Volume 17, Issue 1

This article explores a painting (circa 1562) by the Antwerp artist, Frans Floris (1519/1520-1570). Special attention is given to Floris’s work with both the iconographic traditions and the theological impulses of the Reformation and how Floris takes the transconfessional imagery of the hen and her brood (Mt. 23:27) and gives it a genuine Lutheran interpretation. One finds compelling evidence for this Lutheran interpretation in the many biblical citations included in the painting. The intermediality of word and image is highly relevant in view of the early modern era’s visual theology, within which the image-filled word and the speaking images work together in fruitful cooperation.

In the age of enlightenment, travelling was thought to result in an expansion of the horizons of one’s knowledge and experience. Aside from ethnologists, who gathered statistical data, and authors, who undertook travel to convey their experiences in effective literary ways, there was also a small group of intellectuals who endeavored to make sense of the regions that they travelled to or through by delving into the particularities characteristic of these areas. However, in their desire to penetrate to the essence of things, these intellectuals found themselves confronted by the necessity of mastering the »hydra of empirical reality« (Goethe). Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt both made the attempt to surmount this obstacle, at times in close contact with each other, during the journeys they made around the turn of the century. But both came to recognize, in equal measure, that the genre of travel literature did not suit their purposes of conveying the results of their experiences and impressions.

The idea of the thought experiment is currently enjoying remarkable attention within the fields of literature and science. However, works on this topic often focus only on general transdisciplinary phenomena and ignore structural and epistemic differences between science and fiction. The article aims to demonstrate the need for differentiation in this research field by discussing particular case studies. First, a complex counterfactual thought experiment in Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population , its structure and epistemic function are analyzed, showing how overpopulation fantasies are embedded in a both logically and rhetorically constructed reductio ad absurdum . Second, the paper describes the fictional transformation of this specific thought experiment in Vladimir Odoevsky’s late Romantic short story The Last Suicide , which serves as a powerful device in his polemic against Malthus’s Rationalism. Considering both the specific cultural- historical contexts and the ideological aims of the two texts, the paper demonstrates different uses of counterfactual imagination in science and literature.

This article investigates the way in which the psychological »turn« of late 19 th - and early 20 th -century German aesthetics plays out in a wide-ranging discussion - and redefinition - of the classic paradox of tragic joy. In contrast to the understanding of catharsis as affective »discharge «, which has been introduced by 19 th -century philologist Jacob Bernays, the proponents of turn-of-the-century psychological aesthetics develop new typologies of tragic feelings designed to distinguish between »pathological « and genuinely aesthetic forms of pleasure. This separation - according to which tragic affects like pity and fear are to be reconceived as merely simulated states of consciousness ( Scheingefühle ) - serves to negotiate a tension that arises from the two-fold aspiration of aligning aesthetics with the methodological standards of empirical psychology while maintaining its discoursive specificity as an academic discipline in its own right.

Kurt Lothar Tank’s highly circulated monograph on Gerhart Hauptmann (Rowohlt 1959) is based on his two essays from 1942, both marked ideologically by the spirit of the time. By their emphasis on spatial pattern, they - just like his later biography - correspond with Otto Schönstein’s stereoscopic publications, with which Tank had been involved since 1935. Hauptmann, on his part, objected resolutely to stereoscopy.

Starting out from the fact that Robert Musil’s first novel unsettled its contemporary readers with the »immoral« behaviour of its young protagonist, this essay tries to find out what kind of provocation the novel actually contains. It argues that it is less the behaviour of the protagonist Törleß as depicted in the novel, but rather the narrator’s way of commenting on it that entails the actual provocation. With this provocation Musil aims at replacing the traditional interpersonal comprehension of moral standards by a new concept of the individual development of the inner self. Taking into account Musil’s later reflections on the moral theory, the essay’s final part deals with some problems that are caused by such an individualistic idea of morals.

In essays, interviews and at public readings, the contemporary German writer Patrick Roth presents himself as a modern prophet whose novels open up privileged access to the collective unconscious to his readers. However, through a close reading of Roth’s most recent novel Sunrise: Das Buch Joseph , this article argues that Roth’s poetics is based less on an intuitive or unconscious participation in timeless archetypes than on a subtly crafted intertextual play with biblical and apocryphal texts. Roth’s Jungian reworking of these pretexts has important theological consequences: In place of the Christian doctrine of atonement, Sunrise instates a neognostic psycho-religion that centers on the self-salvation of the individual. The novel therefore needs to be read as an aesthetic contribution to current debates about atonement and, more generally, about Gnosticism as an alternative Christianity

Conventionally, systems theory is not only considered to be a sociological approach that questions the empirical existence and importance of ›subjects‹ in social practices, but to have itself a decentralized, non-hierarchical, desubjectivated structure. Analysing texts and paratexts of its most famous author Niklas Luhmann, the article argues that specific forms of presenting sociological systems theory nonetheless lead to effects of subjectification

Previous discussions of the author have almost fully disregarded the fact that language, and, consequently, the role of »sender«, and thus also the narrator of a literary work, are anchored in the functional contexts of evolution. The sender is not only a byproduct of language, but an essential part of information. In the first part of the article, four innate tools are examined which can count as prerequisites of existing narrative works: a sender detector, which prompts us to look out for the sender of all kinds of verbal or otherwise speech-like communication; the ability to provide linguistic information with meta-level source-tag indicating scope and reliability; the capability of relating others’ action to their mental states (»theory of mind«); and the transmission of social knowledge (»gossip «). The last two paragraphs describe the role these dispositions play in the game of literature. The study is located in the overlapping area of biopoetics, pragma-linguistics, and cognitive poetics.