Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature

Stanley Corngold

ISBN 10: 0804729409 / ISBN 13: 9780804729406

Published by Stanford University Press, 1998

About this Item

"Complex Pleasure" deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers: Lessing, Kant, Hslderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. Num Pages: 264 pages. BIC Classification: 2ACG; DSB. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational; (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 5182 x 3226 x 14. Weight in Grams: 308. . 1998. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780804729406

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804729409
• ISBN 13: 9780804729406
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers―Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition―fiction, poetry, critique―can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary.

The types of feeling treated in Complex Pleasure include wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Hölderlin's "swift conceptual grasp," in which "the tempo of the process of thought is stressed"; "artistic imagination," mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche ("On Moods") and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novel The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).

About the Author

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form and Borrowed Lives (with Irene Giersing.)