Format:
1 Online-Ressource (256 pages)
,
digital, PDF file(s)
ISBN:
9781571138071
Content:
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
Content:
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
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 02 Oct 2015)
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781571133823
Additional Edition:
Print version ISBN 9781571133823
Language:
English
Subjects:
German Studies
Keywords:
Rilke, Rainer Maria 1875-1926
;
Lyrik
;
Natur
;
Benn, Gottfried 1886-1956
;
Brecht, Bertolt 1898-1956
;
Döblin, Alfred 1878-1957
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