Beyond Nihilism: Gottfried Benn's Postmodernist PoeticsP. Lang, 2003 - 205 oldal By focusing on Benn's early Expressionist prose and what this study calls his 'fictive self', the author traces the relationship between Benn's Weltanshauung and later critical theory. Building upon the latest scholarship, she analyses Benn's poetics as precursor of certain postmodernist ideas concerning language, meaning and polysemy, aesthetics, personal identity, authorial intention versus reader reception, intertexuality, and the role of art in society. By paying specific attention to the concept of the autonomous self and its relation to language, this study demonstrates that Gottfried Benn's aesthetic theories do not represent the end of German expressionism, but rather the beginning of the present post-modernist period. |