Agonistic Reading: Kleist's Aesthetics of Temptation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Kleist's "On the Marionette Theatre" and the Poetics of the Unrepresentable in "Penthesilea"
Cossack in Jamaica, Ukraine and the Antipodes: Essay in Honor of Marko Pavlyshyn, 2020
In this essay, I read Kleist's essay "On the Marionette Theatre" (1810) as a manifesto of a new aesthetics, grounded in a non-Euclidean conception of human subjectivity, issue from an unconscious that is both unrepresentable and the source of all representation. I read Kleist's lyrical drama through this aesthetic text as well as through two theoretical concepts which are historically different but in my view related: Kant's "sublime" and Lacan's "real". What emerges from the readings of these diverse theoretical texts/concepts is a dialectic of the sublime, the paradox and the non-Euclidean subject of the unconscious, which are demonstrated through a structural analysis of the play to be elements of Kleist's innovative poetics.
Kleist's On the Marionette Theatre and the Poetics of Penthesilea
Cossacks in Jamaica, Ukraine at the Antipodes. Essays in Honor of Marko Pavlyshyn, ed. Alessandro Achilli, Serhy Yekelchyk, and Dmytro Yesypenko (Boston: Academic Studies Press), pp. 72-87. , 2020
This paper examines the poetics of Kleist's lyrical drama "Penthesilea" through a reading of Kleist's essay "On the Marionette Theatre".
Renegotiating the Body of the Text: Mechthild Von Magdeburg’s Terminology of the Sublime
Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Das fliessende Licht der Gottheit is a text that celebrates the female body and imbues it with narrative, semiotic, and spiritual significance. In contrast to arguments that the narrative goal of Mechthild’s book is to overcome physicality in order to allow a full embrace of spirituality, the article posits that the body is itself a narrative device that exposes a pleasant tension between the physical and the spiritual without prioritizing one over the other. Mechthild’s visions of the Virgin Mary as exuding a sensual and multidirectional femininity that also represents a powerful spiritual force, particularly with respect to the breast and breast-feeding, evidences this positive valuation of the body as well as subverts contemporary perceptions of female flesh and perviousness. The article also explores the complex relationship between the allegorized Body and Soul in Book I, as well as the Kristevan processes of abjection, jouissance, and sublimation as they apply to the text, ultimately considering the rewards to be gained through the very process of reading encouraged by Mechthild’s coded text and her sublimation of language itself.
Postclassicism, Disturbed Philology and Kleist’s Fencing Bear
Oxford German Studies, 2018
This article reads Kleist’s narrative dialogue essay ‘Über das Marionettentheater’ (1810) as a text that is instructive for scholars examining the culture of classical education and the disciplines of knowing, interpreting and reading around 1800. This means mobilizing Kleist as a disruptive guide to emblematic tropes of disciplinary enquiry and pedagogy, especially those glossed on the Platonic desire for knowledge. What Földényi called a drama of ‘disturbed erotics’ is thus also a drama of ‘disturbed philology’. It is, at the same time, a reminder that the structures of artistic and literary classicism around 1800 are closely bound up with the structures of classical knowledge and its increasingly professionalized practices, especially in light of their emphasis on teaching, understanding and ‘Bildung’.
This volume aims to bring discussions of literary and artistic modernist expressions to bear on the current debates about form and formlessness within German Studies from a genuinely interdisciplinary perspective. Such discussions reflect the prevailing contemporary concern of how the evaluation of the 'other,'whether considered as a living being or a mere object-, tells us more about the evaluator's cultural biases, than about that which is being evaluated. It is common knowledge that the human body's posture, orientation, and motions are laden with meanings that provide an account of an individual's "life as a social creature" (10); when it comes to giving an appropriate voice to the bodily expressions of 'other' within the context of German modernism, however, far more is required than to simply adopt a distanced stance, or a critical outlook based on a purely visual perception. 1 As the author points out in the volume's introduction, modernists grant an appropriate voice to their chosen bodily expressions insofar as they adopt a form of understanding which, rather than appealing to human vision, counters gravity itself (3-13). As argued in the wake of Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1930), this countercurrent action is explored in the study through the modernist reception of Arthur Schopenhauer's aesthetics, Auguste Rodin's sculptures, German empathy aesthetics, Paul Klee's lectures, and, last but not least, Franz Kafka's narrative and Alfred Döblin's literary masterpiece. The study focuses on the role played throughout modernity by the challenging relationships between human mental faculties and the individual's own body, as 1 The German word Form is borrowed both from the Latin forma, i. e. 'form, figure, shape,' which in turn is borrowed from the Greek morphê (μορφή), i. e. 'form, beautiful form,' and refers to the mold and the shape of the resulting object, as well as eidos (εἶδος), meaning 'species.' Cf.