This study makes a contribution to the question of what it means to engage with literary and filmic texts in times of a transnational, environmental crisis. To this end, it takes up texts as complex, poetic encounters with diverse ecologies. Specifically, this study investigates the ecological complexity of the figure of the shadow as it emerges in filmic and literary texts. A prominent figure in the catalogue of uncanny doubles, the shadow is most commonly interpreted as a representation of interiority--the soul. This project offers a different perspective: the shadow as a figure that explores the limits of the body and its profound enmeshments with the material, nonhuman world. Rather than focusing on the shadow as a figure of immateriality, lack, or absence, I pursue it as an interface between the human body and its environment. In works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, F. W. Murnau, Walter Benjamin, and Thomas Mann, the shadow is overfull and lively. It contests the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman and challenges notions of human isolation and apartness from her environment.

This project benefits from the recent material and ecocritical turns in literary theories. Ecocriticisms and new feminist materialisms that build the theoretical scaffolding of this project repudiate the notion that matter is passive and explore the complexity of the interactions between humans and nonhumans. Furthermore, I rely on queer ecologies as well, which challenge binaries like human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, man/woman, nature/culture. Explored against this backdrop, the shadow emerges as a figure with the potential to reconfigure the sensible and to disclose the present life-worlds as always in flux. It situates human bodies in their environment and broadcasts their profound enmeshment with the material, nonhuman world. This study foregrounds the shadow's potential to upset, or rather queer, the essentialized elements and limits of human and nonhuman bodies.

In this project, I also investigate how advances in technologies of seeing (x-ray, cinema, and psychoanalysis), and the shadow's involvement in these technologies register in literary, philosophical, or filmic works. I furthermore ask how the shadow, reconfigured through said technologies at the close of the nineteenth century, brings about the disruption of the distinction between inside/outside, reframes the situatedness of the human, and functions as an interface between the human and the nonhuman in selected texts.

This dissertation sets its sights on a group of writers and scientists who cultivated readers capable of responding to the pain of others with emotions ranging from sympathy and empathy to disgust and suspense. These emotions, I claim, shed new light on the significant terrain shared by the history of medicine and literary history between German realism and modernism. The writing on pain examined in this dissertation reveals not only how medicine imagined and ultimately won support for its institutions by relying on literary strategies, but also how literature—by developing its own knowledge of pain—pointed out new directions for medicine as an institution. In this sense, the dissertation maintains that pain became the basis for a culture common to both medicine and literature. The first two chapters locate this common culture by turning to the crucial role sympathy played in the formation of institutions such as public health, naturalist theater, and charitable organizations during the last half of the nineteenth century. Towards this end, I dedicate careful attention to texts such as Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1892 Die Weber, an 1844 report by a representative of an aid organization named Alexander Schneer, and a report on an 1848 typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia by the doctor Rudolf Virchow. The remaining chapters address the shifting stakes of pain that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. Around this time, I argue, pain was no longer to be eliminated as a threat to public health, but rather to be embraced on its own terms. The third chapter outlines the parameters of this shift towards pain in the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner and F. J. J. Buytendijk. The fourth and fifth chapters, in turn, deal with the concrete ways in which this shift gave rise to new emotions and medical institutions that would cope with pain. These chapters focus, respectively, on disgust as a means of restoring emotion to medicine in the early poetry and prose of Gottfried Benn, and on suspense as a counterpart to sympathy for readers observing an epidemic unfold in Ernst Weiss’ novel Georg Letham: Arzt und Mörder.

This dissertation offers a way of bridging the growing divide within contemporary literary studies and across the humanities between frameworks focusing on questions of signification, representation, and textual hermeneutics on the one hand, and those focusing on materiality, affect, and posthermeneutics on the other. I explore the phenomenon of writing as an interaction or negotiation of different materialities that implies a dispersal of the agency of textual production onto an array of participants. More specifically, "The Materialities of Writing" develops a theoretical framework with which to think about the materiality of textual production by focusing on the preserved portion of the manuscript of Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, the so-called "Berner Taschenbuch." Integrating various discourses of materiality - the materiality of the signifier, the materiality of the manuscript, and the materiality of the body - and rooting them in a common new materialist framework, my central claim is that the material practices of writing were essential in the creation of the Aufzeichnungen and therefore haunt the printed text to such an extent that the only way to understand the semantic dynamics of the novel is by returning to the hand-written manuscript. However, the dissertation points beyond this single work and its manuscript history, proposing a fundamental methodology for dealing with the relationship between manuscripts and printed texts as constitutive forms of what we call "the" literary work.

Even in its "final" form (i.e. traditional print editions of the Aufzeichnungen), the novel points to the physical process of its generation. This happens most directly through annotations indicating that certain passages are "written in the margin of the manuscript." Drawing extensively on art historical scholarship and theory, I show how the visuality of the manuscript becomes figured in the novel, how, for example, the blotched, crossed-through and stitched-together appearance of the manuscript pages are transformed into the excessive descriptions of fragmented architecture and wounded bodies in Paris. The corporeality of these descriptions, pointing to the physical process of writing by hand, transgresses the boundary between reader and text, allowing the materialities of writing to cross the threshold of the page and to surge forth into the reader's affective, bodily experience during reading. In various ways, the manuscript and materialities of writing continue to haunt the printed work, like a specter. Ultimately, I respond to the question of autobiography in the Aufzeichnungen, avoiding a simple enumeration of the biographical connections between Rilke and Malte, and instead rooting the notion of autobiography in the physical activity of writing. In doing so, my exploration traverses the fluid boundary between corps and corpus, between the body of the writer and the body of the text.

Reconsidering the work through the materiality of its production illuminates a dialectic circulation between materiality and signification. This circulation is largely severed in the printed work, yet haunts it like a phantom limb. By attending to the ways in which the materiality of the manuscript and of handwriting remain present in the printed text of the Aufzeichnungen, I show how returning to the manuscript enables us to trace the circulation between the materialities of writing and the "immaterial" space of representation.

Hebrew Reminiscences: Global Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in the Rise of Hermeneutic Thinking examines emerging approaches to the Old Testament in the late eighteenth century as constitutive to the period's egalitarian notions of textual interpretation and aesthetic sensibility. I argue that the universalization of the Hebrew Bible during this period was both instrumental and emblematic for the Enlightenment notion of a global community of interpreters. The dissertation evinces a parallel between the community of interpreters, established with the presumption that "hermeneutic thinking" is a universal human capacity, and the community of citizens in the modern nation state. Showing how interpretation was uprooted from its origins in specific religious cultures, the dissertation thus underscores the tensions pertaining to the symbolic communal form of the nation state in view of the separatist history of religious communities.

The first and second chapters deal respectively with Johann Gottfried Herder's historiography and aesthetics, which he develops in his writings on the Old Testament. These chapters demonstrate that the consideration of biblical texts as a global asset holds a reciprocal connection to the emerging notion of "humankind." The third chapter examines Moses Mendelssohn's lobbying for emancipatory politics, and proposes that the interreligious circulation of the Old Testament shows secular constructs to be porous to competing religious values. The fourth chapter describes how Schleiermacher's psychological hermeneutics built on the replacement of the Old Testament with the New Testament as the model object for interpretation, and traces how literary realism evokes Jewish ritual to repond to the theological backdrop for this paradigm shift in hermeneutics. Considering the incessant identification of the Old Testament with Jews in twentieth-century German poetics and thought, I conclude that the persistence of the Bible's standing as an unchanging, material object of worship has posed a continual challenge to models of modern interpretation that highlight restoration--a seminal aspect of Protestant biblical interpretation in Enlightenment theology--as the hegemonic perspective on reading.

This study explains how “India” can sometimes be used in German-language literature in non-Orientalist terms. As I closely analyze Stefan Zweig's Die Augen des ewigen Bruders: Eine Legende, his essay “Die indische Gefahr für England,” and Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha all within a postcolonial theoretical framework, I argue that these texts that either take place in India or contend with Indian themes are less about India than about coming to terms with self-identity. With Zweig's work, I demonstrate how India is used as a means toward self-reflection and self-critique. Accordingly, I turn to Zweig's fraught relationship to the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as interest in internationalism to verify, through historical and biographical analysis, how these texts that are ostensibly about an Other are inexorably a means of constituting a Self. Since with Zweig's texts I establish that “Indienliteratur” can be read in postcolonial terms, I move in a different direction with my reading of Hesse's “German-Indian” story by not taking recourse to locating its cultural identity. I borrow analytical developments I make previously on the relationship between individual and community/national identity in order to engage with identity on a philosophical scale. I examine how Siddhartha, a text that condemns every kind of teaching, paradoxically helped teach individualistic identity formation in the era of U.S. Counterculture.

Few of us think about the ways in which the topography of our environment affects our worldview. But when one takes a closer look at it, he/she finds a certain limiting aspect to where they live, while also discovering a definition of self in reference to this topography. In each of the novels of this study, the main character is defined by his geographic origin. Sal Paradise in Jack Kerouac's On the Road is from New Jersey, and eventually finds comfort in New York, but ultimately he is an Easterner. Frank Lehmann, in Herr Lehmann, is a Berliner, more specifically a Kreuzberger. He comes originally from Bremen, but in his ten years in Berlin he has found himself the location that fits his worldview. Finally, Josef K. is an urbanite. Kafka's Der Proceß is never located specifically in a geographic sense. However, as Max Brod points out, this is a "`zeitlose' Roman" (Brod 216). It is simultaneously an ortslose Roman. Located entirely within the city limits, the novel explores the topography of the city in the same way that Kerouac explores the United States.

In my analysis of literary representations of single men engaging in the struggle for self-realization, I employ the term "topographic imagination" to denote each individual's conception of the geographic and topographic space within which they live. The limits of the topographic imagination do not possess a physical dimension inasmuch as they are boundaries defined by the psyche.

Using the writings and theories of Leslie Fiedler, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Claire Parnet, this study explores the topographic imagination, that limiting force of identity, and its role in the quest for self-realization in the protagonists. All of them are aware of their limiting self-identity, but also unaware of what it will take to accomplish their goal of knowing themselves completely. Through a mapping of their rhizomes, and through Deleuzean lines of flight, all accomplish the becoming, the metamorphosis that is inherent in becoming a man. There is in each of the works a lack of certainty about what lies ahead, what is to be found around that next corner. Yet, this does not stop them. Unfettered by relationships, each is free to search the boundaries of their topographical imagination in search of "IT": in search of the power to define their lives and live modern life on their own terms.

Fiedler writes of the Frontier as "the margin where the Dream has encountered the resistance of fact, where the Noble Savage has confronted Original sin (the edge of hysteria: of the twitching revivals, ritual drunkenness, `shooting up the town,' of the rape of nature and the almost compulsive slaughter of beasts) we call simply: the Frontier" (Fiedler, A New Fiedler Reader 14). The Frontier is a place located outside of geography. It is more concerned with the margins; those places just outside the realm of our existence. Dreams meeting the resistance of fact, are, in fact, at the heart of the search for self-realization not only in the novels in question, but for the modern experience in general.

We are all always already in the milieu that comprises the rhizomatic existence. Although our lives contain a beginning and an end, we remember neither of them. As far as the human experience is concerned we live and experience in a series of dimensions and/or directions in motion. Our changes of dimension, aging, life experiences, etc. necessitate frequent, if not constant, metamorphoses. In my analysis, self-realization, the most important step in any life metamorphosis, necessitates a direct and intentional engagement with the rhizome.

This engagement eventually leads to a crossing outside of the realm of the protagonist's topographic imagination. This then is the moment of self-realization. Each novel is characterized by a moment in which the protagonist recognizes that by crossing out of the limiting space of his topographic imagination he has taken responsibility for his own actions and owned the possibility of his self-realization.

This study focuses on a major aspect of literature and culture in the later twentieth century: the intersection of psychiatry, madness and art. As the antipsychiatry movement became an international intervention, W. G. Sebald's fascination with psychopathology rapidly developed. While Sebald collected many materials on Outsider Artists and has several annotated books on psychiatry in his personal library, I examine how Sebald's thought and writings, both academic and literary, were particularly influenced by Ernst Herbeck's poems. Herbeck, a diagnosed schizophrenic, spent decades under the care of Dr. Leo Navratil at the psychiatric institute in Maria Gugging. Sebald became familiar with Herbeck via the book, Schizophrenie und Sprache (1966), in which Navratil analyzed his patients' creative writings in order to illustrate commonalities between pathological artistic productions and canonical German literature, thereby blurring the lines between genius and madness. In 1980, Sebald travelled to Vienna to meet Ernst Herbeck and this experience inspired him to compose two academic essays on Herbeck and the semi-fictionalized account of their encounter in his novel Vertigo (1990).

In this study, I reveal how Sebald incorporated Herbeck within his works over a thirty year period in order to provide a social commentary. Sebald looks to Herbeck to examine what had become the standards of normality in Western Germany following the Second World War from a critical perspective. Not only is Sebald's empathetic identification with the outsider Herbeck in itself a political and social act of protest, but I show how Sebald recognized in Herbeck's language an embodiment of his own viewpoints regarding (eco)politics and critical theory. Since his understanding of Herbeck is informed by a number of disciplines, various cultural discourses assist in my clarification: I turn to Sebald's interest in the Frankfurt School thinkers, such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ideas on minor literature; political viewpoints as posed by filmmakers such as Alexander Kluge and Werner Herzog; and also the socio-anthropological writings of Pierre Bertaux, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. I furthermore provide close readings of Herbeck's poems to argue that Sebald imitates Herbeck's style. Focusing initially on archival material, I locate within Sebald's unpublished poetry and prose several thematic, linguistic and semantic characteristics which are typical of Herbeck's poetry. I then expand this analysis to incorporate how these features also reappear in Sebald's published novels. In uncovering underexplored intertextuality, this study sheds new light both on Sebald's novels, since recognizing Herbeck's voice within his prose calls for a reevaluation of what is "Sebaldian", as well as on the broader, yet underexplored cultural movement from which I focus on Herbeck as the apex. It also locates Sebald's key political ideas and his values concerning poetics and morality as derivatives of a particular historical and psychological discourse.

In this study, I analyze the containment of the artificial woman. In Western literature and cinema, artificial women appear as: mythical women, monstrous women, genetically engineered women, living dolls, living statues, female automatons, female androids, female robots and female cyborgs. Artificial women may also appear as human women, constructed to reflect patriarchal ideals of perfection. The artificial woman embodies the sociocultural ideals of female perfection relative to the male creator in the historical moment. Historically, Western literature and cinema have portrayed the male creator as: an alchemist, magician, engineer, scientist, sculptor, and god. Both the male creator and the artificial female have been variously figured. However, each of their characterizations appears to remain rather consistent over the centuries. Indeed, the ideal, artificial woman’s characterization has remained rather consistent, and, in turn, developed into a trope. The ideal artificial woman appears domestic, innocent, submissive and beautiful. If the artificial woman engenders these traits, she is often contained in marriage and in the home. If the artificial woman is wild and unruly, she must be contained, tamed, or destroyed (often by the male creator). The male creator symbolizes the patriarchy and seeks to establish control over the artificial woman. Whether a domestic wife or a wild woman, the artificial woman appears to be created and contained by the patriarchy. Therefore, the artificial woman seems to be kept metaphorically in a box. In the following, I analyze the containment of the artificial woman in Western works, particularly emphasizing German cinema. I argue that the woman’s portrayal as artificial in cinema confines and reduces her to a projection of male ideals. I examine the various forms in which women are displayed as artificial beings and consequently contained by patriarchal ideals. In my close reading of contained, artificial women in cinema, I draw upon archival texts and literature. In constellation, these works illuminate an age-old project–the patriarchy seeks to contain and control the real woman, who lives in the real world by rendering her artificial in films. Through this project, I show how characterizing a woman as artificial serves as a patriarchal mechanism of containment by conceptualizing and modeling a woman’s role in society. Furthermore, I find the containment of the artificial woman in literature and cinema is often emphasized by the inclusion of a box. The box-whether a magic box, toy box, glass box, convent, laboratory, or house-contains and domesticates the artificial woman physically and metaphorically. In the following chapters, I explore a trope, which I term “the artificial woman in the box.”

In the treatise Aesthetica (1750), Alexander Baumgarten describes the aesthetic exercise as a training of the senses through which innate sensual and spiritual proclivities are developed and perfected. He formulates aesthetics not merely as an epistemological theory, but as a way of life capable of generating a happy human being. Throughout the course of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic exercise functions as a model for poetic practices, both in the production and reception of poetry.

For Hölderlin, the harmony of the natural and historical world is not something given, but something that one has to be trained to perceive amidst the facticity of suffering and violence. The deliberate confusion of Hölderlin's poetry, triggered by complex syntactical structures and a dense semantic texture, challenges the human mind to find evidence of the divine in its own mental and poetic self-organization. Disjunction and chaos eventually triumph over organization, leading to a form of aesthetic exercise that undermines rather than bolsters a conception of nature and history as self-organizing, harmonious systems.

Novalis rejects a philosophical conception of the absolute in favor of a "physiological absolute," redefining the absolute as an intensification of stimulation rather than a realm of undifferentiated identity. For Novalis, poetry exercises the mind by generating imaginative multiplicities and differences, continually overturning orders of representation, and creating magnetically attractive signs and permeable poetic spaces. In Die Lehrlinge zu Saïs, Novalis uses poetry to disorganize the normative structure of institutionalized regimes of bodily and mental exercise, thereby differentiating the aesthetic exercise from disciplinary forms that produce stable subjects.

Following Baumgarten's definition of the aesthetic, which fuses sense perception and artistic activity, the rhetoric of Anacreontic and Rococo poetry functions as an exercise in sensory cognition. Anacreontic poetry, in some of its manifestations, imaginatively constructs a space of unbounded play that extracts the human being from its normative anchoring points: God, bourgeois economic rationality, the use of public reason, epistemological progress, the family structure, and boundaries between life and death, among others. Such poetry develops signifying practices divested of attachments to transcendent realms of meaningfulness. Instead of melancholy, trauma, and genius, it gravitates towards the pleasure of repetition, the immanence of play, and the possibility of an imaginative deviation from one's own patterns of selfhood.

In this dissertation, I investigate literary, philosophical, and religious texts from the German tradition which use the figure of the desert to reflect on the conditions of their own possibility, and on larger questions of textual production, memory, and forgetting. I examine these works in four case studies that span the medieval period and the modern era: 1.) The anonymous 14th century mystical song Granum sinapis and several sermons by Meister Eckhart; 2.) Hölderlin's late hymn Der Einzige and novel Hyperion; 3.) Stifter's short story Der Hagestolz; and 4.) Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra. I pay particular attention to the ways in which the images of the desert in these texts function as figures [figurae] whose material and figural properties are deployed to interrogate language and memory, and to guide the reader into a landscape of experiential or speculative possibility. After sketching the rhetorical and semiotic relationship between the figure of the desert, memory, and writing in Western literary, cultural, and intellectual discourses, I investigate how the texts in my case studies reshape and redeploy this inherited tradition for their own purposes. Despite their significant differences, all of these texts engage in what I call "desert writing." This "arid" poetics reflects upon its own unstable, "sand-like" qualities through the explicit and implicit use of the desert figure, and through the metonyms of sand, dust, and ash to produce cognitive and experiential landscapes of possibility that push the limits of language and thought. Often represented as "deserts" themselves, these landscapes simultaneously produce hermeneutic meaning and non-hermeneutic effects of perception and sensation. In its unique ability to contain a non-binary "both/and" logic, to simultaneously evoke fullness and emptiness, positivity and negativity, literalness and figurality, the desert is one of the most productive figures for generating new forms of poetry, thought, and experience. This dissertation contributes to established criticism on the desert's poetological and speculative dimensions by synthesizing existing research and forming a new textual constellation that uncovers unacknowledged correspondences between medieval and modern texts.