Heinrich von Kleist and Modernity

BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University. BERND FISCHER is Emeritus Academy Professor at the Ohio State University. CHRISTIAN MOSER is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Bonn. HELMUT J. SCHNEIDER is Professor (emeritus) für neuere deutsche Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Bonn. He has also held positions at the University of California, Irvine und Davis. He has published widely on German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the European pastoral tradition, utopian landscapes, the literature of the Enlightenment and on German neoclassicism (in particular on Lessing, Kleist, Goethe). His most recent monograph is Genealogie und Menschheitsfamilie: Dramaturgie der Humanität von Lessing bis Büchner (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011). JEFFREY L. HIGH is Professor in German Studies, Comparative Literature, and Honors at California State University, Long Beach, CA. SEÁN ALLAN is Professor of German at the University of St Andrews. He studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and at the Humboldt Universität in what was then East Berlin. From 2001-2016 he worked at the University of Warwick before moving to St Andrews in 2016 as Professor of German. His main research areas regard the culture of the European Enlightenment, interdisciplinary approaches to the mediation of music and the visual arts, as well as translation and translation studies. He is the author of The Plays of Heinrich von Kleist: Ideals and Illusions (1996) and The Stories of Heinrich von Kleist: Fictions of Security (Camden House, 2001). He is the co-editor of a special edition of German Life and Letters, entitled Heinrich von Kleist: Performance and Performativity (2011); the co-editor of the volumes Kleist, Education and Violence: The Transformation of Ethics and Aesthetics and Konstruktive und destruktive Funktionen von Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2012), and Re-Imagining DEFA: East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Contexts (2016); and the co-author of the monograph Unverhoffte Wirkungen: Erziehung und Gewalt im Werk Heinrich von Kleists (2014). His most recent book, Screening Art: Modernism and the Socialist Imaginary in East German Cinema (2019), investigates questions of intermediality and spans not only film, but also literature, music, and the visual arts in post-war cinema. WOLF KITTLER is Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely with monographs on Franz Kafka and Heinrich von Kleist. Recent publications on Impressionism as an effect of the chemical dye industry, on the history of the Greek alphabet from Euripides to Plato, on early wireless technology, on music in Jean Jacques Rousseau's work, on the history of the concept of "risk," and on transformations in perspective painting from Leon Battista Alberti to Salvador Dalí. Works in progress include: On Wings of Light: A Cultural History of Telecommunication from Antiquity to the Present, and Echo's Echoes: From Freud to Lacan.

This outstanding collection of essays . . . is an excellent indicator of the state of contemporary Kleist scholarship. Written by some of the foremost Kleist experts, the contributors display a wide methodological range . . . . [P]rovides readers novel insights into what constitutes Kleist's modernity and how his writings participate in modernity's emerging literary, philosophical, and scientific discourses. . . . No matter what methodological predisposition readers have, they will encounter fascinating new insights into the life and work of an author whose unique if enigmatic status is still growing two hundred years after his death.

• Introduction - Bernd Fischer and Tim MehiganZu Ende schreiben: Ultimative Strategien im Schaffen Kleists - Bernhard Greiner"Sein Nahen ist ein Wehen aus der Ferne": Ottokar's Leap in Die Familie Schroffenstein - Nancy NobileThe Fragmented Picture and Kleist's Zerbrochner Krug - Dorothea von Muecke"So glaubst du jetzt, daß ich dir Wahrheit gab?" Gender, Power and the Performance of Justice in Kleist's Der zerbrochne Krug - Sean AllanRecht als Krieg: Moderne Staatlichkeit und die Aporienlegalistischer Herrschaft bei Heinrich von Kleist - Christian MoserRepresenting the Nation in Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg - David PanHerrschaftsgenealogie und Staatsgemeinschaft: Zu Kleists Dramaturgie der Moderne im Prinzen von Homburg - Helmut J. SchneiderChanging Perceptions of Modernity in Nineteenth-CenturyGerman Theater from Goethe to Wagner, with Reference to Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Homburg - Hilda BrownWeiblicher Sadismus, Wutwelt des Liebes-Urwalds, Geschlechtskampf, absolutes Gefühl: Die Penthesilea-Rezeptionin der Moderne - Ricarda SchmidtProsodic and Dramatic Tension in the Blank-Verse Dramas of Heinrich von Kleist - Dr. David Chisholm-Univ. of ArizonaCrisis, Denial, and Outrage: Kleist (Schiller, Kant) and the Path to the German Novella(s) of Modernity - Jeffrey L. HighDas Gespenst der Armut: "Das Bettelweib von Locarno" - Zwischen traditioneller christlicher, kantisch aufgeklärter undmoderner marxistischer Auffassung - Peter HornThe Problem of Knowledge and the Discourse of the Hysteric: Exploring a Lacanian Interpretation of "Die Marquise von O. . ." - Peter BartonReligion nach der Aufklärung: Die heilige Cäcilie - Identität, Religion und Moderne - Anette HornBreaking Skulls: Kleist, Hegel, and the Force of Assertion - Andreas GailusKleist's "Übermarionette" and Schrenck-Notzing's "Traumtänzerin": Nervous Mechanics and Hypnotic Performance under Modernism - Jonathan MarshallFalling after the Fall: The Analysis of the Infinite in Kleist's Marionette Theater - Wolf KittlerNotes on the ContributorsIndex