Das deutschsprachige Prosagedicht: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung der Moderne by Wolfgang Bunzel

Abstract

588 Reviews comedy with provocative political overtones. Fiddler rightly concludes that Jelinek asked questions here of thegenre and applied traditions fornew and unexpected uses. MELLEN UNIVERSITY BRIAN KEITH-SMITH Das deutschsprachigeProsagedicht: Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischenGattung derModerne. ByWOLFGANG BUNZEL. (Communicatio: Studien zur europaischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 37) Tiibingen: Niemeyer. 2005. viii+421 pp. E78. ISBN 978-3-484-63037-6. Small formsof literaryprose such as aphorisms, prose poems, prose sketches, Feuil letons, Denkbilder, autobiographical notes, and short short stories-play a crucial role in thedevelopment of literary modernism inGermany, Austria, and Switzerland, sub verting existing genre conventions and exploring new modes of literaryexpression at the intersections of established genre traditions and discourses. In this context, the significance of Charles Baudelaire's Petits poemes enprose has long been recognized, but the academic debate about the prose poem and its place inGerman literature has until recently struggled to account for the complex challenge that thismodernist form poses to established genre conventions, subsuming the prose poem under the older tradition of poetical prose or trying to construct a traditional genre history for a typeofwriting which defies such categorization. Developing Johannes Hauck's insight that, unlike traditional genres, the prose poem isnot defined by a set of textualmarkers, relying instead on paratextual presen tation as an innovativemode of poetic writing (Typen desfranzosischen Prosagedichts: Zum Zusammenhang von moderner Poetik und Erfahrung (Tiibingen: Narr, I994)), Wolfgang Bunzel puts research into theGerman prose poem on an entirely new foot ingby arguing that in the context of latenineteenth-century European literature the prose poem acts as a challenge to established genre conventions and as a catalyst in themodernist desire to transcend the historical limitations of literaryexpression by operating deliberately at the intersections of poetry and narrative, verse and prose, literature and non-literary writing. Collapsing the traditional binary distinction be tween verse/poetry and prose writing, theprose poem emerges as a 'countergenre' to traditional poetry,but also as a kind of 'hypergenre' (p. 39), which subverts the system of genre conventions in a more general sense. This transgressive and experimental potential makes the prose poem 'a paradigmatic genre ofmodern literature' (p. 6), securing its significance in the rise of literary modernism around igoo. Bunzel's monograph, based on his Habilitationsschrift at theUniversity ofMu nich (2002), thus provides a new theoretical framework for research into the prose poem, but it also presents themost comprehensive and detailed account to date of the prose poem's early history inGerman and Austrian literature.Although Bun zel's historical narrative startswith Baudelaire, the instigator of the prose poem in its transgeneric function, one of his most important findings is the crucial role of Ivan Turgenev's prose poems (Stichtovorenija v proze) for the reception and popularity of thenew genre inGerman Naturalism and theGermanfin de siecle. Where Baudelaire is primarily concerned with creating amodern form of poetry to express modern experience, Turgenev uses this inspiration to develop a new formof narrative short prose which draws on the nineteenth-century prose sketch and on the French tra dition ofmoralistic cultural critique. Bunzel argues that it isTurgenev's alternative model of the prose poem which influenced the earlyGerman proponents of the new genre,most notably theprominent Naturalist poet Detlev von Liliencron, whose first publication, Adjutantenritte und andere Gedichte (I883), set the pattern formuch of theGerman wave ofprose poems during the i88os and i8gos by combining versewith MLR, I02.2, 2007 589 small prose pieces modelled on Turgenev. This pattern recurs, forexample, inOtto Julius Bierbaum's Erlebte Gedichte (I892), where the tradition of the prose sketch inspires prose poems on modern paintings, or inMax Dauthendey's Ultra Violett (I893), which marks the transition fromNaturalism (propagating theprose poem as Naturalist poetry) to theanti-Naturalist modernism of thefinde siecle (reinventing the prose poem as an expression of post-Nietzschean philosophies of nature and cultural critique). Tracing themultiple links between aesthetic theory,philosophy, science and theemerging range ofpoetic agendas and literaryformsassociated with theprose poem, Bunzel discusses both innovative approaches and the decline of the genre in the later I8gos as itbecame a popular vehicle forthe self-marketing of young authors. This development helps to explain Hugo von Hofmannsthal's and Rainer Maria Rilke's reluctance togo beyond some literaryexperiments inprose...