Transports of imagination: poetry and the rehabilitation of experience, 1830–1860
Date
2021-08
Author
Advisors
Trop, Gabriel
Downing, Eric
Engelstein, Stefani
Weiler, Christina
Prica, Aleksandra
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Abstract
This dissertation examines how poets of the German late romantic and restoration periods
between 1830 and 1860 disrupt the systematizing drive of technological, cultural,
and industrial advancements during the nineteenth century in Germany by establishing
connections with the past: both a large-scale geological past and discrete historical
moments. My dissertation focuses on the lyric works of Joseph von Eichendorff, Annette
von Droste-Hülshoff, and Eduard Mörike. Often read as nostalgic, quietist, or political
conservatives, I argue that their works enact in their readers an experiential, temporal
expansion in contact with modes of "pastness" that can in turn serve as a normative
standpoint of critique and explore alternative forms of experience. The first chapter
examines how Eichendorff’s transformative poetic practice that at once emphasizes
the disruptive and connective potential of acts of "transcription." Transcription
involves writing that crosses boundaries: from nature to text (in lyric); from life
to text (in autobiography); or from text to text (in translation). In these different
domains, I show how Eichendorff' creates texts that at once transcend the life and
context of their creator and bear his unmistakable character. The second chapter locates
in Droste-Hülshoff’s lyric works what I call uncanny animation, an imaginative strangeness
that repurposes the contemporaneous technical advancements of the daguerreotype and
the railway in order to disrupt their respective logics of reproducibility and temporal
acceleration. In her lyric works, Droste-Hülshoff disrupts the tight fit between
subject and technology to reincorporate the reader into a more imaginatively expansive
world. She performs an analogous operation in lyric works that focus on more abject
aspects of nature—dust, earth, and bones, for example—which are animated in order
to challenge dominant patterns of intelligibility. In the final chapter, I show how
Mörike mobilizes play as an aesthetic operation responding to the temporally inflected
traumas of modernity that prioritize the present's relentless drive to produce a future.
I argue that Mörike develops a concept of poetic play with forms in which the past
is conserved—such as the fossil and the elegy—to loosen potentially constraining frameworks
of time, space, and genre associated with industrialization and modernization.
Type
DissertationDepartment
German StudiesPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/23587Citation
Dawson, Martin (2021). Transports of imagination: poetry and the rehabilitation of experience, 1830–1860.
Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/23587.Collections
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