19th Century German Literature
clerk...@my-dejanews.com
as possible on a writer called Adalbert Stifter and his aesthetic
programme-asap- for an essay i'm in the middle of right now. any info on this
would be really good - thanks.
-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==----------
http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own
MKlei...@aol.com
clerk...@my-dejanews.com wrote:
> I'm a German student at the uni of Edinburgh and am looking for as much info
> as possible on a writer called Adalbert Stifter and his aesthetic
> programme-asap- for an essay i'm in the middle of right now. any info on this
> would be really good - thanks.
Thingy number one is that Stifter was Austrian (from the border of Bohemia)
and became a Vienna writer. Since there are not many Austrian writers of note
in this era, his Austrianness could be a way into your essay.
Stifter wanted originally to be a landscape painter.
I don't know Stifter that well (I read Wild Flowers, and I think Nachsommer
is the important one, which i don't know) but I think you could make
something of a)looking at the influence of German Sturm and Drangers like
Jean Paul and b) looking at the decorative arts of his Vienna. There is
something going on about domesticating romaticized nature (and romanticism):
painting it on a door or a mirror: commodifying it: bringing it inside where
it can be appreciated in safety, and venturing out into it on long walks
which begin and end in apartments in town that have fake vegetation all over
the moulding. It is an interesting response, I think, to the city vs. country
problem with which the genteel folk of a metropolis like Vienna, the seat of
a patchwork empire at the gate to the east, would be concerned. The
prettified, health-giving, populous nearby Wienerwald, and not the primal
barbarian Black Forest, is Stifter's nature. One of things on does from the
suburbs is look back at the town (looks nice from there, one can get it all
in at a glance) so that when one returns to the town (one never just keeps
walking: no romantic hermit-exile impulse, no exile in disgust at the corrupt
city, just a daytrip, a little air, sunlight) one knows where one is
(visually, spiritually). The Viennese intellectual's nature walk and
landscape-mural-on-a-mirror (which Stifter's prose resembles) are ways,
perhaps, of diffusing an increasingly dangerous antagonism between the site
of production and consumption (Vienna is not primarily an industrial capital
at this point, but still, dominantly, a place where money flows into from the
outlying countryside, a hub of commerce, leisure, government. But the
industrial aspect is now visible and about to explode.) The idea is to
establish a harmony and interchange between the country and the city, enacted
in the consciousness of the sensitive intellectual who doesn't ally himself
with one or the other but smoothly moves between them. His little circuits
mirror something like the circuits of a wheelbarrow -- out empty (looking for
some spiritual raw stuff), back, full of raw spirituality to be
processed/refined into city-product, such as books or music.