Germanic StudiesGermanic Studieshttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/652024-03-19T09:19:03Z2024-03-19T09:19:03ZSpatial Reckonings: Mapping the Raumproblem in Modern Mathematics and German Modernism, 1890-1933Hedley, Thomas Williamhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/1055472024-02-13T18:03:04Z2024-01-01T00:00:00ZSpatial Reckonings: Mapping the Raumproblem in Modern Mathematics and German Modernism, 1890-1933
Hedley, Thomas William
Despite the often-celebrated ascent of 'interdisciplinarity' within academic research, in perhaps every setting, mathematics and the arts are still viewed as unrelated disciplines with divergent origins, influences and aims, thus exemplifying the 'two cultures' described by C.P. Snow in the 1960s. It is precisely this enduring perception that this project seeks to undermine. By placing the transformative era of the late 19th Century to the early 20th Century under the microscope - a period in which both mathematics and the arts underwent significant change - this thesis aims to bring modern mathematics and German-language modernism into a fruitful conversation with one another, showing how label 'modernism' envelops the two realms. To do so, it is proposed in this thesis that both modern mathematics and aesthetic modernism can be tied to a common Raumproblem ['problem of space'], a shifting understanding and representation of space and spatiality. This manifests in particular as a nuanced dynamic between transformation and invariance, which in turn actions and is enveloped by a broader complication of spatial objects and ontology in language - mathematical or otherwise. With this 'spatial reckoning' as a central analytical lens, this dissertation proceeds by uncovering commonalities between the two 'cultures' on two main levels: shared philosophical influences and parity on the level of expression and modes of representation. Firstly, it is argued that the philosophical influences in each field when it comes to a 'modern' re- evaluation of space are by no means as divergent as current scholarship suggests. By working inwards from a wider German context towards Felix Hausdorff, a key proponent of mathematical topology who also published philosophical and creative work, the unexpected influence of Friedrich Nietzsche becomes evident, whose significance in the simultaneous waves of modernist art and literature is perhaps unrivalled. Having traced these philosophical connections, the remaining chapters serve as case studies in 're-reading' key works of literary, filmic and visual modernism in light of their mathematical Doppelgenger. Beginning with the entanglement of transformation and invariance and working progressively outwards towards the level of language and ontology, this thesis interweaves these mathematical developments with Franz Kafka?s prose, F.W. Murnau's innovations in Weimar Cinema, an underrepresented voice of Vienna Modernism in Mela Hartwig, and differing intermedial and programmatic movements like Bauhaus and Dadaism. Taken together, these comparative studies seek to demonstrate that modern mathematics and aesthetic modernism begin to harmonise with one another at this unique moment in time; they begin, in a sense, to 'speak' in a common tongue. In short, by beckoing modern mathematics into the wider modernist arena, this thesis calls for a thorough revision of the divides between these two cultural and academic discourses, and it makes the case for a much more inclusive and cross-disciplinary conception of modernism as a whole.
APPROVED
2024-01-01T00:00:00ZOmnium Gatherum: The Ecological Fictions of Ransmayr, Tokarczuk and FlanaganBrennan, Conorhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/1041492023-11-13T18:02:52Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZOmnium Gatherum: The Ecological Fictions of Ransmayr, Tokarczuk and Flanagan
Brennan, Conor
This thesis presents a comparative reading of novels by three prominent contemporary writers who engage with ecological themes. Christoph Ransmayr, Olga Tokarczuk and Richard Flanagan are all well-known writers both internationally and within their respective cultural contexts of Austria, Poland and Australia. A comparison of their work is justified not only by the international scale of the climate crisis - and their own opposition to categories of national literature - but also by an array of shared literary influences and intertexts, foremost among them Franz Kafka and Ingeborg Bachmann. As well as a detailed reading of works by these three authors and their literary ancestors, the thesis presents an argument about ecological fiction itself, supporting an understanding of ecology as an expansive category that is inseparable from the aesthetic. It also constructs an argument about acts of reading, and particularly of comparative reading, through its theoretical framework of the 'omnium gatherum'.
Chapter 1 introduces the three focus authors and outlines some of their key experiments with the form of prose fiction in the light of the climate crisis. These experiments, it is argued, are influenced by a modernist forebear to whom all three authors frequently allude, namely Franz Kafka. Chapter 2 analyses the portrayal of systems that are historically implicated in ecological destruction. It considers systems of empire and their links to the production of scientific knowledge, as well as the many forms of resistance which processes of colonisation, disenchantment and resource extraction are met with. Chapter 3 introduces another key literary precursor for these texts: the Austrian poet and fiction writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Correspondences between the writing of Bachmann and Ransmayr, in particular, help to shed light on the role of archetypal representation in ecological fiction, which is bound up with the importance of gender and narrative perspective. Chapter 4 outlines the manifesto for contemporary fiction put forward in Tokarczuk's Nobel lecture 'The Tender Narrator'. The ideas outlined in the lecture are explored in more detail through the figure of Janina Duszejko, the narrator of Tokarczuk's 'eco-thriller' Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Prowad? sw?j p?ug przez ko?ci umar?ych, 2009; trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones, 2019). The epilogue draws together the key arguments of the thesis using Ursula K. Le Guin's essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', which offers an original and hopeful alternative to the types of story and system seen elsewhere in the thesis. Through the archetype of the gatherer, and the idea of the novel form as a kind of carrier bag, the epilogue offers ways of bypassing the trap of comprehensiveness, including the new constellations engendered by comparative reading itself.
APPROVED
2023-01-01T00:00:00ZAesthetics of Timbre in late Eighteenth-Century and Early Romantic German Scientific, Philosophical and Music-related LiteratureErrington, Benjamin Jameshttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/1038342023-09-12T17:02:11Z2023-01-01T00:00:00ZAesthetics of Timbre in late Eighteenth-Century and Early Romantic German Scientific, Philosophical and Music-related Literature
Errington, Benjamin James
Until recently timbre has generally been considered as first emerging as a Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century concept. This interdisciplinary thesis explores the existence of timbre as a concept during the period spanning circa 1760 to 1810, exploring definitions of timbre and other literary manifestations of timbre-understanding in German thought. Following a review of recent secondary literature and using a mixed-research methodology, the question of timbre-understanding in late Eighteenth-Century and Early Romantic German scientific, philosophical and music-related discourses is explored via five aesthetics-related access-points. These are, respectively, (1) organological, (2) acoustical, (3) physiological, (4) epistemological (post-Kantian) and (5) speculative meta-approaches. The last of these covers timbre-understanding in relation to the question of the origins of music and language. A considerable number of authors and texts is considered and the output of certain authors overlaps between several access-points, which only serves to show the rich diversity of the topic of timbre which appears in organological and musical treatises, works on acoustics, natural science, Naturphilosophie, physiology, neurology, musical-aesthetics, epistemology, theosophy, theology, works on the subject of language and works of fiction from the Early Romantic period. The authors discussed include Chladni, Herder, Hamann, Schubart, S?mmerring, Ritter, Kant, K?rner, Schiller, Schelling and Novalis. The division into these five access-points also reveals that timbre-understanding, which was surprisingly developed in some of the texts considered, ran parallel with Counter-Enlightenment approaches to aesthetics and significant trends of Romantic Science and (post-Kantian) philosophy that paved the way for the increasingly central place in music and aesthetic-acoustic theories that timbre was to achieve in the Twentieth-Century and beyond.
APPROVED
2023-01-01T00:00:00ZGermanistik in Ireland. Jahrbuch der / Yearbook of the German Studies Association of Ireland (GSAI). Special issue: Explorations in Literary HistoryBarkhoff, Jürgenhttp://hdl.handle.net/2262/1020972023-02-15T18:02:50Z2022-01-01T00:00:00ZGermanistik in Ireland. Jahrbuch der / Yearbook of the German Studies Association of Ireland (GSAI). Special issue: Explorations in Literary History
Barkhoff, Jürgen
J?rgen Barkhoff, Siobhan Donovan, Leesa Wheatley; Barkhoff, Juergen
PUBLISHED
2022-01-01T00:00:00Z