The German Epic in the Cold War: Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge - Softcover

Miller, Matthew D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810137321 ISBN 13: 9780810137325

Verlag: Northwestern University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Matthew Miller’s The German Epic in the Cold War explores the literary evolution of the modern epic in postwar German literature. Examining works by Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge, it illustrates imaginative artistic responses in German fiction to the physical and ideological division of post–World War II Germany.

Miller analyzes three ambitious German-language epics from the second half of the twentieth century: Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), Johnson’s Jahrestage (Anniversaries), and Kluge’s Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings). In them, he traces the epic’s unlikely reemergence after the catastrophes of World War II and the Shoah and its continuity across the historical watershed of 1989–91, defined by German unification and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Building on Franco Moretti’s codification of the literary form of the modern epic, Miller demonstrates the epic’s ability to understand the past; to come to terms with ethical, social, and political challenges in the second half of the twentieth century in German-speaking Europe and beyond; and to debate and envision possible futures.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MATTHEW D. MILLER is an associate professor of German at Colgate University.

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The German Epic in the Cold War

Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge

By Matthew D. Miller

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2018 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3732-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
List of Abbreviations, 
Introduction: A Genre for Cold Times, 
Chapter 1 Modern Epic Possibilities: Tasks and Techniques of a Genre, 
Chapter 2 Epic's Impossible Return: Peter Weiss's Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, 
Chapter 3 Time-Spaces of Epic Narration: Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage, 
Chapter 4 Epic Storytelling and Human Survival: Alexander Kluge's Chronik der Gefühle, 
Epilogue: Epic for the Twenty-First Century, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Modern Epic Possibilities

Tasks and Techniques of a Genre

From Blitzkriegen and flights no epic can emerge ... What genre could capture the collapse of our experience of time?

— Karl Schlögel, Die Mitte liegt ostwärts

Thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the world system as such.

— Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic

See Gesine Lisbeth? In telling a story one has to think of everything.

— Uwe Johnson, Jahrestage

Conceptualizing an Unlikely Genre

Novel, chronicle, encyclopedia, constellation, monument, counterstories, network: of the generic categories that might capture the innovations in narrative form advanced in Peter Weiss, Uwe Johnson, and Alexander Kluge's prose works, this study adopts "modern epic" as the organizing principle of its comparative investigation. The name of the genre itself has been regarded as something of a self-contradiction. Whether in Schlögel's remark cited above regarding epic's inability to capture the collapse of our experience of time in the twentieth century or in Lindner's warning, cited in the introduction, regarding postcatastrophic returns to "the power of epic memory" operative in the nineteenth-century novel, our association of epic with ancient or otherwise past and no longer viable modes of narration remains firm. Yet "modern epic" is not meant to beg any questions here. While literary criticism and scholarship have periodically been beset by works outstripping conventional taxonomies and the expectations ingrained by them, generic categories must be derived from actual artistic products. A long-standing central tenet of German aesthetic theory holds that the form and content (including, as "material," previously developed aesthetic forms, AT 35/59) of any artistic production unfold in dialectical interrelation. In lockstep with this precept, Weiss's Ästhetik, Johnson's Jahrestage, and Kluge's Chronik remobilize characteristic features of the epic and advance formal innovations of the genre to generate creative and realistic forms of narration appropriate to historically specific contexts and suggestive of the epic imagination's future purchase. Modern epic constitutes a common denominator for the comparative evaluation of their accomplishments not simply due to the general resonance which "epic" (usually as the adjective episch) still holds in German as an attribute of all literary prose (in contrast to dramatic or lyrical genres). That would do little to limit the field. Rather, the reconstruction of the literary-aesthetic and theoretical discourse on the concept of modern epic and what such a genre can entail enables us to distinguish it from other narrative modes. The following pages thus lay the theoretical groundwork for the analyses elaborated in the study's main chapters by reviewing and intervening in this discourse, highlighting interconnected features of Weiss, Johnson, and Kluge's projects as instantiations of the modern epic, and outlining an arch of the genre's possibilities that the synoptic treatment of their works suggests.

Modern epic is a literary-historical category developed by the comparatist Franco Moretti. In his 1996 study named after the genre, originally published in Italian as Opere Mondo, Moretti focuses on challenges pertaining to the literary narration of increasingly complex modern social conditions from Goethe's Faust through modernism to Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Tracing the evolution of the modern epic while accounting for the emergence and different uses of specific literary techniques, Moretti delivers a testament to the undiminished power of prose's formally innovative possibilities against claims regarding the medium's obsolescence. His study operates against the backdrop of foregoing theorizations of literary forms vis-à-vis their historical moments and themes. While Moretti's reliance on a Darwinian model of evolution only loosely parallels the emphasis in German aesthetics on form and content's dialectical relationship, his advocacy of the modern epic returns us to a conceptual point of departure in Hegel's Aesthetics, parts of which Moretti cites at the outset of his study:

The epic [Hegel lectured] ... acquires as its object the occurrence of an action which in the whole breadth of its circumstances and relations must gain access to our contemplation as a rich event connected with the total world of a nation and epoch [in sich totalen Welt einer Nation und Zeit]. ... This whole [Totalität] comprises both the religious consciousness, springing from all the depths of the human spirit, and also concrete existence, political and domestic life right down to the details of external existence, human needs and means for their satisfaction; and epic animates this whole by developing it in close contact with individuals, because what is universal and substantive enters poetry only as the living presence of the spirit.

Against the background of Hegel's criteria, which were oriented to the epic of antiquity, Moretti unravels modern epic responses to the genre's putatively impossible task: the narration of totality under the conditions of modernity. Because what Hegel called the "living presence of the spirit" no longer encompassed universality, substance, and individuals' lives in any straightforward relation, the prospects for encapsulating modernity in some totalizing poetic form seemed bleak (ME 12ff.). On Hegel's account, the epic of yore had benefited from the allegedly poetic content of a bygone age (poetischer Weltzustand) in which individual heroic actions — most curiously in the context of war — could be holistically and concretely narrated in connection with the spiritual unity of a people (Volksgeist). The genre of the novel, by contrast, which Hegel treated derivatively as the "modern bourgeois epic" (moderne bürgerliche Epopöe), takes shape against the background of a whole world (totalen Welt) that is "already prosaically ordered" in a way "diametrically opposed to the requirements which we found irremissible for genuine epic." Although Hegel would not have put it this way, such "prosaic ordering" would include the abstraction and reification in modern social relations deemed resistant to mediation in and by artistic semblance, at least as Hegel imagined it: "Art," he had famously pronounced in the introduction to his lectures, "considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past." The encyclopedic comprehension of art Hegel delivered in his Aesthetics situated its object of study within a larger...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Northwestern University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810137321
• ISBN 13: 9780810137325
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 237
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei