Stations of the Divided Subject: Contestation and Ideological Legitimation in German Bourgeois Literature, 1770-1914

ISBN-13: 9780804724029 / Angielski / Twarda / 1995 / 408 str.

Richard T. Gray

Opis

The socio-history of German bourgeois literature from 1970 to 1914, traces the sociogenesis of bourgeois divided subjectivity by examining the dialectic of utopian contestation and ideological legitimation in six canonical literary texts: Lessing's Emilia Galotti, Schiller's The Robbers, Heine's Ideas - The Book Le Grand, Buchner's Woyzech, Hofmannsthal's Tale of the Cavalry, and Kafka's The Judgement. Gray asserts that the emancipatory struggle of middle-class literati in Germany was directed not so much against an external class oppressor as it was against the intra-ideological coercion inherent in bourgeois socio-political and economic practice. The book's thesis is that aesthetic innovation in German bourgeois literature was shaped by the simultaneous accommodation with adn rebellion against bourgeois instrumentalized reason on the part of the literary intelligentsia.