Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé

ISBN-13: 9781628920178 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 176 str.

Gisela Brinker-Gabler

Opis

Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salome's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations o fsome of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salome's contributions to contemporar ydiscourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salome's historical, social, and intellectual contexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson, and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salome -- committed as she was to the"double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing -- refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salome offered an image epistemology or"aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.

Recenzje

Proceeding from its lucid analysis of relatively known territory in Andreas-Salomé criticism-the 'Human Being as Woman' essay - to the less discussed Rilke texts, Brinker-Gabler's Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé opens new vistas and insights on Andreas-Salome's surprisingly multidisciplinary writings and thought. Fascinating throughout is the kaleidoscope of links that integrate Andreas-Salomé's developments to a broad historical range of influences and echoes, likewise preceding from the known - Nietzsche, Freud - to the new, fostering new insights on this author's range and contexts: back to Spinoza, Baroque emblems, Leibniz,and Darwin; forward to Irigaray, Kristeva, and Benjamin. Theoretically dense yet lucid, Image in Outline is a welcome new pillar in recent decades' discourse on Andreas-Salomé's contribution to modern cultural and literary thought at the turn of the twentieth century. Raleigh Whitinger, Professor of German, University of Alberta, Canada

Spis treści

IntroductionChapter One: Umriss--B(u)ilding Woman or Sexual DifferenceChapter Two: Andreas-Salomé's AestheticsChapter Three: Icon: B(u)ilding Russia or Cultural DifferenceChapter Four: Nachtrauer: B(u)ilding Rilke or Modern CreativityChapter Five: (Un)doing Modern Thought BibliographyIndex

O autorze

Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. She has previously taught at the University of Cologne (Germany), the University of Essen (Germany), and the University of Florida (USA). She is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1978, 5th revised and extended edition 2007) and Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (1996).