Writing the Mountains - (New Directions in German Studies) by Jens Klenner (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Writing the Mountains reveals how landscape and discourses of environmental formation impress themselves on the literary imagination and argues that mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate new aesthetic and narrative forms. Through close readings of several canonical works by German, Austrian, and Swiss writers in which the mountains are depicted as unknowable, labyrinthine, or mercurial, Klenner uncovers the surprising transformations that landscape and the material environment can enact on the subjects within a story and how that story is told. Writing the Mountains claims that the environment's mutability in fact demands a poetics that can account for shifting forms"--

Book Synopsis

Writing the Mountains reconsiders the role of mountains in German language fiction from 1800 to the present and argues that in a range of texts, from E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Die Bergwerke zu Falun" (1819) to Elfriede Jelinek's Die Kinder der Toten (1995) and beyond, mountains serve as dynamic spaces of material change that generate aesthetic and narrative innovation. In contrast to dominant critical approaches to the Alpine landscape in literature, in which mountain ranges often features as passive settings, or which trace the influence of geographical and geological sciences in literary productions, this study argues for the dynamic role in literature of presumably rigid mineral structures.

In German-language fiction after 1800, the counter-intuitive topology of rocky mountain ranges and unfathomable subterranean depths of the Alpine imaginary functions as a space of exception which appears to reconfirm and radically challenge the foundations of Enlightenment thought. Writing the Mountains reads the mountain range as a rigid yet permeable liminal space. Within this zone, semiotic orders are unsettled, as is the division between organic and inorganic, between the human and the other.

About the Author

Jens Klenner is Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, USA, and a Fellow of the German Studies Association. He has written extensively on German studies and philosophy, with one of his most recent works being the edited journal, Sprache und Rache (2019, co-edited with Juliane Prade-Weiss).