A01=Erica Weitzman
Adalbert Stifter
Aesthetics
Alterity
Arno Holz
Author_Erica Weitzman
Category=DSB
Category=DSBF
Category=DSRC
Corporeality
Epistemology
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Expressionism
Franz Kafka
Gottfried Benn
Gustav Freytag
Humanism
Idealism
Materiality
Metaphysics
Mimesis
Naturalism
Nature
New Materialism
Obscenity
Phenomenology
Profanation
Realism
Representation
Sensuality
Shame
Theodor Fontane
Thing studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780810143166
- Weight: 375g
- Dimensions: 152 x 226mm
- Publication Date: 15 Feb 2021
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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At the Limit of the Obscene: German Realism and the Disgrace of Matter examines the fear of materiality in German-language realist and postrealist literature. The book argues that with German literature's turn in the mid-nineteenth century to the depiction of the profane, sensual world, anxiety emerged about the terms of that depiction-with consequences not only for the formal development of realist poetics but also for the conception of profane physical matter itself.
Erica Weitzman analyzes works by Adalbert Stifter, Gustav Freytag, Theodor Fontane, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn, and Franz Kafka to show how efforts to represent the material world in human terms led to an idea of the obscene as an excess of sensual appearance beyond human meaning: the very obverse of the anthropocentric worldview that realism both propagates and pushes to its crisis. At the Limit of the Obscene thus brings to light the troubled and troubling ontology underlying German realism, at the same time demonstrating how it shaped-and continues to shape-our ideas about materiality, alterity, perception, knowledge, representability, and the relationship of human beings to the nonhuman world.
Erica Weitzman is an assistant professor in the Department of German at Northwestern University. She is the author of Irony's Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition, also published by Northwestern University Press.
