About the Book
Our main words defining emotional states suggest that we have clarity about them: expressions like "love," "hatred," "anxiety," or "sorrow" seem clear enough. The reality, however, tends to be more complicated. We are often faced with gestures and utterances that are difficult to interpret; we thus find ourselves wondering about the affective force of what has just been said: "Was that an insult?" "Flirtation?" "Aggression?"
Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond looks at three interlocking forms of social violence--flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence. In order to understand their circulation, it traces their literary-historical genealogy in German realism and modernism--in scenes from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, and Franz Kafka, covering a historical period from the middle of the 19th century to the early decades of the 20th century.
Reading realist and modernist literature through 21st-century affect theory and vice versa, the analyses collected in this book show the deep literary history of our current cultural predicaments and predilections.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Author’s Note
1 Introduction
Part I FLIRTATION
2 “Love Exploded on a Time-Fuse”: Flirtation and Critical Theory from Realism to #MeToo
Part 2 PASSIVE AGGRESSION
3 Twice-Read Love Letters: The Ambiguities of Epistolary Violence
Part 3 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
4 Home in Hiding: Scenes of Domestic Violence
Part 4 SYMPHONIC AGGRESSION
5 “What Murderously Peaceful People There Are”: On Aggression in Robert Walser
6 Conclusion
Index
Bibliography
About the Author :
Barbara N. Nagel is Assistant Professor of German at Princeton University, USA. She is the author of Der Skandal des Literalen. Barocke Literalisierungen bei Gryphius, Kleist, Büchner (2012) and co-editor (with Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz and Lauren Shizuko Stone) of Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction (2015).
Review :
[A] daringly original, elegantly written, rigorous, and witty book ... Nagel’s slim book is a power tool with a broad range of applications. It combines historical with formal (in particular, narratological and rhetorical) analysis of realist and modernist works in tandem and considers intimate verbal and physical aggression, in its larger social context, as an emotional phenomenon, thus drawing on and contributing to affect studies. The result is a wealth of insights. … For somewhat different reasons, contemporary feminism, literary studies, and affect studies all need a high tolerance for and a strong practice of ambiguity. Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond intervenes at the intersection of these three fields to sharpen our sensorium for the workings of ambiguity. This is a brilliantly structured and deftly argued book that models a new kind of scholarship: rigorously formalist and politically relevant.
Nagel has broken new ground no the subject of aggression in German literature and has demonstrated great analytical skill in attending to a topic that is hard to grasp in its ambiguity. Ambiguous Aggression is not only of interest to scholars and students of German literature, it also contributes to current debates on aggression and violence.
[I]f one is interested in German realism or in the representation of violence in literary works, this book is a must-read. It refreshes the discourse on everyday violence and offers a substantial new way of reading violence, especially in our contemporary context.
Aesthetically argued, passive aggression is an issue between Sein and Schein, "being" and "appearance." A person presents herself in a weaker position while simultaneously using it to manipulate her counterpart. [Nagel's] book turns into an unveiling of sorts, one in which the partners' behavior reveals increasing violence as the ambiguity of what is unseen diminishes. In the end, she is a deft cultural critic: she wonders what these texts can mean for us today—not for German readers of the past but for American readers now—and if a reflection upon them could contribute to contemporary discussion of the broader meanings to #MeToo. In this way, Nagel has provided us with her own open letter.
With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel has for the first time systematically measured the confusing emotional terrain that lies between [insult and intimacy]. Whoever does not want to enter this terrain unknowingly – and who could possibly want that? – should read her book.
[A]n original contribution to the research of emotions in literature ... With admirable analytical energy, Nagel raises what appears to be a phenomenon at the object level as a phenomenon that is determined by reluctance and frustration as the subject of a study that arouses “lust for the text” (Barthes) and the topic.
With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel not only makes an important addition to the German cultural and political history of affect, but also highlights an epoch that, so far, has not been in the focus of German affect studies. Theoretically, Nagel takes her inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of affect: within cultural and literary studies we need to address affects not in their ontological opacity, but in their manifestation as aesthetic forms, down to very specific linguistic details, in the case of this study of the German language. For Nagel, it is the German realist novel that provides a rich archive for the study of affect.
This turn is both original and highly productive. For with her choice of an affective register--Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence--Nagel manages to link her literary analysis of texts by Keller, Fontane, Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter, and others to the most recent and controversial debates about sexual harassment in the context of the #MeToo movement. Nagel’s choice of topic and material is both courageous and clever: by looking at forms of aggression and violence between the genders within a heterosexual setting, she takes up moral issues of responsibility and victimhood. By working through these complex questions within a literary and historically distant setting--German realism in the last third of the 19th century (and beyond)--however, she creates a space of interrogation that a contemporary context could not provide. Boldly, her project takes the risk, in a way, of prioritizing textual analysis over power structures; the result being that she very productively and stunningly sharpens and extends our understanding of the force of violence through and beyond language.
Diverging with many contemporary understandings of aggression, which moralize, simplify, or blame, Nagel engages with aggression as a complex and ambiguous social and psychological phenomenon whose semantics were systematically explored in the literature of German realism. Ambiguous Aggression is a study of gendered and domestic violence that deliberately redraws many lines: between modernism and realism, scholarly and essayistic idioms, contemporary and historical discourses, literary and theoretical sources, interpretive and rhetorical dimensions.
Barbara Nagel's Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond takes German Studies to difficult, necessary places--where canonical works of literature both participate in and allow us to reflect on the most subtle and perfidious forms of violence. Nagel is a literary critic of rare wit and sensitivity, but also an inventive theorist, judiciously drawing on but never simply reproducing the major insights of both 20th- and 21st-century theory, from Freud and the Frankfurt School through rhetorical deconstruction to the affective turn. Suggesting a compelling taxonomy of forms of violence in German literature, this book is a watershed publication, modeling for all of us what 21st-century feminist literary criticism can (and must) do.
A compelling intervention in feminist literary studies, this is a book which comes at the right moment, but I am sure is here to stay: avoiding the contemporary inclination to moralize aggressive behavior, Nagel instead dismantles the structural bearings of such exit strategies. The book is a lesson in comparative studies—not as an academic discipline but as a consciousness aware of the ways in which violence simultaneously entangles and undoes language. In that, it serves as a compass for reframing canonical German Studies from within. Even more importantly, it provides a reality check for each of us as social animals.
Barbara Nagel’s rich, deceptively compact book joins a growing body of scholarship on the history of feelings. More specifically, it extends an ongoing intervention within the turn to affect by scholars including Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Eugenie Brinkema, Mel Y. Chen, and Marta Figlerowicz, insisting that affect can, and even should or must, be read. [...] Departing from an ontological strain of affect theory that risks, ironically, reifying the very materiality that it celebrates into yet another abstraction precisely by declaring it ineffable, these feminist and queer theorists adopt the methods of phenomenology and aesthetics. By replacing 'openness' with ambiguity, Nagel opens affect itself to close reading. In so doing, she also renders it a fruitful site for reading the social.
Ambiguous Aggression is, in excess of all its scholarly merits, a highly entertaining book—there is plenty of humor, suspense, and surprise to be had—qualities not exactly ubiquitous in publications of (literary) theory. This book will even have something to offer to those outside the field of academia, as long as they have an inclination to follow Nagel into the realms of the quizzical, the absurd and share her enjoyment of staring at familiar words and phrases until they turn bizarre, silly, or monstrous.
With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel has for the first time systematically measured the confusing emotional terrain that lies between [insult and intimacy]. Whoever does not want to enter this terrain unknowingly – and who could possibly want that? – should read her book.
Barbara N. Nagel's innovative approach in her new book Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence shows how interesting new directions in German studies can be. This approach to German realism is refreshing because it focuses on aesthetics linked with the social and political implications of affect. [I]f one is interested in German realism or in the representation of violence in literary works, this book is a must-read.
Barbara Natalie Nagel has published widely on the topic of flirtation, a subject that also occupies the center of her recent, intellectually ambitious book, Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence. [Nagel] is a deft cultural critic: she wonders what [the texts of German Realism] can mean for us today—not for German readers of the past but for American readers now—and if a reflection upon them could contribute to contemporary discussion of the broader meanings to #MeToo. In this way, Nagel has provided us with her own open letter.
