Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture
Regular price
€64.99
Regular price
€78.99
Sale
Sale price
€64.99
20th century
A01=Andre Fischer
aesthetics
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Author_Andre Fischer
automatic-update
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DS
Category=DSB
Category=DSBH
Category=DSRC
conceptual art
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
film theory
German film
German literature
Hans Henny Jahnn
Hubert Fichte
installation art
Joseph Beuys
Language_English
modernism
myth
mythmaking
mythology
PA=Available
performance art
postwar literature
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
queer literature
softlaunch
Werner Herzog
Product details
- ISBN 9780810146686
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2024
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Debunking myths plays a crucial role in media literacy, but doing so can let us overlook why myths are created in the first place and why we need them. AndrÉ Fischer draws on key examples from German postwar culture, from novelists Hans Henny Jahnn and Hubert Fichte, to sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys, and filmmaker Werner Herzog, to show that myth is an indispensable human practice in times of crisis.
Against the background of the nineteenth-century visions of a new mythology and its ideological continuation in Nazism, new forms of mythmaking in the narrative, visual, and performative arts emerged as an aesthetic paradigm in postwar modernism. Boldly rewriting the cultural history of an era and setting in transitional, The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture counters the predominant narrative of an exclusively rational VergangenheitsbewÄltigung (“coming to terms with the past”). Far from being merely reactionary, the turn toward myth offered a dimension of existential orientation that had been neglected by other influential aesthetic paradigms of the postwar period. Fischer’s wide-ranging, transmedia account offers an inclusive perspective on myth beyond mere storytelling and instead develops mythopoesis as a formal strategy of modernism at large.
Against the background of the nineteenth-century visions of a new mythology and its ideological continuation in Nazism, new forms of mythmaking in the narrative, visual, and performative arts emerged as an aesthetic paradigm in postwar modernism. Boldly rewriting the cultural history of an era and setting in transitional, The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture counters the predominant narrative of an exclusively rational VergangenheitsbewÄltigung (“coming to terms with the past”). Far from being merely reactionary, the turn toward myth offered a dimension of existential orientation that had been neglected by other influential aesthetic paradigms of the postwar period. Fischer’s wide-ranging, transmedia account offers an inclusive perspective on myth beyond mere storytelling and instead develops mythopoesis as a formal strategy of modernism at large.
AndrÉ Fischer is an assistant professor of German at Washington University in St. Louis
