Figures of Simplicity: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville - Couverture souple

Kaiser, Birgit Mara

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1438432305 ISBN 13 : 9781438432304

Editeur : State University of New York Press, 2012

Synopsis

A fascinating comparison of the work of Heinrich von Kleist and Herman Melville.

Figures of Simplicity explores a unique constellation of figures from philosophy and literature—Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, G. W. Leibniz, and Alexander Baumgarten—in an attempt to recover alternative conceptions of aesthetics and dimensions of thinking lost in the disciplinary narration of aesthetics after Kant. This is done primarily by tracing a variety of “simpletons” that populate the writings of Kleist and Melville. These figures are not entirely ignorant, or stupid, but simple. Their simplicity is a way of thinking, one that Birgit Mara Kaiser suggests is affective thinking. Kaiser avers that Kleist and Melville are experimenting in their texts with an affective mode of thinking, and thereby continue a key line within eighteenth-century aesthetics: the relation of rationality and sensibility. Through her analyses, she offers an outline of what thinking can look like if we take affectivity into account.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: State University of New York Press
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1438432305
• ISBN 13: 9781438432304
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 172
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Allemagne