Eric Downing Livres

Focuses critical attention once again on the nature and process of reading, taking into account both current theory and historical investigations.

Examining literature and cultural theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this volume considers connections between photography, archaeology, and psychoanalysis and their effects on conceptions of the self and Bildung.

Downing s highly original, thorough, and rewarding book is certain to emerge as an indispensable critical reference-point for scholars and students in the areas of narrative theory, problems of realism, and 19th-century German prose. . . . A nearly ideal combination of intellectual scope, erudition, and originality. Thomas Pfau, Duke University To write an engaging and entertaining study of German or poetic realism that offers insightful and differentiated readings of the novellas of Stifter, Storm, Keller, C.F. Meyer, and Raabe through the lenses focused on repetition of narratology, Critical Theory, and psychoanalysis and, to a leser extent gender studies, is without a doubt a daunting endeavor. This study, with its keen analysis of the doubling within German realist texts, is equal to the task. . . . While this book is written to engage and challenge scholars of realism, the clarity of Downing s prose makes the textual twists and turns, and thus the study as a whole, equally accessible to non-specialists. German Studies Review"

This study explores three works in which the protagonist undertakes to fashion a literary artwork out of himself: Ovid's »Ars Amatoria«, Kierkegaard's »Diary of the Seducer«, and Thomas Mann's »Felix Krull«. For each work, particular attention is paid to the self-conscious interplay between the author's project of book-making and the character's project of self-making, as well as to the effect of changing notions of self-identity on the protagonist's attempt at life as literature. For »Felix Krull«, this includes a sustained analysis of Mann's incorporation and problematization of various Nietzschean models of aesthestics, reality, and self-identity. In Ovid and Kierkegaard, this study also considers a related project, the attempt to fashion a literary artwork out of another, namely out of a woman.