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Full-Text Articles in German Literature
The Modernist Mirror And The Hold Of Being: Rilke And Zamiatin, Petre Petrov
The Modernist Mirror And The Hold Of Being: Rilke And Zamiatin, Petre Petrov
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The article approaches the image of the mirror as a metaphorical vehicle for the experience of modernity in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke and Evgenii Zamiatin. The argument builds upon a duality that informs the folkloric and artistic representations of mirrors from ancient to modern times: that between flat and deep reflection. Flat reflection refers to the idea of images projected outwardly from the specular surface, while deep reflection implies an imaginary space behind this surface, where objects are caught and held. By examining two of Rilke’s elegies and Zamiatin’s novel We, the article shows the way in …
The Value Of Kitsch. Hermann Broch And Robert Musil On Art And Morality, Patrizia C. Mcbride
The Value Of Kitsch. Hermann Broch And Robert Musil On Art And Morality, Patrizia C. Mcbride
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This article examines the discourse on kitsch articulated by Austrian novelists Hermann Broch (1886-1951) and Robert Musil (1880-1942) between 1930 and 1950. In particular, I focus on the ways in which the two novelists draw the distinction of value between real and pseudo art (or kitsch). As I argue, their disagreement on this matter is emblematic of dilemmas that continue to confront aesthetic evaluation today. While Broch anchors value in a metaphysical realm on the outside of aesthetic discourse, assuming a late-idealistic notion of art, Musil frames the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' art within an empirical, relativistic, and immanent …
A Lustful Passion For Clarification: Bildung, Aufklärung, And The Sight Of Sexual Imagery , Stephanie D'Alessandro
A Lustful Passion For Clarification: Bildung, Aufklärung, And The Sight Of Sexual Imagery , Stephanie D'Alessandro
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The equation of education and self-cultivation was an Enlightenment ideal which has become a hallmark of bourgeois culture. Prizing Bildung, the bourgeoisie professed an appreciation for art, music, and literature. Within their libraries, comprehensive scholarly texts intended for academic and well-educated, lay audiences occupied a special place. Marrying illustration with academic investigation, the Sittengeschichte (history of morals) could also be found on the bourgeois library shelf and afforded its readers a glimpse into a world outside the strict parameters of bourgeois propriety. During the Weimar Republic, the demand for illustrated Sittengeschichten increased dramatically among the bourgeoisie, meeting their ideal …
Fear And Fascination In The Big City: Rilke's Use Of George Simmel In The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge, Neil H. Donahue
Fear And Fascination In The Big City: Rilke's Use Of George Simmel In The Notebooks Of Malte Laurids Brigge, Neil H. Donahue
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
This essay examines Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) as one corner in a triangle of reciprocal influence and affinity in early twentieth-century modernity consisting of Rilke, the sociologist Georg Simmel, and the art theorist Wilhelm Worringer. In the notes, this essay documents the biographical relations among the three, but in its text it demonstrates through textual analysis how Rilke's descriptions of Malte in Paris enact Simmel's categories of psychological response for man in the metropolis, as delineated in his essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"(1903). Rilke's descriptions of Malte's attempts to overcome his fears of …
Art And Androgyny: The Aerialist, Naomi Ritter
Art And Androgyny: The Aerialist, Naomi Ritter
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Among the many circus performers who have fascinated writers and artists since Romanticism, the clown and the aerialist predominate. In the nineteenth century, the tightrope artiste inspired comparisons with the (self-styled) equally daring and equally craftsmanlike poet. The vertical metaphor suggested a vision of transcendent art that Romantics and their heirs claimed for themselves. In the twentieth century, vestiges of the same identification and transcendence remain, but a new sexual focus appears also. Two important texts by Cocteau and Thomas Mann, "Le Numero de Barbette" (1926) and Chapter 1 in Book III of Felix Krull ( 1951), show the aerial …
The Maze Of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, And Kant, Arkady Plotnitsky
The Maze Of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, And Kant, Arkady Plotnitsky
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The case of Kant's Critique of Judgment offers a powerful example of the radical disruption of the metaphysical text, enacted by Bataille's major сoncepts. The analysis of the metaphor of economy in Kant, Bataille and Derrida suggests the crucial importance of Bataille's general economy—as the economy of loss—for deconstructing the Kantian conception of genius and the whole scheme of taste—as an economy of consumption—and inscribing a complex interplay forces that the general economy is designed to account for. Once however taste, art and the economy of genius can no longer be inscribed through the restricted economy …
Proust And Benjamin: The Invisible Image, Beryl Schlossman
Proust And Benjamin: The Invisible Image, Beryl Schlossman
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Benjamin's essay "Zum Bilde Prousts" questions the status of the image even as it leafs through the possibilities and variations that form it—as photograph, figure, representation, disappearing trace or promise of creation. As the image of Proust's novel, Benjamin's text takes up the elements of A la Recherche du temps perdu (poetic language, autobiography, critical commentary) in the terms of Benjamin's theory of allegory reflected through the Proustian strategy of reading and writing. "Zum Bilde Prousts" examines the traditional markers of "art" and "life," locating Proustian recherche—and Benjamin's image—in the deep waters beyond them. Through an interpretation of Benjamin's …
Saturnine Vision And The Question Of Difference: Reflections On Walter Benjamin's Theory Of Language, Rodolphe Gasché
Saturnine Vision And The Question Of Difference: Reflections On Walter Benjamin's Theory Of Language, Rodolphe Gasché
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Walter Benjamin's writings do not owe their intelligibility to their indebtedness to one or more specific brands of philosophical thought, but to Benjamin's primary concern with the most elementary distinctions of philosophy itself. Chief among these distinctions is that of philosophical thought itself, or the difference it makes with respect to the realms of nature, myth, or the appearances. By focusing on the notions of "communicability" and "translatability," philosophical difference, for Benjamin, shall be shown to rest on structures within the language of man and art that aim at breaking through language's mythical interconnectedness, its weblike quality, its textuality, toward …
Avant-Garde: The Convulsions Of A Concept, Michael T. Jones
Avant-Garde: The Convulsions Of A Concept, Michael T. Jones
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
The current status of the «avant-garde» provokes many questions, which include both inner-artistic matters and matters of history and society commonly associated with Marxist or reception-oriented thinkers. The convolution of questions cannot be disentangled; efforts to confront the dilemmas of the avant-garde cannot abstract from matters of commodification, recent reception, or the complex dialectic of «classical» and «modern.» The essay deals with the most recent manifestations of avant-garde aesthetic impulses. It emphasizes the historical and social aspects of German theorizing in contrast to purely formalist or ahistorical conceptions commonly found elsewhere. It insists that such «materialist» theory does greater justice …