Allen Thiher – författare

"Fascinating and important . . . a work of prodigious scholarship, covering the entire history of Western thought and treating both literary and medical discourses with subtlety and verve." ---Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism "The scope of this book is daunting, ranging from madness in the ancient Greco-Roman world, to Christianized concepts of medieval folly, through the writings of early modern authors such as Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Descartes, and on to German Romantic philosophy, fin de siècle French poetry, and Freud . . . Artaud, Duras, and Plath." ---Isis "This provocative and closely argued work will reward many readers." ---Choice In Revels in Madness, Allen Thiher surveys a remarkable range of writers as he shows how conceptions of madness in literature have reflected the cultural assumptions of their era. Thiher underscores the transition from classical to modern theories of madness-a transition that began at the end of the Enlightenment and culminates in recent women''s writing that challenges the postmodern understanding of madness as a fall from language or as a dysfunction of culture.

This academic work explores the pivotal shift in Western thought when disease replaced sin as the fundamental framework for understanding human existence. This volume examines how this transformation shaped literary modernism through three exemplary writers who confronted the growing medicalization of human life.The book traces medicine's evolving relationship with literature across European history—from medieval skepticism through Renaissance ambivalence to Enlightenment enthusiasm. It argues that modernity emerged when humanity ceased viewing disease as divine punishment and began understanding it as natural physiochemical processes.Central to the analysis is how medicine assumed powers once held by the Church, overseeing birth, life, and death while explaining human suffering. This medicalization granted authority to medical practitioners, creating both benefits and potential abuses—particularly evident in early 20th-century eugenics movements.The author demonstrates how modernist writers paradoxically accepted medicine's dominance while questioning its authority. Through close readings of selected texts, the book reveals how these writers navigated the tension between medical determinism and humanistic concerns, often employing irony and satire to express their ambivalence toward medicine's expanding role in defining human experience. This study illuminates a defining characteristic of literary modernism: the creative response to medicine's replacement of religion as arbiter of human ontology.

This book contains deft analysis of the fiction, theater, and essays of the author of ""The Man without Qualities"". In this critical introduction to the major works of Austrian modernist writer Robert Musil (1880-1942), Allen Thiher maps Musil's development as a writer, illustrating how his work evolved in response to catastrophic historical events such as World War I, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Hitler's seizure of power. Following his service in World War I, Musil began to view writing as his vocation, and, during this early period in his literary career, he produced short fiction, plays, and some of the most interesting essays on politics, ethics, and literature to be published during the Weimar era. In exploring these writings as well as ""The Man without Qualities"", a work left unfinished upon Musil's death in exile during World War II, Thiher's study plumbs the depths of Musil's ambition and accomplishments and presents a concise interpretation of the lasting significance of the writer's interrogations of the foundations of modern European culture.

Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod. In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity.After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle.Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries. These help demonstrate that Kafka never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental literary text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.

An analysis of the life of the eccentric author of The Trial, and his quest for meaning in his work.Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924. Kafka’s eccentric methods of composition and his diffident attitude toward publishing left most of his writing to be edited and published after his death by his literary executor, Max Brod.In Understanding Franz Kafka, Allen Thiher addresses the development of Kafka’s work by analyzing it in terms of its chronological unfolding, emphasizing the various phases in Kafka’s life that can be discerned in his constant quest to find a meaning for his writing. Thiher also shows that Kafka’s work, frequently self-referential, explores the ways literature can have meaning in a world in which writing is a dubious activity.After outlining Kafka’s life using new biographical information, Thiher examines Kafka’s first attempts at writing, often involving nearly farcical experiments. The study then shows how Kafka’s work developed through twists and turns, beginning with the breakthrough stories “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis,” continuing with his first attempt at a novel with Amerika, and followed by Kafka’s shifting back and forth between short fiction and two other unpublished novels, The Trial and The Castle.Thiher also calls on Kafka’s notebooks and diaries to help demonstrate that he never stopped experimenting in his attempt to find a literary form that might satisfy his desire to create some kind of transcendental text in an era in which the transcendent is at best an object of nostalgia or of comic derision. In short, Thiher contends, Kafka constantly sought the grounds for writing in a world in which all appears groundless.