Catriona MacLeod (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781526125798
- eISBN:
- 9781526141965
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9781526125798.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön essay of 1766 has long been understood as a pivotal moment in the demarcation of the spatializing properties of the plastic arts versus the temporal or narrative ...
More
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön essay of 1766 has long been understood as a pivotal moment in the demarcation of the spatializing properties of the plastic arts versus the temporal or narrative properties of literature. This chapter examines the long afterlife of this essay as it reappears as a discursive ‘foreign body’ (akin to and implicating ekphrasis) within a number of novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Going beyond strong critical readings of ekphrases as hostile stand-offs between text and image, however, my analysis of works such as Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787) and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), will show how, in case of Heinse, the ventriloquizing of Lessing leads to a dynamic novel that is nevertheless saturated with ekphrastic description. Stifter’s novel allows ekphrasis to spread out from its centre creating an experimentally sclerotic narrative. These hauntings by Lessing reveal not only the entanglement of the modern novel with theories and histories of representation but also its observational stance on its own and the reader’s mediation.Less
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön essay of 1766 has long been understood as a pivotal moment in the demarcation of the spatializing properties of the plastic arts versus the temporal or narrative properties of literature. This chapter examines the long afterlife of this essay as it reappears as a discursive ‘foreign body’ (akin to and implicating ekphrasis) within a number of novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Going beyond strong critical readings of ekphrases as hostile stand-offs between text and image, however, my analysis of works such as Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787) and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857), will show how, in case of Heinse, the ventriloquizing of Lessing leads to a dynamic novel that is nevertheless saturated with ekphrastic description. Stifter’s novel allows ekphrasis to spread out from its centre creating an experimentally sclerotic narrative. These hauntings by Lessing reveal not only the entanglement of the modern novel with theories and histories of representation but also its observational stance on its own and the reader’s mediation.
Laurence A. Rickels
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816675951
- eISBN:
- 9781452947167
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816675951.001.0001
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
This book is the first volume in the “unmourning” trilogy. Here, the text studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, ...
More
This book is the first volume in the “unmourning” trilogy. Here, the text studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, Heinse, Artaud, Keller, Stifter, Kafka, and Kraus. The book maintains that we must shift the way we read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to go beyond traditional Oedipal structures. The book argues that the idea of the crypt has had a surprisingly potent influence on psychoanalysis, and it shows how society’s disturbed relationship with death and dying, our inability to let go of loved ones, has resulted in technology to form more and more crypts for the dead by preserving them—both physically and psychologically—in new ways.Less
This book is the first volume in the “unmourning” trilogy. Here, the text studies mourning and melancholia within and around psychoanalysis, analyzing the writings of such thinkers as Freud, Nietzsche, Lessing, Heinse, Artaud, Keller, Stifter, Kafka, and Kraus. The book maintains that we must shift the way we read literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis to go beyond traditional Oedipal structures. The book argues that the idea of the crypt has had a surprisingly potent influence on psychoanalysis, and it shows how society’s disturbed relationship with death and dying, our inability to let go of loved ones, has resulted in technology to form more and more crypts for the dead by preserving them—both physically and psychologically—in new ways.
Laurence A. Rickels
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816675951
- eISBN:
- 9781452947167
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816675951.003.0004
- Subject:
- Psychology, Social Psychology
This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Heinse, a popular writer who, in his own lifetime, became the widow of his own reputation and acclaim. Heinse’s conception of the arts can thus only begin to be ...
More
This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Heinse, a popular writer who, in his own lifetime, became the widow of his own reputation and acclaim. Heinse’s conception of the arts can thus only begin to be received and find acknowledgement when the two German heralds of mass media culture, Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria, come to read Heinse with great respect and interest. In the midst of everything good and beautiful, Heinse always evokes and privileges das Nackende, which covers, up front, nakedness as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Although the embodiment of das Nackende is hailed by Heinse as the highest degree of pleasure successfully attained and transmitted by painting and sculpture, it also doubles as the measure of his despair.Less
This chapter focuses on Wilhelm Heinse, a popular writer who, in his own lifetime, became the widow of his own reputation and acclaim. Heinse’s conception of the arts can thus only begin to be received and find acknowledgement when the two German heralds of mass media culture, Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria, come to read Heinse with great respect and interest. In the midst of everything good and beautiful, Heinse always evokes and privileges das Nackende, which covers, up front, nakedness as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Although the embodiment of das Nackende is hailed by Heinse as the highest degree of pleasure successfully attained and transmitted by painting and sculpture, it also doubles as the measure of his despair.
Mark Evan Bonds
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- June 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199343638
- eISBN:
- 9780199373437
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199343638.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
By the turn of the nineteenth century there was a growing conviction that purely instrumental music, independent of any text, had the capacity to disclose truths about the nature of the universe in ...
More
By the turn of the nineteenth century there was a growing conviction that purely instrumental music, independent of any text, had the capacity to disclose truths about the nature of the universe in ways that words could not. From this perspective, the greatest composers were in effect oracles, intermediaries between the divine and the human. Music’s greatest value, in this scheme of thought, is formative, in that it helps us perceive the world in ways we otherwise would not. Changing attitudes toward the nature of language itself helped foster this outlook.Less
By the turn of the nineteenth century there was a growing conviction that purely instrumental music, independent of any text, had the capacity to disclose truths about the nature of the universe in ways that words could not. From this perspective, the greatest composers were in effect oracles, intermediaries between the divine and the human. Music’s greatest value, in this scheme of thought, is formative, in that it helps us perceive the world in ways we otherwise would not. Changing attitudes toward the nature of language itself helped foster this outlook.
