- ホーム
- > 洋書
- > 英文書
- > Literary Criticism
Full Description
Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun" (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which trace the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, this study argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures.
In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and the other.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation
1. Mountains Transformed—Towards an Alpine Aesthetic
1779—No Human Eye Could Do it Justice
Mountains at Rest? Kant and the Sublime
Georg Simmel and The Resistance of Mountains
Shifting Forms
2. Figures from Mines—E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun"
1720—Summer
Source Material
An Aesthetic Existence
A Task for Poets
An Empty Cipher
Inversion, Transformations, Transitions
3. Lost in the Mountains—Perspective and Displacement in Georg Büchner's Lenz
Arrivals
Windows to the World
Return to the Mountains
A Lethal Gaze
Medusa in the Mountains
4. Folded Mountains—Paul Celan's "Gespräch im Gebirg"
Mountains Vanished
August 1959—Reading Leibniz
Leaving for the Mountains
Wordscapes
The Folded Eye
5. Liquid Mountains—Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten
Mountain Graves
Historical Matters
Into the Mountains
Metamorphoses—Die Murie. Die Furie
Coda
Mountains Immaterial
Bibliography
Index
