„Inzwischen gingen seine Füße weiter“: Autonome Körperteile in den frühen Erzählungen und medizinischen Essays von Alfred Döblin und Gottfried Benn

Davies, Steffan; Schonfield, Ernest

doi:10.1515/9783110217704.46

Cited by 23 publications

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“…This is remarkable for a text following on the heels of German Expressionism, which focused, in both theory and artistic practice, on the concept of Geist ("spirit, " "mind," or "soul"), especially on the dark side of the human mind. It is not as surprising, however, in the context of some short stories from Döblin's early period, which, as Kurt Binneberg (1979) and Torsten Hoffmann (2009) have shown, evince a keen interest in body parts and gestural language. However, the role of body imagery in Berlin Alexanderplatz has so far escaped critical inquiry and will, for this reason, occupy us in what follows.…”

Section: The Case Against Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fictions of Legibility

Stoicea¹

2020

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A very special thank you goes to the Circulation and Resource Sharing Librarians at Clemson University's main library. In addition to crucial research support throughout the project, they always provided a kind word, friendly smile, and judgment-free space to an academic who spent one too many hours using their facilities. Kathy Edwards, Alison Mero, John Morgenstern, and Ed Rock also provided vital assistance at various points in the process. To all these dedicated librarians who went above and beyond, I am eternally grateful.I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my editor, Annika Linnemann, and her entire team at Transcript for the care, expertise, and professionalism with which they prepared the manuscript for publication. A heartfelt thank you also to Nicholas Galanin, whose inspiring artwork graciously adorns the cover of this book.My final words of appreciation are reserved for those I consider my biggest cheerleaders. My husband, Lucian, patiently endured my absences from home, took on all the domestic responsibilities that I skirted while finishing the manuscript, and helped me think through various aspects of the book. From working weekends to writing impasses and everything in between, he has seen and supported me through it all -no questions asked and no complaints. I am also grateful beyond words for and to my daughters, Fabiana and Freya. Their inexhaustible energy and contagious enthusiasm kept me going when inspiration and a good night's sleep were in short supply.Last but not least, I want to thank my colleague Johannes Schmidt for giving me the gift of time when I most needed it. Without his untiring support, this book would surely not have been possible. And for keeping my spirits high and my feet on the ground during many months of hard work, my good friends Raquel Anido and Aga Skrodzka deserve special thanks. 'them.'This cursory review of physiognomy's history shows that within the span of 150 years following its revival in the 1770s, this pseudo-science morphed from a discipline designed to foster "the knowledge and love of mankind" into a building block of racial-ethnic policies in Nazi Germany. It would be misguided to think that the discursive manipulation of the body on which this process rested was specific only to eugenics or the German-speaking world. As texts from different cultural backgrounds will show in the course of this study, many disciplines purported to 'read' the body, i.e., unlock its secrets, when in fact they overwrote it with preformed ideas. The rise of sciences caused not only the meaning of Being to be forgotten, as Martin Heidegger (cf. 1998) and Edmund Husserl (cf. 1970) have argued, but also its material corporeality. In point of physical appearance, medicine and philosophy conflated readability with transparency. Instead of seeing the body, they saw past or through it, effectively relegating the human frame to invisibility. I argue in the chapters to follow that no one recognized and countered this fictitious legibility better than writers of literary fiction, who mo...

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Section: The Case Against Psychologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Fictions of Legibility

Stoicea¹

2020

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Rezeption zu Lebzeiten

Sander

2016

Döblin-Handbuch

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Gestural Imaginaries

Ruprecht¹

2019

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Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranges across art and philosophy. Taking further Cornelius Castoriadis’s concept of the social imaginary, it explores this imaginary’s embodied forms. Close readings of dances, photographs, and literary texts are juxtaposed with discussions of gestural theory by thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, and Aby Warburg. Choreographic gesture is defined as a force of intermittency that creates a new theoretical status of dance. The book shows how this also bears on contemporary theory. It shifts emphasis from Giorgio Agamben’s preoccupation with gestural mediality to Jacques Rancière’s multiplicity of proliferating, singular gestures, arguing for their ethical and political relevance. Mobilizing dance history and movement analysis, it highlights the critical impact of works by choreographers such as Vaslav Nijinsky, Jo Mihaly, and Alexander and Clotilde Sakharoff. It also offers choreographic readings of Franz Kafka and Alfred Döblin. Gestural Imaginaries proposes that modernist dance conducts a gestural revolution that enacts but also exceeds the insights of past and present cultural theory. It makes a case for archive-based, cross-medial, and critically informed dance studies, transnational German studies, and the theoretical potential of performance itself.

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„Inzwischen gingen seine Füße weiter“: Autonome Körperteile in den frühen Erzählungen und medizinischen Essays von Alfred Döblin und Gottfried Benn

Cited by 23 publications

References 0 publications

Fictions of Legibility

Fictions of Legibility

Rezeption zu Lebzeiten

Gestural Imaginaries

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