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The Look of Things

Poetry and Vision around 1900

Carsten Strathausen

Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures
Published: 12/2003
Pages: 344
Subject: Literary Criticism | University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807863237

DESCRIPTION

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 Stephan 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.

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