Aesthetic Anxiety: Uncanny Symptoms in German Literature and Culture (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, 141)

__Aesthetic Anxiety__ analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity. Cover 1 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Acknowledgments 6 Table of Contents 7 Preface 8 Chapter 1 Aesthetic Anxiety and the Uncanny 19 Freud on the Acropolis 19 The Uncanny Beyond Repetition and the Return of the Repressed 30 Chapter 2 The Uncanny Before Freud: Psychological and Philosophical Aspects 45 Uncanny Anxiety and Sublime Awe 45 Philosophical Psychology, Mental Physicalism, and the Pre-Freudian Unconscious 55 Estranged Knowledge: “Anxious” Texts by Kant and Schelling 60 Chapter 3 Beautiful Breakdowns: Uncanny Symptoms and the Aestheticization of Illness 92 Magnetism as an Aesthetic and Scientific Practice in the Early Nineteenth Century 92 The Case Studies of Moritz and Schlegel 101 Chapter 4 Conspiracy Theories: The Melancholy and Manipulated Male Subject 139 The Curse of Enthusiasm 139 Male Hysteria and the Uncanny in Tieck and Schiller 147 Chapter 5 Too Much Memory: Uncanny Love 180 The Anxious Revolution Continues 180 Disturbers of Love: Uncanny Displacement in Kleist and Hoffmann 183 Uncanny Love and the Aesthetics of Healing in Lang and Schnitzler 209 Chapter 6 Conclusion: Childish Anxiety, Wish, Belief 229 Bibliography 237 "Aesthetic Anxiety analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity."--Publisher's website Annotation. "Aesthetic Anxiety "analyzes uncanny repetition in psychology, literature, philosophy, and film, and produces a new narrative about the centrality of aesthetics in modern subjectivity. The often horrible, but sometimes also enjoyable, experience of anxiety can be an aesthetic mode as well as a psychological state. Johnson's elucidation of that state in texts by authors from Kant to Rilke demonstrates how estrangement can produce attachment, and repositions Romanticism as an engine of modernity