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This book offers a reading of Walter Benjamin's notoriously opaque work, Origin of the German Tragic Drama that systematically attends to its place in discussions of the Baroque in Benjamin's day. The book recovers Benjamin's relationship to the ideologically loaded readings of the literature and political theory of the seventeenth-century Baroque that abounded in Germany during the political and economic crises of the Weimar years. To date, the significance of the Baroque for Origin of the German Tragic Drama has been glossed over by students of Benjamin, most of whom have neither read it in this context nor engaged with the often incongruous debates about the period that filled both academic and popular texts in the years leading up to and following World War I. The book shows the extent to which Benjamin participated in these debates by reconstructing the literal and figurative history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books that Benjamin analyzes and the literary, art historical and art theoretical, and political theological discussions of the Baroque with which he was familiar. In so doing, it challenges the exceptionalist, even hagiographic, approaches that have become common in Benjamin studies.

This book explores connections between the practices of reading and magic during the realist and modernist periods in German literature and thought, with a particular focus on divination. Divination, historically long associated with the reading of literature, engages an issue of critical importance to this cultural moment, that of futurity: both the different ways that the future figured in the reading of texts at this time, and the evident (or apparently evident) fading of its force as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith. In case studies of works by Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin, this study investigates divinatory readings not just of texts but of the world, its things, their forces, and their relations to the human. It approaches both the texts and the world that supports such readings against the background of the notion of “sympathy” that, in both ancient and pre-modern times, allowed for future reading and that, it argues, persists in the realist and modernist periods in the form of “Stimmung.” And it traces the significant transformations of “sympathy” and “Stimmung” that accompany the changing shape of reading, magic, and the future in German art and thought during this period.

This book reexamines Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory along with his other writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today's cultural debates. Is Adorno's aesthetic theory still relevant today? This question is answered with an emphatic yes. As the book shows, a careful reading of the work exposes different questions and arguments today than it did in the past. Over the years Adorno's concern over the fate of art in a late capitalist society has met with everything from suspicion to indifference. In part this could be explained by relative unfamiliarity with the German dialectical tradition in North America. Today's debate is better informed, more multifaceted, and further removed from the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and of the shadow of postmodernism. Adorno's insistence on the radical autonomy of art has much to offer contemporary discussions of art and the aesthetic in search of new responses to the pervasive effects of a neoliberal art market and culture industry. The book shows how radically transformative Adorno's ideas have been and how thoroughly they have shaped current discussions in aesthetics. Among the topics considered are the role of art in modernism and postmodernism, the truth claims of artworks, the function of the ugly in modern artworks, the precarious value of the literary tradition, and the surprising significance of realism for Adorno.

The Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” has long led a paradoxical life within literary studies, having been construed both as a peculiarly German genre, a marker of that country's cultural difference from Western Europe, and as a universal expression of modernity. This book argues that the dual status of the Bildungsroman renders this novelistic form an elegant way to negotiate the diverging critical discourses surrounding national and world literature. Since the late eighteenth century, authors have employed the story of a protagonist's journey into maturity as a powerful tool with which to facilitate the creation of national communities among their readers. Such attempts always stumble over what the book calls “cosmopolitan remainders,” identity claims that resist nationalism's aim for closure in the normative regime of the nation-state. These cosmopolitan remainders are responsible for the curiously hesitant endings of so many novels of formation. The book presents readings of a number of novels—Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Karl Leberecht Immermann's The Epigones, Gustav Freytag's Debit and Credit, Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus among them—that have always been felt to be particularly “German” and compares them with novels by such authors as George Eliot and James Joyce to show that what seem to be markers of national particularity can productively be read as topics of world literature.

This book reads theoretical, literary and cinematic works that appear noteworthy for the ethical questions they raise. Via critical analysis of writers and filmmakers whose projects have changed our ways of viewing the modern world—including Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, the directors of Germany in Autumn, and Heiner Müller—the book furnishes a cultural base for contemporary discussions of totalitarian domination, lying and politics, the relation between law and body, the relation between law and justice, the question of violence, and our ways of conceptualizing “the human.” A consideration of ethics is central to the book, but ethics in a general, philosophical sense is not the primary subject here; instead, the book suggests that whatever understanding of the ethical one has is always contingent upon a particular mode of presentation (Darstellung), on particular aesthetic qualities and features of media. Whatever there is to be said about ethics, it is always bound to certain forms of saying, certain ways of telling, certain modes of narration. That modes of presentation differ across genres and media goes without saying; that such differences are intimately linked with the question of the ethical emerges with heightened urgency in this book.

This book explores the power of lyric poetry to stir the social and emotional lives of human beings in the face of the ineffable nature of our mortality. It focuses on two German-speaking masters of lyric prose and poetry: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770—1843) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875—1926). While Hölderlin and Rilke are stylistically very different, each believed in the power of poetic language to orient us as social beings in contexts that otherwise can be alienating. They shared the conviction that such alienation cannot be overcome once and for all in any universal event. Both argued that to deny the uncertainty created by the absence of any such event (or to deny the alienation itself) is to deny the particularly human condition of uncertainty and mortality. By drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell, the book challenges poststructuralist scholarship, which stresses the limitations of language in the face of reality. The book provides detailed readings of Hölderlin and Rilke and positions them in a broader narrative of modernity that helps make sense of their difficult and occasionally contradictory self-characterizations. The book reconciles the ambitious claims that Hölderlin and Rilke make for poetry—that it can create political communities, that it can change how humans relate to death, and that it can unite the sensual and intellectual components of human subjectivity—and the often difficult, fragmented, or hermetic nature of their individual poems.

The consumer revolution of the eighteenth century brought new and exotic commodities to Europe from abroad—coffee, tea, spices, and new textiles to name a few. Yet one of the most widely distributed luxury commodities in the period was not new at all, and was produced locally—the book. This book considers books and the culture around books during this period, focusing specifically on Germany where literature, and the fine arts in general, were the subject of soul-searching debates over the legitimacy of luxury in the modern world. Building on recent work done in the fields of consumption studies as well as the New Economic Criticism, the book combines intellectual-historical chapters (on luxury as a concept, luxury editions, and concerns about addictive reading) with contextualized close readings of novels by Joachim Heinrich Campe, Wieland, Karl Philipp Moritz, Novalis, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It demonstrates that artists in this period were deeply concerned with their status as luxury producers. The rhetorical strategies they developed to justify their activities evolved in dialogue with more general discussions regarding new forms of discretionary consumption. By emphasizing the fragile legitimacy of the fine arts in the period, the book offers a fresh perspective on the broader trajectory of German literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one that allows us to view the entire period in terms of a dynamic unity, rather than simply as a series of literary trends and countertrends.

Many early novels were cosmopolitan books, read from London to Leipzig and beyond, available in nearly simultaneous translations in French, English, German, and other European languages. This book charts just one of the paths by which newness—in its avatars as fashion, novelties, and the novel—entered the European world in the decades around 1700. As readers across Europe snapped up novels, they domesticated the genre. Across borders, the novel lent readers everywhere a suggestion of sophistication, a familiarity with circumstances beyond their local ken. Into the eighteenth century, the modern German novel was not German at all; rather, it was French, as suggested by Germans' usage of the French word Roman to describe a wide variety of genres: pastoral romances, war and travel chronicles, heroic narratives, and courtly fictions. Carried in large part on the coattails of the Huguenot diaspora, these romans, nouvelles, amours secrets, histoires galantes, and histories scandaleuses shaped German literary culture to a previously unrecognized extent. The book contends that this French chapter in the German novel's history began to draw to a close only in the 1720s, more than sixty years after the word first migrated into German. Only gradually did the Roman go native; it remained laden with the baggage from its “French” origins even into the nineteenth century.

During his sojourn in England during the 1870s, a young C. P. Cavafy found himself enthralled by the aesthetic movement of cosmopolitan London. It was during these years that he encountered the canvases and personalities of Pre-Raphaelite painters, including Edward Burne-Jones and James McNeill Whistler, as well as works of aesthetic writers who were effecting a revolution in British literary culture and channeling influences from France that would gradually coalesce into an international decadent movement. This book returns to this critical period of Cavafy's life, showing the poet's creative indebtedness to British and French avant-garde aesthetes whose collective impact on his poetry proved to be profound. It offers a critical reappraisal of Cavafy's relation to Victorian aestheticism and French literary decadence. Foremost among the tropes of decadence that captivated Cavafy were the decline of imperial Rome, the rise of Christianity, and the lingering twilight of Byzantium. The influence of Walter Pater on Cavafy's view of classical and late-antique history was immense, inflected as it was with an unapologetic homoerotic aesthetic that Cavafy would adopt as his own, making Pater's imaginary portraits an important touchstone for his own historicizing poetry. Cavafy would move beyond Pater to explore a more openly homoerotic sensuality but he never quite abandoned this rich Victorian legacy, one that contributed greatly to his emergence as a global poet. The book concludes by considering Cavafy's current popularity as a gay poet and his curious relation to kitsch as manifest in his ongoing popularity via translation and visual media.

In 1812, Napoleon launched his fateful invasion of Russia. Five decades later, Leo Tolstoy published War and Peace, a fictional representation of the era that is one of the most celebrated novels in world literature. The novel contains a coherent (though much disputed) philosophy of history and portrays the history and military strategy of its time in a manner that offers lessons for the soldiers of today. To mark the two hundredth anniversary of the French invasion of Russia and acknowledge the importance of Tolstoy's novel for our historical memory of its central events, this book provides fresh readings of the novel. The chapters focus primarily on the novel's depictions of war and history, and the range of responses suggests that these remain inexhaustible topics of debate. The book aims to open fruitful new avenues of understanding War and Peace while providing a range of perspectives and interpretations without parallel in the vast literature on the novel.

Karl Philipp Moritz (d. 1793) was one of the most innovative writers of the late Enlightenment in Germany. A novelist, travel writer, editor, and teacher he is probably best known today for his autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) and for his treatises on aesthetics, foremost among them Über die bildendeNachahmung des Schönen (On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful) (1788). In this treatise, Moritz develops the concept of aesthetic autonomy, which became widely known after Goethe included a lengthy excerpt of it in his own Italian Journey (1816–17). It was one of the foundational texts of Weimar classicism, and it became pivotal for the development of early Romanticism. This book gives Moritz the credit he deserves as an important thinker beyond his contributions to aesthetic theory. It sees Moritz as an incisive early observer and theorist of modernity. Considering a wide range of Moritz’s work including his novels, his writings on mythology, prosody, and pedagogy, and his political philosophy and psychology, the book shows how Moritz’s thinking developed in response to the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment and paved the way for later social theorists to conceive of modern society as differentiated into multiple, competing value spheres.

“God only knows how many diverse, captivating impressions and thoughts evoked by these impressions … pass in a single day. If it were only possible to render them in such a way that I could easily read myself and that others could read me as I do.” Such was the desire of the young Tolstoy. Although he knew that this narrative utopia—turning the totality of his life into a book—would remain unfulfilled, Tolstoy would spend the rest of his life attempting to achieve it. This book is an account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience. The reader is guided through the voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings that Tolstoy produced from the 1850s until his death in 1910. For Tolstoy, inherent in the structure of the narrative form was a conception of life that accorded linear temporal order a predominant role, and this implied finitude. Tolstoy refused to accept that human life stopped with death and that the self was limited to what could be remembered and told. In short, Tolstoy's was a philosophical and religious quest, and he followed in the footsteps of many, from Plato and Augustine to Rousseau and Schopenhauer. In reconstructing Tolstoy's struggles, this book reflects on the problems of self and narrative as well as provides an intellectual and psychological biography of the writer.