Shadow Lines: Austrian Literature from Freud to Kafka

(Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria r...)

Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria reached levels of originality and excellence that have rarely been equalled before or since. Shadow Lines examines works by major novelists, dramatists, poets, and intellectuals of that extraordinary era—among them, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. Lorna Martens considers how each of these authors contributed to a decisive transformation in Austrian culture, involving a shift away from the dialectical syntheses of much nineteenth-century German thought and culture to potent, unresolvable dualisms of known and unknown—orderly and chaotic—features of human experience: consciousness and the unconscious, reason and the irrational, language and the inexpressible. In most of these writers, according to Martens, all that is knowable, reasonable, and orderly is grounded in that which is dark, irrational, chaotic. What Martens calls “the dark area” emerges variously “as the unconscious (Freud), the sexual drive (Freud, Schnitzler, Musil), the death instinct (Freud, Schnitzler), the dangerous chaos below the surface of things (Rilke), the inaccessible totality (von Hofmannsthal), or the unsayable (Mauthner, von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Wittgenstein).” The essential yet enigmatic relation between the known and the unknown leads to much that is unsettling—and strangely fascinating—in these writers’ works. A book that shrewdly relates the works of these authors to the intellectual and political turmoil of the times, Shadow Lines is a new critical appraisal of Austrian literature and intellectual culture at the dawn of the century. Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria reached levels of originality and excellence that have rarely been equalled before or since. Shadow Lines examines works by major novelists, dramatists, poets, and intellectuals of that extraordinary era—among them, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Franz Kafka. Lorna Martens considers how each of these authors contributed to a decisive transformation in Austrian culture, involving a shift away from the dialectical syntheses of much nineteenth-century German thought and culture to potent, unresolvable dualisms of known and unknown—orderly and chaotic—features of human experience: consciousness and the unconscious, reason and the irrational, language and the inexpressible. In most of these writers, according to Martens, all that is knowable, reasonable, and orderly is grounded in that which is dark, irrational, chaotic. What Martens calls “the dark area” emerges variously “as the unconscious (Freud), the sexual drive (Freud, Schnitzler, Musil), the death instinct (Freud, Schnitzler), the dangerous chaos below the surface of things (Rilke), the inaccessible totality (von Hofmannsthal), or the unsayable (Mauthner, von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Wittgenstein).” The essential yet enigmatic relation between the known and the unknown leads to much that is unsettling—and strangely fascinating—in these writers’ works. A book that shrewdly relates the works of these authors to the intellectual and political turmoil of the times, Shadow Lines is a new critical appraisal of Austrian literature and intellectual culture at the dawn of the century.

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1996

The Promised Land?: Feminist Writing in the German Democratic Republic

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2001

The Promise of Memory: Childhood Recollection and Its Objects in Literary Modernism

(Readers once believed in Proust’s madeleine and in Wordsw...)

Readers once believed in Proust’s madeleine and in Wordsworth’s recollections of his boyhood―but that was before literary culture began to defer to Freud’s questioning of adult memories of childhood. In this first sustained look at childhood memories as depicted in literature, Lorna Martens reveals how much we may have lost by turning our attention the other way. Her work opens a new perspective on early recollection―how it works, why it is valuable, and how shifts in our understanding are reflected in both scientific and literary writings. Science plays an important role in The Promise of Memory, which is squarely situated at the intersection of literature and psychology. Psychologists have made important discoveries about when childhood memories most often form, and what form they most often take. These findings resonate throughout the literary works of the three writers who are the focus of Martens’ book. Proust and Rilke, writing in the modernist period before Freudian theory penetrated literary culture, offer original answers to questions such as “Why do writers consider it important to remember childhood? What kinds of things do they remember? What do their memories tell us?” In Walter Benjamin, Martens finds a writer willing to grapple with Freud, and one whose writings on childhood capture that struggle. For all three authors, places and things figure prominently in the workings of memory. Connections between memory and materiality suggest new ways of understanding not just childhood recollection but also the artistic inclination, which draws on a childlike way of seeing: object-focused, imaginative, and emotionally intense.

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2011

The Diary Novel

(Although the diary novel is often regarded as a twentieth...)

Although the diary novel is often regarded as a twentieth-century genre due to its particular popularity in this century, the form actually has a long history that originates in the eighteenth century. The Diary Novel is the first book to trace that history, concentrating on French, German and English works with some attention given to Russian and Scandinavian traditions as well. Beginning with a discussion of the definition of the diary novel and some observations about genre study and criticism, Lorna Martens proceeds with interpretations of major diary novels by writers such as Defoe, Gide, Rilke, Frisch, Butor and Lessing. The Diary Novel includes sections on the influence of Richardson and the letter journal novel, the publication of the journaux intimes, psychological fiction, reliability of the narrator and the contemporary diary novel.

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