Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction (New Directions in German Studies)

Writing the Mountains: The Alpine Form in German Fiction (New Directions in German Studies)

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. “Jens Klenner's ambitious, historically sweeping study of German mountain literature takes its reader from the Kantian sublime to contemporary ideas of mountain immateriality, digging into some challenging and complex literary expressions of mountains along the way” ― H-Net Reviews Jens Klenner is Associate Professor of German at Bowdoin College, USA. His research on questions of literary form and the environment focuses on contemporary Austrian and German literature and culture from 1800 to the present. Among his publications are essays on Thomas Bernhard, Bertold Brecht, Paul Celan, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Elfriede Jelinek, and Georg Simmel.