The Technological Unconscious In German Modernist Literature

Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. Powell's term "the Technological Unconscious" refers both to the intersection between psychoanalysis and theories of modernism and to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and -- especially -- poetry by Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Doblin from the years 1900 to 1945. In connection with these works, Powell analyzes the conceptions of subject and system in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist" theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other. Larson Powell is assistant professor of German at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

"Even after the end of modernism and postmodernism, the grandiose fantasies of artifice and self-reference that have informed so much modernist literature still resonate in the "social constructivism" of current literary and cultural theory: in the idea that we can perform or construct "identities" or social roles without external constraint, as if we had consumer choice of self. Larson Powell's book posits nature as a limit to such fantasies, redefining aesthetic modernity's conception of and relation to nature and therefore its relation to reality. He shows how nature, no longer the idealized, maternally coded Utopia of the Romantics, becomes the trace of specific political, sexual, and technological traumas. The book's four chapters center on the representation of nature in German prose and-especially-poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, and Alfred Doblin from the years 1900 to 1945, while making reference to other literatures as well." "Powell's term "the Technological Unconscious" refers to a point of intersection between psychoanalysis and social and scientific theories of modernism and also to the philosophical mediation between history and nature, a motif important from Kant to Adorno. Powell critiques the tendency toward jargon of an often merely rhetorical "theory," while continuing to develop the philosophical and conceptual inheritance of Continental traditions. He analyzes in connection with the works treated the conceptions of subject and system in the theories of Adorno, Luhmann, and Lacan and their relation to their complement, nature. The Technological Unconscious is thus an important polemical intervention both in the debates over interdisciplinarity and in those between eclectic "culturalist" theories such as New Historicism and postcolonialism on the one hand and systems theory and psychoanalysis on the other." --Book Jacket.

A prolific poet, art critic, essayist, and translator, Charles Baudelaire is best known for his volumes of verse (Les Fleurs du Mal [Flowers of Evil]) and prose poems (Le Spleen de Paris [Paris Spleen]). This volume explores his prose poems, which depict Paris during the Second Empire and offer compelling and fraught representations of urban expansion, social change, and modernity. Part 1, "Materials," surveys the valuable resources available for teaching Baudelaire, including editions and translations of his oeuvre, historical accounts of his life and writing, scholarly works, and online databases. In Part 2, "Approaches," experienced instructors present strategies for teaching critical debates on Baudelaire's prose poems, addressing topics such as translation theory, literary genre, alterity, poetics, narrative theory, and ethics as well as the shifting social, economic, and political terrain of the nineteenth century in France and beyond. The essays offer interdisciplinary connections and outline traditional and fresh approaches for teaching Baudelaire's prose poems in a wide range of classroom contexts.

Filmmaking in Germany and Austria has changed dramatically with digitalization and the use of video and the Internet. Introducing the work of filmmakers, this volume offers an assessments of the intent and effect of their productions, and describes overall trends.

Written in three weeks of creative inspiration, Rainer Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (1923) is well known for its enigmatic power and lyrical intensity. The essays in this volume forge a new path in illuminating the philosophical significance of this late masterpiece. Contributions illustrate the unique character and importance of the Sonnets, their philosophical import, as well as their significant connections to the Duino Elegies (completed in the same period). The volume features eight essays by philosophers, literary critics, and Rilke scholars, which approach a number of the central themes and motifs of the Sonnets as well as the significance of their formal and technical qualities. An introductory essay (co-authored by the editors) situates the book in the context of philosophical poetics, the reception of Rilke as a philosophical poet, and the place of the Sonnets in Rilke's oeuvre. Above all, this volume's premise is that an interdisciplinary approach to poetry and, more specifically, to Rilke's Sonnets, can facilitate crucial insights with the potential to expand the horizons of philosophy and criticism. Essays elucidate the relevance of the Sonnets to such wide-ranging topics as phenomenology and existentialism, hermeneutics and philosophy of language, philosophy of mythology, metaphysics, Modernist aesthetics, feminism, ecocriticism, animal ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

As German-language literature turned in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, a corresponding anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction—with consequences not only for realist poetics but also for the conception of the material world itself. At the Limit of the Obscene examines the roots and repercussions of this anxiety in German realist and postrealist literature. Through analyses of works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka, Erica Weitzman shows how German realism’s conflicted representations of the material world lead to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that German realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how its works continue to shape our ideas about representability, alterity, and the relationship of human beings to the non-human well into the present day.

Having studied philosophy at a time when its traditions were being seriously uprooted by the atrocities of World War II, Theodor Adorno had an enormous impact on thinking about aesthetics at a transitional historical moment when the philosophy of science and leftist politics were looking for new ground. Moreover, with his focus on the rise of commercial culture and its effects on identity-construction, Adorno can be said to have reinvigorated modernist concerns by introducing the prevailing terms in our contemporary versions of cultural politics and cultural studies. Understanding Adorno, Understanding Modernism traces Adorno's social and aesthetic ideas as they appear and reappear in his corpus. As per other volumes in the series, this book is divided into three parts. The first, “Adorno's Keywords,” is organized by the aesthetic terms around which Adorno's philosophy circulates. The second section is devoted to “Adorno and Aesthetics.” While Adorno's philosophical viewpoints influenced modernism's evolution into the 21st century, the history of modernist aesthetics also shaped his philosophical approaches. The third and final part, “Adorno's Constellations,” discusses how aesthetic form in Adorno's thinking underlies the terms of his social analysis.

Honorable Mention for the DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in Germanistik or Cultural Studies Biological Modernism identifies an intellectual current in the Weimar Republic that drew on biology, organicism, vitalism, and other discourses associated with living nature in order to redefine the human being for a modern, technological age. Contrary to the assumption that any turn toward the organic indicated a reactionary flight from modernity or a longing for wholeness, Carl Gelderloos shows that biology and other discourses of living nature offered a nuanced way of theorizing modernity rather than fleeing from it. Organic life, instead of representing a stabilizing sense of wholeness, by the 1920s had become a scientific, philosophical, and disciplinary problem. In their work, figures such as Alfred Döblin, Ernst Jünger, Helmuth Plessner, and August Sander interrogated the relationships between technology, nature, and the human and radically reconsidered the relationship between the disciplines as well as the epistemological and political consequences for defining the human being. Biological Modernism will be of interest to scholars of German literature and culture, literary modernism, photography, philosophical anthropology, twentieth-century intellectual history, the politics of culture, and the history of science.