Thinking in Literature : On the Fascination and Power of Aesthetic Ideas. Translated From German by Joel Golb

“M'illumino/d'immenso” – “I'm lit/with immensity” is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable – in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the ‘death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. THINKING IN LITERATURE: On the Fascination and Power of Aesthetic Ideas CONTENTS Foreword I. M’illumino / d’immenso. On the Power of Aesthetic Ideas II. Farewell to Genius? On Myths and New Concepts of Creativity III. Speaking the Unspeakable? Death-Images after the ‘Death of God’ IV. Heroic Melancholy. On the Beginning and End of a History of Fascination V. Pleasure in Dissimulation as Power VI. “Loveless Legends”? Notes on the Poetology and Ethic of Biographical Writing VII. “Only Something that Continues to Hurt Stays in Memory.” On Kleist’s Unsettling Power VIII. Me-picture without the Me: Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbild 9b (1919) in the Museum Ludwig IX. The End of Fiction: Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Prose of the Absurd X. Real-and-Imagined: Figurations of Space in Geography and Literature. The Example of Judith Hermann’s Berlin Stories. XI. Signs of Freedom, or the Economy of Sacrifice. Notes on Oskar Roehler’s Film No Place to Go (Die Unberührbare) MINIMA POETICA XII. The Invisible Thing Called Soul XIII. Teddy, Death, and the Devil: Warning from the Bears XIV. Beyond Identities—The Art of Metamorphosis XV. States of Euphoria—Literature and Intoxication XVI. Counterwords: Poetry and Resistance XVII. Blue Notes, or: In the End, all Art is (no) Blue Vapor Acknowledgments Bibliography Notes