| View Larger Image | The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Doeblin (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) | Hardcoverby Larson Powell (Author)
| List Price: | $65.00 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Hardcover | | Publisher: | Camden House | | Page Count: | 264 Pages | | Publication Date: | May 01, 2008 | | Sales Rank: | 2,905,539nd |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
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 Doeblin 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. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 1 review)
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Beautifully Creative! by Alexandra Ottaway  5 Stars
May 07, 2009
So far I have only read the intro. I simply cannot do the book justice here.
It is a culminating achievement in this genius or near-genius man's life. A
writer like this, said one of his teachers, only comes a long once
every ten years. The intro fulfills the writer's promise quite
brilliantly
and is vibrantly fertile. It's difficult, so I will have to get back to
you when I read the whole book or at least half.
It requires time, and rewards the time spent.
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