Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature
Regular price
€92.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=Larson Powell
Aesthetic modernity
Author_Larson Powell
Benn
Brecht
Category=DSBH
Doblin
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
German literature
Interdisciplinarity
Modernism
Nature
Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Rilke
Product details
- ISBN 9781571133823
- Weight: 542g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2008
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A bold new theoretical analysis of literary modernism and its conception of and relation to nature.
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 Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City.
