Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin

The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin

Powell, Larson

Hardcover

Series: Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture, Book 20

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1571133828
ISBN13: 9781571133823
Publisher: Camden House Inc
Published: May 1 2008
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.20
Height: 1.00 Width: 9.20 Depth: 6.20
Language: English
A bold new theoretical analysis of literary modernism and its conception of and relation to nature.

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 Döblin 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.

Larson Powell is Curator's Professor of Film Studies at University of Missouri, Kansas City.

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