NARRATIVES OF ECSTACY: ROMANTIC TEMPORALITY IN MODERN GERMAN POETRY

Rolleston, James

ISBN 10: 081431841X / ISBN 13: 9780814318416

Published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1987

About this Item

Not an ex-library copy. No remainder marks. Most books shipped within 24 hours. All books mailed with Delivery Confirmation. Previous owner's signature at the top of the front fly-leaf. Very good + condition. ; 8vo.; 243 pages.

Seller Inventory # 6717

Bibliographic Details

• Title: NARRATIVES OF ECSTACY: ROMANTIC TEMPORALITY IN MODERN GERMAN POETRY
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press, Detroit
• Publication Date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081431841X
• ISBN 13: 9780814318416
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition
• Condition: Very Good+
• Seller catalogs:
  • 443 (May, 2012)

About this title

Synopsis

Guided by an exploration of Romantic thinking about time, history, and the function of literature, James Rolleston examines fifteen texts from the modern German poetic tradition as they recount the eruption of "ecstasy" into the historic moment. As a premise, he employs a series of textual fragments from Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis which contain "an encyclopedia, a comprehensive language for thinking and feeling in the modern age."

For Rolleston, two narratives are in process simultaneously in the modern German lyric. The first is the "contingent narrative," wherein the poem relates its events as if they are happening unpredictably, erupting unexpectedly, one time only, their meaning opaque. The second, in radical tension with the first, is the "interpretive narrative," which is the poet's indispensable but unstable structuring of the events into a linguistic universal. From these two narratives, a third emerges, the "historical narrative." Weaving in and out of the first two, it contributes the experience and the interpretation of ecstasy to history, compelling "a shift in the horizon of 'laws' which at any given historical moment seem fixed."

Examining poems from Eichendorff to Meckel, Rolleston traces the hesitant affirmation, then the disintegration of the idea of Bildung, and, finally, the last-ditch stand of Expressionists and post-Expressionists to shatter the stagnant temporality of the everyday. As a result, Narratives of Ecstasy traces the fate, seen in the perspective of the German lyric, of belief in "the privileged moment."

About the Author

James Rolleston obtained his Ph.D. from Yale University. Currently, he is associate professor in the Department of German and Director of Graduate Studies, Literature Program, at Duke University. In addition to articles on modern German poetry, he is the author of Rilke in Transition and Kafka's Narrative Theater.