Figures of natality : reading the political in the age of Goethe / Joseph D. O'Neil.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

O'Neil, Joseph D., author.

Series:

New directions in German studies ; v. 17.

New directions in German studies ; v. 17

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Birth (Philosophy) in literature.

German literature--19th century--History and criticism.

German literature.

Politics and literature--Germany--History--18th century.

Politics and literature.

Politics and literature--Germany--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (321 pages).

Place of Publication:

New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Summary:

"Figures of Natality reads metaphors and narratives of birth in the age of Goethe (1770-1832) as indicators of the new, the unexpected, and the revolutionary. Using Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, Joseph O'Neil argues that Goethe, Schiller, and Kleist see birth as challenging paradigms of Romanticism as well as of Enlightenment, resisting the assimilation of the political to economics, science, or morality. They choose instead to preserve the conflicts and tensions at the heart of social, political, and poetic revolutions. In a historical reading, these tensions evolve from the idea of revolution as Arendt reads it in British North America to the social and economic questions that shape the French Revolution and from there to the question of the German nation. Alongside this geopolitical evolution, the ways of representing the political change, too, moving from the new as revolutionary eruption to economic metaphors of birth. More pressing still is the question of revolutionary subjectivity and political agency, and Goethe, Kleist, and Schiller have an answer that is remarkably close to that of Walter Benjamin, as that "secret index" through which each past age is "pointed toward redemption." Figures of Natality uncovers this index at the heart of scenes and products of birth in the age of Goethe."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

"Examines the work of Goethe, Kleist, and Schiller in the light of Hannah Arendt's concept of natality"--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Chapter 1: Lyric Births: Poetic Revolution and Maieutic Technique

Chapter 2: Genre, Generation, and the Retreat of the Political

Chapter 3: Ghostly Births: The Specter of Romanticism and the Maieutics of the Medium

Chapter 4: "Not as in a mirror": Wilhelm Meister and the Haunting of Sovereignty

Chapter 5: Kleist's Machiavellian Mothers: Institution, Relation, Distribution

Conclusion: Split Summits and Bifurcated Maieutics: The Political Difference and the Future of Democracy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781501315053

1501315056

9781501315046

1501315048

OCLC:

963359051