Geomorphic Poetics: Mountainous Transformations from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Elfriede Jelinek

Abstract

Geomorphic Poetics argues that depictions of material changes in German literature encode changes in narrative form. It explores instances of material and textual metamorphosis set in a mountainous landscape. The project unfolds as a series of case studies that examine the poetic forms that arise when writers confront the resilient but often-dynamic materiality of the mountains' liminal and extreme terrain. Spanning German texts from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth-century, this dissertation affirms the link between literature and the environment--not as a stable relation but as a fraught interaction between shifting forms.

From the question of figuration posed by a petrified miner in E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun," (1819) to the metamorphosis of inanimate matter in Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995), this project demonstrates the aesthetic transformations that arise in response to material changes. These texts depict the mountains as a site at which the imaginary and the real conjoin; they therefore render visible the porousness of boundaries. This project reveals how the dissolution of boundaries--between animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, individual and collective--generates new literary forms. By uncovering the significance of the material and poetological changes in modern German prose, this project brings together literary analysis, aesthetic theory, and philosophical inquiry.