Self-reflection in Literature: (202 Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Self-reflection is fundamental for human thinking on many levels. Philosophy has described the mind's capacity to observe itself as a core element of human existence. Political and social sciences have shown how modern democracies depend on society's ability to critically reflect on their own values and practices. And literature of all ages has proven self-reflexivity to be a crucial trait of cultural production. This volume provides the first diachronic panorama of genres, forms, and functions of literary self-reflection and their connections with social, political and philosophical discourses from the 17th century to the present. Far beyond the usual focus on postmodernist opacity, these contributions present a rich tradition of critical transparency: Literary texts that show us what is behind and beyond them.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Read Thyself: Cultural Self-reflection and the Relevance of Literary “Self”-labels  Florian Lippert and Marcel Schmid Reflections on Reflection Autoreferentiality, Autoreflexivity, Selftransparency  Oliver Jahraus – 1600 – 1 Cervantes’s and Unamuno’s Metalepsis Hope Unraveled in Don Quixote: Self-Reflexivity and the Problem of Metalepsis in Cervantes, Unamuno, and Bloch  Konstantin Mierau – 1700 – 2 Hamann’s Latent Parrhesia Intertextual Exploration of the Self in Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten  Andrea Krauss 3 Klopstock’s Historiography Written out of Time: Inventing What Happened in Klopstock  Kristina Mendicino – 1800 – 4 Kleist’s Performativity Transmission Kleist  Marcel Schmid 5 Mallarmé’s Rhetoric Allegorical Self-Reflexivity in Mallarmé’s Sonnet en-x  Evelyn Dueck 6 Nietzsche’s Masks “Aber ich notire mich, für mich”: Nietzsche and Self-Reflection  Barbara Naumann – 1900 – 7 Celan and the Timeless A Secret Echo Outside of Time: Paul Celan and the Autumn Crocus  Jason Kavett Letter from Paul Celan to Gisèle Celan-Lestrange  Translated by Jason Kavett 8 Pastior’s Poetics The Medium of Poetry  Jörg Kreienbrock – 2000 – 9 Fforde’s Intermediality Books Without Borders: Self-Referentiality and Intermedial Games in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next Series  Vera Alexander 10 Autobiographies: Kureishi, Miller, Wiebe, Coetzee, and Bechdel Self-Reflexivity in Contemporary English Auto/Biographies  Anne Rüggemeier 11 Brandt’s and Ja, Panik’s Auto-fiction “Only half of what I am saying is true:” Deconstructing Authorial Authority in Contemporary German Literature  Antonius Weixler Index

About the Author :
Dr. Florian Lippert (1978) is Associate Professor in European Languages and Cultures at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is the author of Selbstreferenz in Literatur und Wissenschaft (Fink 2013) and has published numerous articles and chapters on self-reflexivity in literature, arts, media and politics. Dr. Marcel Schmid (1979) is Assistant Professor in Germanics at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Autopoiesis und Literatur (transcript 2016) and has co-edited a volume on the life reform movement: Die Literatur der Lebensreform (transcript 2016).