Author : Carsten Strathausen
Release : 2003-12-04
Genre : Literary Criticism
Kind : eBook
Book Rating : 238/5 ( reviews)
Book Synopsis The Look of Things by : Carsten Strathausen
Download or read book The Look of Things written by Carsten Strathausen. This book was released on 2003-12-04. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining the relationship between German poetry, philosophy, and visual media around 1900, Carsten Strathausen argues that the poetic works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan George focused on the visible gestalt of language as a means of competing aesthetically with the increasing popularity and "reality effect" of photography and film. Poetry around 1900 self-reflectively celebrated its own words as both transparent signs and material objects, Strathausen says. In Aestheticism, this means that language harbors the potential to literally present the things it signifies. Rather than simply describing or picturing the physical experience of looking, as critics have commonly maintained, modernist poetry claims to enable a more profound kind of perception that grants intuitive insights into the very texture of the natural world.