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Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's Early Novels in the Context of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology

Published/Copyright: December 11, 2007
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From the journal Volume 124 Issue 1

Abstract

The article examines the representation of nature in five short novels written between 1945 and 1960 with reference to two literary theories recently formulated in Britain and Germany: Garrard's account of the aims and methods of ecocriticism, and Finke and Zapf's understanding of literature as cultural ecology. Situated midway between the Inner Émigrés of the Third Reich and environmentally committed writers in the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt dramatises the clash between conceptions of nature as order and chaos in pessimistic, autobiographically coloured narratives conveying a blistering critique of postwar conservatism and Cold War politics. His Warnutopien combine fantasies of withdrawal from society to a simple life in natural surroundings with apocalyptic warnings of nuclear destruction. Schmidt's creative adaptation of the genres of apocalypse, idyll and utopia (identified by Garrard as central environmentalist tropes) is examined, and his distinctive contribution to nature discourse in the 1950s is discussed as an example of the ability of literature, a complex medium of symbolic representation, to serve as a sphere of experimentation and innovation, helping readers overcome the self-destructive dynamic of modern civilisation.

Published Online: 2007-12-11
Published in Print: 2006-August-07

© Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen 2006

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies
  2. Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf
  3. Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century
  4. Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's Early Novels in the Context of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
  5. Literature and Environmental Ethical Criticism: Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Texts
  6. How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature
  7. Literatur und Ökolinguistik: Anthropozentrische, anthropomorphe und physiozentrische Sprache in englischen Gedichten
  8. Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur
  9. Eingegangene Schriften
https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2006.70

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies
  2. Darwin in Arcadia: Brute Being and the Human Animal Dance from Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf
  3. Imaginary Ecologies: Landscape, American Literature, and the Reconstruction of Space in the 21st Century
  4. Postwar Dystopia and Rural Idyll: Arno Schmidt's Early Novels in the Context of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology
  5. Literature and Environmental Ethical Criticism: Sarah Orne Jewett's New England Texts
  6. How to Speak the Unspeakable: The Aesthetics of the Voice of Nature
  7. Literatur und Ökolinguistik: Anthropozentrische, anthropomorphe und physiozentrische Sprache in englischen Gedichten
  8. Die Evolutionäre Kulturökologie: Hintergründe, Prinzipien und Perspektiven einer neuen Theorie der Kultur
  9. Eingegangene Schriften
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