the sine qua nons a better and more just life. According to Adorno, the central meaning of art is to allow another, more complete world to appear. This study is based on the thesis that Adorno’s literary and cultural theoretical essays contain elements of a theory of happiness that are of decisive importance for his entire thinking.
The political dramas of Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist articulate an early theory of charismatic authority by modeling heroes as figures that reflect the relationship between politics and emotionality. This study shows that the three authors’ texts analytically revolve around the irrational and affective aspect of heroization. They thereby create literary representations of how the heroic emerges out of the collective imaginary.
The Silesian Wars (1740–1763) initiated developments that would prove central to 18th-century cultural history. Nevertheless, their relevance to the history of German literature has remained unexplored. This book is a pioneering study of the interrelation between literary and political discourses around 1750, which was of decisive importance for the emergence of a modern model of literature.
A narrative is more than story; it is a window into the world it narrates. Sebastian Meixner’s book explores the juncture between narrative and world in his study of Goethe’s early works. In three different constellations he investigates relationships of exchange between literature and science that Goethe used to ground the modern narrative.
Inventio as a technique of organizing knowledge and text production became obsolete after 1800 because of its orientation to cultural knowledge. However, the same orientation motivated the revival of topical inventio in late realism: the novels of Fontane and Raabe revive topical techniques of invention and remembrance as methods of cultural self-affirmation, demonstrating the power of realistic narrative for cultural analysis.
Scholars have largely neglected Thomas Bernhard’s way of dealing with the concrete aspects of typescript. For the first time, this volume provides a systematic analysis of the typescripts from Bernhard’s legacy and describes the effects of his concrete writing practice on the unmistakable style of his texts. It also shows how the Suhrkamp Verlag implemented the “Bernhard brand” in typography and book design.
The book traces the everyday cultural, aesthetic, and ethical impact of bacteriology research on the cultural epoch around 1900. It offers an integrated discursive history of the invisible, while also suggesting an alternative view of classical modernity. Its scope extends from naturalistic novels to ideological texts and includes the literary and artistic avant-garde.
The study shows that the post-1920 texts of German realism drafted an intermediate-stage poetics, which integrated opposing literary procedures (realism, expressionism) and also communicated contradictory worldviews of modernity. This model, including all its paradoxes, remained operative until 1960, and thus proved robust in the face of classical breaks in literary history.
This study examines Stifter’s ambivalent notion of the sublime, reflected in criticism of his works for their monotony as well as praise for their unfathomability. Along with textual interpretations that reveal the dimensions and functions of the sublime in his works, the author presents Stifter’s reception of contemporary natural scientific philosophy and offers a systematic approach to the analysis of the sublime as a textual phenomenon.
In an attempt to precisely model Foucault’s concept of heterotopy in the context of literary studies, this book describes its application to the paradigm of textuality. Drawing on Roman Jakobson’s two-aspects theory, it reveals the cross-epochal process of heterotopy as paradigmatic deviation, and shows epoch-specific variations in the example of romantic-metaphoric versus realistic-metonymic logics of space.
Around the turn of the millennium, a number of autobiographical novels were published by authors who grew up as children during the Nazi period. This study examines texts by Ruth Klüger, Martin Walser, Georg Heller, and Günter Grass, focusing on the poetology of memory that underlies their narratives.
The theoretical field of fictional and factual narrative has become ubiquitous in recent years. This study offers a critical analysis of the most important approaches. Using the example of historical narratives in German and Dutch, it shows how the fundamental dynamic between grounding in reality and narrative cohesion is expressed differently in fictional and factual contexts.
In response to the pluralism of turn-of-the-century literature, the German author Paul Ernst (1866–1933) sought to reestablish a form of tragedy based on ancient models. This study shows while Ernst tried to counter contemporary formal dissolution, his underlying religious-mystical tendencies sabotaged this effort.
This study investigates the history of post-dramatic literature between 1966 and 1995. It reveals the ways that post-dramatic writing styles lent themselves productively to international modern theater, continued to develop dynamically, and came to form a tradition of its own. Extensive reviews of post-dramatic trends and forms are interspersed with close textual analyses, including examples from the theatrical stage.
Around 1800, the “social” world achieved a new status as a subject area in its own right. Since then, different poetics of the “social” have made claims about ways of shaping human interaction through art. This study focuses on the epistemological prerequisites and the processes of formation of one of the first manifestations of the poetics of the “social” in the early works of Achim von Arnim.
Hölderlin’s Ode Empedocles has never before been the subject of a study comparing its intrinsic literary value to dramatic undertakings with the same name. For the first time, this study provides an accurate textual interpretation along with a new edition of the work that includes all original sources. The basic reflections on poetic methods and metrics interconnect with Hölderin’s theoretical ideas about “poetic individuality.”
In what ways does literary authorship participate in creating the “poetics of the self?” Using the works of Goetz, Lottmann, and Herbst, this study applies the insights of autofiction research to develop a set of methodological tools that take into account the nature of today’s media systems. The result is the emergence of a kind of self-poetics that transcends boundaries, where the distinction between life and work is obliterated.
This study examines the mechanisms and processes by which an image of Germany was constructed by examining literary texts, films, a business location initiative, and a media debate. It reveals that the power of these self-images lies specifically in their openness. Images of Germany do not point to an identity that is meant to be static, but instead, document the truly dynamic structure of identification.
The letters in the Jean-Paul cultural circle are oriented to the idea of ‘simultaneous love.’ Questioning the possibility of finding a philological way to represent this idea means turning the requirements and implications of editorial practice into a basis for creating a theory. This, in turn, leads to a proposal for a ‘theoretical philology.’
The study undertakes a first broad-based analysis of Goethe's historical thinking as evident from his autobiographical writings, demonstrating the links between biography, politics, and new ideas about history developing around 1800.
Examining the image of Egypt portrayed in German travelogues, this study illuminates the history of Germany’s reception of Egypt. It makes a contribution to research on travel literature and foreignness and reveals the shift that occurred in perceptions of Egypt, which were shaped by Egyptomania to Orientalism. Ultimately, it proposes an Orientalism of the early modern era as a discourse of powerlessness alongside Said’s hegemonic Orientalism.
This study traces the intersection between authorship and prophecy at the beginning of the 20th century as interpreted by Mann, George, Rilke, Trakl, and Werfel. Against this backdrop, the work shows the connections between discussions about the ‘return of the author’ and about the ‘return of religion.’
The literature of realism from 1850 to 1900 has maintained a lively exchange of knowledge across the disciplinary boundaries of economics and literary studies. While the literary world has appropriated the vocabulary of economics in order to lend factual plausibility to fiction, economics has often resorted to literary devices in its narratives. This study examines this system of relationships as they are manifest in the discourse of realism. It describes a trans-disciplinary poetology of realism and portrays a realm of institutional economic thought with rich humanist content.
What is the underlying conception of human nature that informs Richard Wagner’s operatic reforms? This study locates the answer to this question in the Romantic notion of the unconscious. Wagner grappled with the unconscious in his libretti, scores, and writings, thereby creating a seminal new form of musical theater. With its examination of the ways that anthropological phenomena such as identity and memory are interlaced with theater history, this book presents an interdisciplinary approach that casts new light on the works of Richard Wagner.
Around 1800, the idea of sibling relationships coalesced to form a network of social, symbolic, and imaginary relations. We can read this fraternal structuring of the world in the literature of the period. The present study examines the meaning of sibling relationships in a broader discussion of cultural history and with a meticulous new reading of the novels of Jean Paul along with other canonical texts (Jacobi, Goethe, Schiller, Novalis). The demonstration of how a dispositif related to siblings developed around 1800 uncovers a previously hidden social dynamic, offering the basis for a perspectival shift in the cultural history of social relationships.
This study analyzes how the imagination of the epic genre as legitimately legitimating community also unleashes an ambivalence between telling coherent ‑ and hence legitimating ‑ stories of political community and narrating open-ended stories of contingency that might de-legitimate political power. Manifest in eighteenth-century poetics above all in the disjunction between programmatic definitions of the epic and actual experiments with the genre, this ambivalence can also arise within a single epic over the course of its narrative. The present study thus traces how particular eighteenth-century epics explore an originary incompleteness of political power and its narrative legitimations. The first chapter sketches an overview of how eighteenth-century writers construct an imaginary epic genre that is assigned the task of performing the cultural work of legitimating political communities by narrating their allegedly unifying origins and borders. The subsequent chapters, however, explore how the practice of epic storytelling in works by Klopstock, Goethe, Wieland, and, in an epilogue, Brentano enact the disruptive potential of poetic language and narrative to question the legitimations of imaginary political origins and unities.
From antiquity until the twentieth century, rhetorical training was exclusively concerned with forming male speakers as well as producing an explicitly masculine speaking style and method. This study focuses on such body and gender-specific training by analyzing the actio doctrine. The book also demonstrates how the “transformation” of rhetoric in the eighteenth century was accompanied for the first time by a discursive shift: gesture, imitation, voice, and dress guidelines were adapted for use with both genders in general education and to teach the art of conversation.
This study contributes both to research on the literary presentation of love and to research on the writer Arnim. The study presents pioneering work by developing, on a systematic basis, a narratological and semiological concept of love and then successfully applies this concept to Achim von Arnim’s novel Gräfin Dolores. It profiles Gräfin Dolores as a romantic novel par excellence that parades all facets of romantic love in order to subject them to a radical critique and thus to develop a new way of telling a love story.
This study is dedicated to the comprehensive explanation of what is probably Walter Benjamin’s most difficult text, the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede (critical foreword) to his Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of German Tragic Drama). The thorough analytical commentary exposes the historical and systematic terminological constructions of this text and places them within the context of the discourse on presentation since the 18th century. For the first time Benjamin’s premarxist philosophy and literary theory are seen as an independent contribution to a philosophy of literary representation with potential for problem-solving up to the present day.
No physical discipline had more expectations attached to it around 1800 than the study of electricity. The literary and philosophical avant-garde of the 1790s took an active part in the debate on its ideological status. The transfer between literature and science, which was by no means only one-way, succeeds through a concept of symbol developed by authors such as Novalis and Wilhelm Ritter in their engagement with the philosophy of their age. However, this synergy soon becomes the problem rather than its solution, as in the case of Kleist, for example.
The study concerns itself with the Künstlerdrama [Drama of the artist], a genre with which research in literary and drama studies has so far scarcely concerned itself, despite its popularity. The study first examines as exemplars theatrical texts by Gerhart Hauptmann, Bertolt Brecht, Wolfgang Bauer, Thomas Bernhard, Falk Richter and others both with reference to the texts and from the perspective of field theory. The study then presents an historical overview of the genesis of the genre and the central motifs of the 20th century Künstlerdrama.
The study demonstrates how Heinrich von Kleist’s work can be understood as a literary translation of an engagement with the problems of moral philosophy from the Enlightenment. Received wisdom has it that with his life’s crisis in 1801 Kleist turned his back on the philosophy of the Enlightenment and became a poet of the irrational and abyssal; in opposition to this, the present study shows that it is above all a philosophical problem to which Kleist turns in his writings until the abrupt end of his creative work - the question of whether man can be motivated to action by moral principles.
Starting with a close analysis of Humboldt's famous Kosmos, this study discusses the genealogy of modern esoteric cosmography and its relations to 19th century fiction. As part of the antimaterialist movement since the 1840s, the esoteric works of Carl Gustav Carus (physiologist and painter), Gustav Theodor Fechner (founder of psychophysics), Ernst Haeckel (propagator of Darwinism), and Hanns Hörbiger (founder of the World Ice Theory) try to establish a modernist philosophy of nature, which became highly influential both in modern esotericism and scientific discourse, as well as in contemporary fiction.
No novel written in English had such an intensive influence on 20th century German prose writing as Ulysses by the Irish writer James Joyce. After the caesura of the Second World War, authors such as Wolfgang Koeppen, Arno Schmidt, Uwe Johnson and Wolfgang Hildesheimer derive inspiration from the re-discovery or new discovery of international modernism. This study sets itself the aim of tracking the paths and traces of this influence and developing the specific premises and positions of the authors examined.
Taking a philosophical epistemological perspective, this work examines Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” (Der Zauberberg), Hermann Broch’s trilogy, “The Sleepwalkers” (Die Schlafwandler), and Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften). These three texts not only constitute epoch-making novels, but are also novels of their epoch, in the sense that they deal with the significant historical currents of thought of their time in a literary manner. One of the most succinct characteristics of their epoch was a diversity of epistemological positions, never to be attained again afterwards. Using an interpretive approach, this study sheds light on how the three authors dealt with this spectrum in their aesthetic works.
The novella from the Age of Realism does not represent literary reality, but literary artificiality. It is characterised by an aesthetic quality which until now has only been commented on marginally. The novellas display 'artfulness' by continuing the Romantic programme through strategies of aestheticisation of both a formal nature (e.g. framing) and a substantive kind (e.g. logical inconsistencies). ‛Poetry of poetry’ is taken seriously as a guideline and runs counter to the efforts of the Realists to picture reality.
The book focuses on the short prose works by the Jewish writer Ernst Weiss (1882‑1940) by typologising this specific section of the novelist’s production, defining its themes and in six interpretive sketches drawing out a type of narration which is classified as parabolic. The study explicates Weiss’ position on the problem of existence and knowledge, defines the concept of the parabolic conception of narration and demonstrates the narrative features of this conception.
Die Studien zu F.A Wolf, F. Ast, Herder, F. Schlegel, Arnim, den Grimms und Goethe untersuchen mit Rückgriff auf eine Vielzahl von enzyklopädischen, wissenschaftlichen und vor allem literarischen Texten von der Aufklärung bis zur Hochromantik das gegenseitige Wechselverhältnis von philologischem und literarischem Diskurs um 1800. Im Zentrum steht dabei nicht ein wissenschaftsgeschichtliches Interesse, sondern die Frage nach den Auswirkungen einer sich professionalisierenden Wissenschaft von der Literatur auf die literarischen Werke selbst. Es zeigt sich, dass insbesondere die Frage nach Antike vs. Moderne, Geist vs. Buchstabe, Autorschaft vs. Herausgeberschaft, Einheit vs. Fragment sowie Epos vs. Roman von diesen Auseinandersetzungen betroffen sind und bis in die ästhetischen Programme der Goethe-Zeit durchschlagen. Dabei werden Ähnlichkeiten zwischen frühromantischer Ästhetik und dem Spätwerk Goethes deutlich, die in der Fachdiskussion immer noch oft von der Dichotomie Klassik vs. Romantik verdeckt werden. Die Verbindungslinie verläuft dabei über F.A. Wolfs Prolegomena ad Homerum über Schlegels Griechen-Studien und seiner projektierten Philosophie der Philologie zu Goethes eigenen ‚philologischen' Arbeiten in den Noten zum Diwan sowie einer Poetik vom Roman als Kompendiums in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahren.
The book examines the work of the Austrian Jewish writer Ernst Weiss (1882–1940), which has only recently been regaining the recognition it was accorded in the inter-war years. A critical study of Weiss' most important texts, from his first novel Die Galeere [The Galley] (1913) through to his novel Der Augenzeuge [The Eye-Witness] written in exile in 1939 gives an overview of the development of his complete works, of its guiding ideas, striking changes of direction, central influences and position in the history of literature.
What makes a literary work of art beautiful? What distinguishes this kind of beauty from others? In Europe, this problem has been repeatedly addressed in poetology and art theory. The present study is the first to trace the ramifications of the problem in a broader context, extending from antiquity to the 20th century. The conclusion is that in its engagement with beauty, literary esthetics takes an approach of its own to the identification of and reflection upon the nature of literature as a medium and the specific materiality and expository potential of literature, homing in not least on those things that defy communication by means of the written word.
The study describes the conceptual and metaphorical field relating to what figures in the Enlightenment as the sense of touch/feeling. In so doing it homes in on a phenomenon whose operative and physiological definition is anything but straightforward. The approaches discussed here indicate the problems involved in situating this sense in anatomical terms and specifying its function. The corpus of texts underlying the study is taken from literature, philosophy, and natural history. These are subjected to a reading that makes it possible to examine the complex nature of the issue in question by drawing upon systematic concepts.
In the late 18th century, aesthetic and political discourses were indissolubly interlinked. The aesthetic philosophies and literary fictions of authors like Karl Philipp Moritz, Salomon Maimon, Daniel Jenisch, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, or the young Wilhelm von Humboldt are both reflections and normative anticipations of the change from the largely court-dominated residential culture of the epoch of Frederick the Great to the emancipated urban culture of the Age of Reform. The topographical approach adopted in this study makes it possible to situate the discourses examined within the history of institutions and the media, and to understand them as argumentative strategies employed in actual debates. Concentration on one location and one restricted period of time also makes it easier to investigate the issue in a manner that cuts across both the dividing lines usually drawn between history, literature, and philosophy and the definition of epochs normally upheld in discussions of literary and cultural history.
The literature of modernism around 1900 reflects an iconic change in the relationship between the prevailing cultural medium of writing and the rival pictorial medium. Challenged by the heightening of evidentiality promised by avant-garde painting, early cinema, and linguistic and psychological imagery, authors like Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and Musil developed a language of visionary boundary-transgression that remained fully aware of its resources while at the same time appropriating the other medium for its expressive purposes. The study inquires into the poetological consequences of the specific pictorial awareness of modernist literature and relates the contexts in which it developed to the history of knowledge.
The study examines the beginnings of critical engagement with literary products in Germany. Unlike most studies of its kind it does not centre on reviews. Instead, it traces the development of the literary critique as a process in which the impetus for scholarly critical engagement draws upon literary models likely to be successful with the public. In the analyses conducted here, dialogue, apologia, and satire stand revealed as productive models with the help of which authors like Thomasius or Lessing flexed their critical muscles with sometimes scathing results and also charted out the specifically dialogic structure still typical of this kind of criticism.
Modernity as a literary 'event' is in fact the result of a long and arduous process marked by critical and poetological disputes and decisively shaping the literary landscape in German-speaking countries from the middle of the century to 1900. Proceeding from the concepts of realistic literary policy formulated by liberalist authors (Haym, Spielhagen, Freytag), moving from there to the self-confident urbanity of Gründerzeit criticism (Karl Frenzel, Paul Lindau), and concluding with the polemical and programmatic journalism of naturalism, the study reconstructs the contemporary settings for the disputes and debates taking place in this half-century. In its course, the influence of the youthful discipline Literary Studies also becomes apparent.
After 1945 there was general consensus among western European intellectuals that no authors of 'high' literary standing could possibly have compromised themselves in their relations with the totalitarian systems. With reference to three case studies - Curzio Malaparte, Louis-Ferdinand Ciline, Gottfried Benn - the study examines how literary criticism deals with authors who fly in the face of this declared incompatibility between aesthetic achievement and moral dereliction. In so doing it points up paradigmatic argumentation structures that have asserted themselves to this day, demonstrating the point with reference to more recent debates (e.g. those involving Peter Handke and Martin Walser).
In the last third of the 18th century, the University of Göttingen was a leading centre of anthropological thought in Europe. One member of its teaching staff was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799). This study examines Lichtenberg's work against the backdrop of the early history of modern anthropology and its roots in 18th century natural history. Special reference is made to Lichtenberg's relations with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Lichtenberg's 'Anthropology in Fragments' facilitates a clearer understanding of the contradictions underlying the Enlightenment's programme, which were never clearer than in the late 18th century.
In the 1980s the sublime was rediscovered in the context of the debates on postmodernism. The emphasis here was on the theories of Burke and Kant, which contrasted beauty and sublimity. Little attention was accorded to the history of sublimity in the early modern age. This study seeks to remedy this deficit. It proceeds on the conviction that in the early modern age the dichotomy between beauty and sublimity was not in fact the operative factor in the debate, but rather the opposition between two models of the sublime, that of Pseudo Longinus, on the one hand, and the three styles defined by classical rhetoric on the other.
The study proposes a new, systematically oriented concept of 'historical drama', on the basis of which it then presents a history of this genre from humanism to the Enlightenment. This general outline is consistently geared to the culture-historical context, the contemporaneous discussion on historiography, and the changes undergone by the theory of history. It is complemented by analyses of individual dramas by such authors as Frischlin, Sachs, Gryphius, Lohenstein, Gottsched, Lessing, and Klopstock. This study represents the first large-scale attempt to discuss and describe historical drama in the early modern age from the perspective of literary history.
The study points up the specific diversity of German baroque literature. Alongside a general overview of this characteristic, it also provides an analysis of specific forms of latitude available in the genres epigram and sonnet. Further, it indicates different kinds of license afforded by baroque poetologies despite their otherwise highly restrictive nature. Processes of literary diversification encouraged certain freedoms in the practice of literature over and against the poetological limitations imposed. To what extent did this contribute to the decline of the baroque poetological paradigm around 1730?
From a historical and systematic perspective, the study analyzes various approaches to the literary portrayal of historical events. Historical prose narratives by 19th century Swiss authors (J. Gotthelf, G. Keller, C.F. Meyer) are examined both in their relationship to contemporary historiography and in the context of a national 'mythology' disseminated by patriotic drama. The aim of the investigation is to point up the complementary and cohesive aspects of literary prose, historiography, and national literature, while casting light on their function in connection with the evolution of an 'inner' nation in the age of historicism.
The adaptations of the Old Testament story of Joseph in baroque novels and Thomas Mann, Kafka's fictions of bureaucracy, clerk and employee literature in the Weimar Republic, the planning and management texts in the literature of the GDR, and office novels in West German literature are discussed here as media in which literature reflects on its own cultural standing. The representation structure and the protocol procedure characterize the way in which literature fluctuates between sovereignty and the subaltern, intervention and monumentality, metaphor and metonymy.
The 'key principle' as a complementary procedure to cryptographic writing and deciphering reading is demonstrated here with reference to various narrative texts, beginning with the courtly romance, extending to Chr.M. Wieland's »Geschichte der Abderiten«, Goethe's »Die Leiden des jungen Werther«, and E.T.A. Hoffmann's »Meister Floh«, and proceeding from there to discuss early 20th century novels with artists as their central figures, and the works of Thomas and Klaus Mann (»Mephisto«, »Doktor Faustus«). The roman à clef emerges cleansed of its opprobrium as a 'suspect' form of literary activity, and stands revealed as an instance of covert reference that invariably casts a highly illuminating light on the societies occasioning its use.
By means of close analysis of Rudolf Borchardt's (1877-1945) autobiography, the study demonstrates that he had a narcissistic personality from early childhood, and draws on his essays and speeches to indicate how this personality structured his self-presentation as martyr, prophet, and messiah of German/European history. The four main sections discuss the culture-political roles he allots to the 'abortive nation' (Germany), the 'hostile poet' (Stefan George), the 'absent ruler' (from Wilhelm II to Hitler), and the 'quest for a home' (Prussia between Berlin and Kvnigsberg) in the cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries, which Borchardt construed in the form of a tragedy.
In his literary works Goethe engages profoundly with various manifestations of melancholy. Highly remarkable is the subtlety with which he takes up ancient, medieval, and contemporary concepts of melancholy, the accuracy with which he models the protagonists of his works on these patterns, and the range of his reflections on the possibilities of an existence free of melancholy. The present study is the first to examine Goethe's literary works in the context of a culture-historical problematic of major significance for the late 18th and early 19th century.
Goethe released occasional poetry from the heteronomous dictates of political interests by extending the traditional representative function of court poetry and using it as a vehicle both for criticism of courtly life and for literary self-advertisement. His texts of this kind display not only a high degree of individualization and a marked instrumentalization of the genre but also a shift of functional emphasis away from aristocratic (self-)glorification and toward literary publicity. For a limited period, occasional poetry was thus (re-)discovered and newly defined as a genre of high literary distinction.
This study investigates the negotiation process involved in the definition of the latitude and license permissible in 'satirical' writing over a period of more than 200 years. Literature and literary theory are observed in communicative interaction with contemporary law, medicine, pedagogics and theology. The productive force inherent in the cultural taboo imposed on aggression manifests itself in theory formation and practice. The investigation closes with analyses of three texts enacting such negotiations in a literary form: Christian Thomasius' ;Ostergedancken+ (1695), an excerpt from Bodmer/Breitinger's 'Mahler der Sitten' (1746), and Theodor Haecker's 'Dialog über die Satire' (1927).
Relations between texts (intertextuality) are one of the pet themes of recent (linguistic and literary) research. But they are more frequently asserted than demonstrated. The study develops the methodological equipment required to test such theses. This is then used to examine texts by Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), from her earliest poems to her late prose. The analysis is able to correct some cherished 'myths' in the recent research on Bachmann, notably the relationship between Bachmann and Celan, Bachmann's so-called 'musical poetology', and the influence of Adorno, Heidegger, and others.
This exploration of Romantic depictions of memory as a faculty of body as well as of mind analyzes representations of remembrance in Jena Romantic texts. When these texts pose questions about memory's employment and depiction in art - about the aestheticization of recollection - they reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which Romantic, and modern, thought is constructed.
A description of Heidegger's theory of literature has yet to be written. The present study undertakes to fill the gap. It identifies models and concepts from the history of interpretation theory drawn upon by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Heidegger's approach to literature is discussed against the background of literary studies and illuminated in terms of what it owes to the legacy of earlier literary theory. As such, it is the first study to provide a comprehensive view of the intellectual sources of Heidegger's thinking and its proximity to certain currents in the history of (literary) theory, a proximity largely unidentified hitherto, not least because of Heidegger's own overtly secessionist and anti-rationalist stance.
The connection between literature and history in omnipresent in the works of Jean Paul (1763--1825). For him world history is an 'unfinished novel' and the world of the novel a 'higher' form of history. In 'anamorphoses' of time, i.e., in the apparent in-finitudes of poetry, the novel as seen by Jean Paul anticipates a future Arcadia above and beyond the fragmentarities of actual history. With reference to poetics, aesthetics, and philosophy, Ralf Berhorst's study examines the analogies drawn by Jean Paul between literature and history and paves the way for a new understanding of the structure of his novels.
For a long time Moses Mendelssohn's (1729-1786) »Jerusalem« was one of the neglected works of the German Enlightenment period. Only in recent years has it started to be given the critical attention it merits, albeit almost exclusively from the perspective of the history of emancipation and of minorities. The present study examines the work in terms of the history of ideas and places it in the context of contemporaneous European thought, demonstrating that in it Mendelssohn presents a highly innovative angle on the issue of human rights and the possibility of pluralistic societies.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is widely considered an advocate of sensualistic hedonism. In the name of sensualism he campaigned against Christian animosity toward things corporeal and the against the renunciation ethic of the restoration era. At the same time, however, his specific brand of sensualism is geared to a pantheistic reconciliation of mind and matter. Exposed to the rival pulls of emancipation and reconciliation, Heine urges a holistic view of life permeating all his output from the early prose to the final death poems. The present study is the first to give a systematic examination of this sensualist concept as an aesthetic constant in Heine's work, thematizing its different materializations in Heine's engagement with religion, politics, aesthetics and psychology. A close reading of the »Reisebilder« demonstrates that sensualism was already a guiding notion for the poet prior to his Paris exile.
Meuthen's study of the traditions operative in the German Künstlerroman is post-structuralist in its approach and as such advances a counter-concept to the traditional schematic inclusion of this genre in that of the Bildungsroman. It opens up an 'inverse' perspective in which central works of German prose literature are seen as cryptograms of a sophistic counter-movement to the main idealistic currents of European cultural history asserting themselves in the 19th century and thus establishing the 'modernist' perspective. The spectrum of works analyzed ranges from Heinse's »Ardinghello« through central classical and Romantic works, Rilke's »Malte Laurids Brigge« and Thomas Mann's »Doktor Faustus« to Thomas Bernhard's »Untergeher« and Ransmayr's »Letzte Welt«.
Like any engagement with literature that is not part of the established canon, a study dealing with the dramatic work of Fouqué (1777-1843) will at the same time be part of the literary history of 'minor works'. The study does not set out, however, to rehabilitate unjustly neglected writings. The material is of interest above all for what it has to tell us about the poetic consequences of (early) Romantic theories of literature and genre. Accordingly, the study concentrates first of all on Fouqué's early dramatic works as an attempt to write an allegorical species of Welttheater, moving from there to examine next his dramatic approach to the New Mythology, then the patriotic and historical dramas against the backdrop of the temporalization of political awareness, the medieval dramas in the context of the institutionalization of Germanic Studies, and finally the problem of the Gesamtkunstwerk with its structural proximity to opera and Romantic drama.
The study identifies metamorphosis as a form of poetic contemplation in which literary imagination divides the flow of time into graphic timepoints. Whereas the concept of ongoing metamorphosis is most frequently encountered in nature philosophy, complex metamorphosis narratives notably reflect upon and criticize the concept of discrete metamorphosis which plays a significant role in mythology and religion. The systematic reconstruction of a poetics of epic metamorphoses is followed by interpretations of Ovid's »Metamorphoses« and relevant 20th century narratives by Kafka, Carl Einstein, Christoph Ransmayr and Steffen Mensching.
In the aftermath of Winckelmann and Mengs, the late Enlightenment thinker and classicist Fernow (1763-1808) set out to determine the autonomy of art on the basis of the intrinsic value of its significative material. As one of the inner circle of Weimar art enthusiasts in the entourage of Goethe and Meyer and with an eye to authors like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, Fernow urged a species of classicism that was not only based on an art history perspective but also argued from a vantage emphasizing the productive rather than receptive aspects of aesthetics. The consequences of his aversion to a mimetic understanding of art are discussed here on the basis of the lead concepts underlying Fernow's writings on the works of the contemporary artists Carstens and Canova, which represent his most significant contributions on the aesthetics of painting and sculpture.
This study is the first monograph on the subject of alchemy and literature in the early modern age. In the light of the hermeticist tradition, the study urges a literal (as opposed to the traditionally allegorical) understanding of the sensual images encountered in the mystic-pietist tradition of poetry in the Song of Songs tradition. Theological and anthropological reference contexts justifying such an understanding are carefully reconstructed. Selected poems by Greiffenberg, Pordage, Leade, Arnold, Zinzendorf, and Novalis are interpreted for the first time exclusively against the backdrop of the hermeticist 'alchemy' concept.
The various sociability concepts of the 18th century made a decisive contribution to the transition from medieval social structure to early modern society. After the religious wars of the 17th century, there emerged a concept of peaceable, tolerant, and self-determined coexistence born of unremitting interplay between literary models, experimental group-formation, and cultural values. The tension immanent in that concept between untrammeled development of the personality and socially required norms of behaviour has remained a characteristic feature of the modern age to the present day.
The literary genre Inscriptio arguta, which originated in the Baroque age, combines both metrical and prose elements. Its characteristics are centre-axis layout, argute diction, and presentation in both printed and unprinted form. The main focus here is on rhetorical and poetological theory-formation and the reception of the genre in German literature (notably Masen, Tesauro, Harsdörffer, Birken, Weise, Morhof). By the early 18th century the Inscriptio arguta started to wane as a genre, its eventual demise being brought about by criticism of the Argutia movement and changing relations between script and scholarship in the early Enlightenment.
The young Lukács' plans for a book on Dostoyevsky were ambitious in scope. On the one hand they essay a sharply defined formal distinction between the semantic worlds and the functional modes of art, ethics, and everyday communication, only to reestablish the relation between them on the content plane in an essayistic form of writing modeled on Dostoyevsky. The present study undertakes a systematic reconstruction of this project as documented both in the large-scale unfinished works (»Theory of the Novel« and the Heidelberg aesthetic theory torso) and in a large number of minor texts and author's notes. In so doing it locates the place of the work in the intellectual context of the early 20th century.
The study looks at 18th century music theatre in German (as an early form of mass-media culture) specifically in terms of the way it interrelates with the development of a modern form of anthropology. The volume contains a typological overview of the parameters governing this multi-media genre and the diachronic changes they underwent, paradigmatic analyses of the relation between dramaturgy and anthropology with reference to a number of selected works, an outline of contemporary theories of the genre, and a comprehensive catalogue of original works in German performed between 1760 and 1800.
Looking by turns at the history of concepts, knowledge and scholarly practice in the 18th century, the study traces the changes undergone in the course of the first half of that period by ideas on imagination as an intermediary faculty between the bodily and the spiritual. Whereas the early Enlightenment regarded imagination as a 'lower faculty' subordinate to the logic of reason, the rehabilitation of sensual perception brought with it a massive reinstatement of imagination as a 'way of knowing'. In the course of this process, it gained central status as a case in point for the investigation of interrelations between psychic and physiological processes representing a major challenge for philosophers and medical scholars alike. By contrast, poetics and aesthetics advocated formal education in aesthetic and sensual perception as a way of channelling and curbing potential extravagances in the use of the imaginative faculty.
Using a chronological interpretation of the text as it took shape, the author demonstrates that Thomas Mann's novel "Joseph and His Brothers" has close direct links with the years in which it was written, i.e. the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. In a period calling increasingly for political commitment on the part of the author, Mann saw himself obligated to review the fatalistic and unpolitical stance he had hitherto adopted. "Joseph and His Brothers" invites reflection on whether and how it is possible to preserve the philosophical premisses of its author (metaphysics and the celebration of 'inner' values) in a modern, political age.
The study sets out from an inquiry into why in the late 19th and early 20th century literature turned more and more to the subject of death although this phenomenon was increasingly repressed and negated in public awareness. The bias of this inquiry is slanted towards the aesthetic procedures enabling literature to embark on this new engagement with the experience of finiteness and mortality. Interpretations of selected texts in German demonstrate the extent to which narrative structures are suffused, affected and changed by new structures of awareness.
The upheavals in European philosophy, religion and literature caused by the advent of the Age of Enlightenment did not leave the ancient and venerable tradition of Christian literature unaffected. One offshoot of the encounter was the idea of a form of 'sacred poetry' (F.G. Klopstock) in which Christian Revelation was to be represented in an entirely new way through the agency of the new 'enlightened' poetic diction. The study reconstructs the theory and the literary materializations of this idea in their historical context, with special reference to philosophical aesthetics, German pietism and rationalist poetics.
'Historical drama' appears as the dominant genre in German literature at the beginning of the 19th century and reflects an attraction of history, that constitutes a specific 'historical culture' formulated and modulated as the complex product of sources and institutions such as historical museums, science, archeology, art and literature. In this frame the plays of authors such as Christian Dietrich Grabbe, but also a number of more unknown texts, can be seen within their relationship to a wider field of cultural and political practices.
Educational reforms around the year 1800 also had their effects on the subject that went by the name of 'Rhetoric'. They did not however spell the end of rhetoric itself. On the contrary, the political and social circles active around 1800 and the frequently unduly roseate aura surrounding political oratory in revolutionary France and the art of public speaking in the British parliament led to a quickening of public debate on the potential for good and evil bound up with political eloquence. The study traces this debate in detail and pays equal attention to the practice and the arenas of public discourse in Germany: the pulpit, the lectern and the theatre.
This is a study of Paul Celan's reception of Russian literature, with special reference to works of major poetological significance for him. The term Begegnung (encounter), so central to his remarks in the speech on the occasion of the award of the Büchner Prize, needs to be seen as a function of this reception process, a process that the present work sets out to delineate for the first time in full detail, drawing upon hitherto unknown material from Celan's posthumous papers. Alongside Mandel'stam there were a number of other Russian authors that Celan was greatly preoccupied with, notably in the period around 1960 (Chlebnikov, Zvetayeva, Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak). Another >first< of this study is a detailed commentary on, and analysis of, Celan's radio broadcast on Mandel'stam.
The consummate musicality of the verse in Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus" stems from a blend of sophisticated craftmanship and poetological originality, as this study sets out to demonstrate. A detailed analysis of the text forms the basis for a discussion of a variety of topics that have traditionally divided literary critics: the unity of the cycle, the use of the sonnet form, the morphological Keimzellenprinzip (nucleus principle), Rilke's contribution to the discussion on the role of the subject in modern literature, his concept of the literary work, his 'abstractionist' approach, his view of temporality, and his reinterpretation of the figure of Orpheus. The findings cast a radically new light on a number of frequently rehearsed topoi in Rilke interpretation. At the same time they reveal the crucial role played by the cycle in the history of poetry on the threshold of modernism.
This work advances the thesis that the symbolism of the ancient mysteries was of central significance for the self-interpretation of the early generation of German Romantics. Literary works and writings on the theory of art by Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Novalis, Loeben and Eichendorff draw upon this source to outline an exclusive form of 'knowledge' that is neither mythodological nor general and can only be communicated by special modes of discourse. The resulting form of intellectual identity formation is interpreted here as a reaction to modernization processes taking shape in society and in the communication of knowledge. With a view of doing justice to the connotative richness of these Romantic writings, there are also detailed chapters on Antiquity and the immediate wellsprings of Romantic self-interpretation to be found in German Enlightenment thinking.
Studying Heine's approach to myth and mythology can help to further ongoing discussion of the problem 'myth and modernity'. Heine's concern is with the view of the world describable as 'mythic thinking'. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) himself was inspired to some extent by the 'new mythology' of early Romanticism and he also took an active part in the revaluation of popular lore identifiable in late-Romantic 'German mythology'. But Heine's brand of mythic thinking is bound up with resistance to any attempt to capitalise on it for political purposes and to this end to restore it as a (Teutonic) blueprint for society as a whole. It is this resistance that determines the form of Heine's treatment of myth and mythology and the changes it underwent. Heine presents no trace of a reconciliation between myth and modernity but both the otherness and the vitality of myth are very much alive in his work.
This study is the first to explicitly identify the mystic traditions informing the literary and theoretical writings of Hermann Broch (1886-1951) and in so doing reveal a transformed concept of mysticism to be the very hub of Broch's entire thinking. His specific brand of mysticism is related here to a form of secularised mysticism called "leere Transzendenz" (empty transcendentalism) that sprang up in early 20th century European thinking as a response to a widespread feeling of loss of meaning and totality.
This study explores three works in which the protagonist undertakes to fashion a literary artwork out of himself: Ovid's »Ars Amatoria«, Kierkegaard's »Diary of the Seducer«, and Thomas Mann's »Felix Krull«. For each work, particular attention is paid to the self-conscious interplay between the author's project of book-making and the character's project of self-making, as well as to the effect of changing notions of self-identity on the protagonist's attempt at life as literature. For »Felix Krull«, this includes a sustained analysis of Mann's incorporation and problematization of various Nietzschean models of aesthestics, reality, and self-identity. In Ovid and Kierkegaard, this study also considers a related project, the attempt to fashion a literary artwork out of another, namely out of a woman.
Das Werk des Schweizer Theologen und Poeten Kurt Marti (*1921) gehört zu den vielgestaltigsten der deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur. Die Verbindung von Überliefertem und spielerischem Brechen von Traditionen, von mundartlicher Bodenständigkeit und weltläufiger Zeitkritik, von biblischen Elementen und Sprachexperiment ist charakteristisch für Martis Oeuvre, in das die vorliegende Arbeit eine umfassende Werkeinführung bietet. Mit seinen an Mustern der konkreten Poesie orientierten "Gedichten in Berner Umgangssprache" wurde Marti zum literarischen Neuerer der schweizerischen Mundartdichtung, die über Generationen auf Helvetisch-Nationales und Bäuerlich-Provinzielles ausgerichtet war. In einem kritisch-essayistischen Diskurs plädiert Marti für eine neuartige "theologische Literaturästhetik", die aus den Sackgassen der sog. "christlichen Literatur" herausführt. Diese Forderung löst er in zahlreichen Verstexten ein, in denen klassische kirchliche Formen ostentativ umgewandelt und sprachspielend neuen Redezwecken dienstbar gemacht werden. Durch die permanente Verknüpfung von Selbstaussage, Analyse, Vergleichen sowie dem der kritischen Abgrenzung dienenden Rekurs auf politische Literaturtheorien und den Kontext der Schweizer Literaturgeschichte wird die Spezifik von Martis Texten (Gedichten und Tagebüchern) deutlich. Unter den Kategorien 'Traditions-Aufhebung' (im Hegelschen Sinn), 'Offenheit' (im Anschluß an Umberto Eco), Konkretisation und Prediger-Poet versucht diese Arbeit, das Unverwechselbare des Martischen Verfahrens zu erfassen.
The study presents a thorough investigation of Kafka's aphoristic writings, examining them in terms of the history of the aphorism in Germany, and paying special regard to Kafka's contemporary Austrian aphorists. Emphasis is placed on the role of the aphorism in the development of Kafka's literary creativity. Aphoristic discourse presented itself to Kafka as a possible manner of resolving specific conflicts in his life and art, above all the crisis of communication the individuality of the self. Aphoristic structure provides the transitional link between Kafka´s early perspectivistic narratives and the parables of the later period.
Wer bei Poetikvorlesungen am Katheder steht, ist gefragt und überfragt zugleich. Er soll nicht nur mit der authentischen Stimme des Autors sein Werk vortragen, sondern auch als Dozent für kreatives Schreiben, als Literaturwissenschaftler und sogar als sein eigener Interpret sprechen. Diese konfligierenden Rollenerwartungen haben bei den Vortragenden immer wieder Verweigerungshaltungen gegen das Format provoziert.
In ihrem Buch zeigt Insa Braun, wie sich dieser Konflikt bei den Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen in der Debatte um die deutsche Nachkriegslyrik zuspitzt: Autoren und Autorinnen wie Ingeborg Bachmann, Karl Krolow, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Peter Rühmkorf und Ernst Jandl nehmen in ihren Vorlesungen auf immer neue Weise zu der Frage Stellung, wie man auch „nach Auschwitz" noch Gedichte schreiben und über Lyrik reden kann. Mit detaillierten Analysen von ausgewählten Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen zwischen 1959 und 1989 zeichnet das Buch nach, wie gerade der Verweigerungsgestus gegen das Format neue Inszenierungsformen lyrischer Autorschaft hervorbringt.
This study presents a systematization of the debate about the concept of the literary work and outlines a pragmatic approach that allows us to examine both the normativity and the functionality of this contentious category. By looking at the oeuvre of Max Frisch, it analyzes examples of the aesthetic, epistemic, moral, legal, and economic functions of attributing the work status to texts.