The technological unconscious in German modernist literature : nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin / Larson Powell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Powell, Larson, 1960- author.

Series:

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture.

Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

German poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

German poetry.

German literature--20th century--Themes, motives.

German literature.

Nature in literature.

Modernism (Aesthetics).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (256 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Suffolk : Boydell & Brewer, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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 Döblin 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.

Contents:

The limits of technocracy

Rilke's unnatural things: from the end of landscape to the Dinggedicht

Nature on stage: Gottfried Benn: beyond the aesthetics of shock?

The limits of violence: Döblin's colonial nature

Nature as paradox: Brecht's exile lyric.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-282-94698-6

9786612946981

1-57113-807-2

OCLC:

694361473