Discourse Networks, 1800/1900

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Stanford University Press, 1990 - Literary Criticism - 459 pages
This is a highly original book about the connections between historical moment, social structure, technology, communication systems, and what is said and thought using these systems - notably literature. The author focuses on the differences between 'discourse networks' in 1800 and in 1900, in the process developing a new analysis of the shift from romanticism to modernism. The work might be classified as a German equivalent to the New Historicism that is currently of great interest among American literary scholars, both in the intellectual influences to which Kittler responds and in his concern to ground literature in the most concrete details of historical reality. The artful structure of the book begins with Goethe's Faust and ends with Vale;ry's Faust. In the 1800 section, the author discusses how language was learned, the emergence of the modern university, the associated beginning of the interpretation of contemporary literature, and the canonization of literature. Among the writers and works Kittler analyzes in addition to Goethe's Faust are Schlegel, Hegel, E. T. A. Hoffman's 'The Golden Pot', and Goethe's Tasso. The 1900 section argues that the new discourse network in which literature is situated in the modern period is characterized by new technological media - film, the photograph, and the typewritten page - and the crisis that these caused for literary production. Along the way, the author discusses the work of Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein, Mallarme;, Bram Stroker, the Surrealists, Rilke, Kafka, and Freud, among others.

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Contents

Prelude in the Theater
3
THE MOTHERS MOUTH
25
Learning to Read in 1800 27 Motherliness and Civil Service
53
LANGUAGE CHANNELS
70
The Impossibility of Translations 70 The Golden Pot
77
Authors Readers Authors
108
THE TOAST
124
Feminine Reader 124 and the Kingdom
148
THE GREAT LALULĂ
206
Technological Media
229
REBUS
265
Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow 273 A Simulacrum of Madness
304
QUEENS SACRIFICE
347
Afterword to the Second Printing
369
Works Cited
419
Index of Persons
449

1900
175

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