Erzählen nach Darwin: Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischen Realismus. Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller. (Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 43) by Philip Ajouri

Abstract

1170 Reviews were not Poles, and Achinger buttresses her analysis of the role of Polish un rest in the novel by considering anti-Polish sentiments' rascist and neo-colonialist message. Society turns out to be a double category: it stretches to contain the tensions between the nobility and the emerging middle class as well as gender differences, to which previous scholarship has given short shrift.Of course, all these categories overlap, and they are complicated, nowhere more noticably than when Freytag presents ein Panorama jiidischer Stereotype' (p. 185). As Achinger argues, 'Gemeinsam istden mannlichen Juden imRoman also nicht eine eindeutig beschreibbare spezifisch "jiidische" Gestalt, gemeinsam ist ihnen aber die Abwei chung von rechtemMafi, von schoner, kraftvollerMannlichkeit' (p. 188, emphasis in original). What unites Achinger's specific analysis and also explains the gespaltene Mo derne' of the book's title is the concept of 'deutsche Arbeit'. In a sense thatMarx might have recognized as unalienated production, German work war nicht mehr nurMittel der Bedurfnisbefriedigung, sondern wurde zu Sinnstiftungmenschlicher Existenz' (p. 62). German work's national component arises because it isArbeit, die nicht um des Verdienstes, sondern desWohls des Ganzen willen geleistet wird' (p. 64); it is also work thatPoles, Jews,the nobility, and women are incapable of per forming.Moreover, in the storerooms and offices of Schroter & Co.'s ganzes Haus', Anton Wohlfart represents the ideal German: a male member of a middle class, 'daswesentliche Ziige der Gemeinschaft in die moderne Gesellschaft hineinzuret ten vermag' (p. 216). Anton's fictional existence is an attempt at 'Versohnung' that depends, curiously enough, on Abgrenzung', and Achinger's book is therefore an admirable explanation of Freytags imperfect answer to the social questions that characterized his times. Lawrence University Brent Peterson Erzahlen nach Darwin: Die Krise der Teleologie im literarischenRealismus. Friedrich Theodor Vischer und Gottfried Keller. By Philip Ajouri. (Quellen und Forschungen zur Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, 43) Berlin: de Gruyter. 2007. xii+373 pp. 98. ISBN 978-3-11-019143-1. Darwin's work was immediately recognized inGermany as epoch-making not only by life-science specialists, but also by thinkers and writers across the spectrum of disciplines, from Ludwig Buchner, Vogt and Haeckel, to Hartmann, Strauss and Avenarius, and Bolsche, theHauptmanns, and Nordau. Yet research intoDar winism's impact on nineteenth-century literature has been sparse and narrowly focused, with only Peter Sprengel andWerner Michler forming notable exceptions. Now, however, Philip Ajouri's book remedies one major misconception: the ten dency to treatDarwinism's impact on literature solely as amatter of abstract ideas, themes, and motifs. Instead, Ajouri observes thatDarwinism changed theway in which the temporal form of lifewas experienced and represented, so that after Darwin the very act of narration had to change. MLR, 104.4, 2009 1171 Chance is the key term. In analyses of philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, Schelling, and Hegel Ajouri discerns teleology?both goal and instrumental func tion?as a hitherto neglected basic category of human orientation: our chiefmeans intellectually of imposing purpose and meaning on a natural world experienced as changing yet contingent and directionless. Darwinian evolution, the origin of species by natural selection through the struggle for life and chance mutation, destroys that possibility. A parallel investigation, inspired by Lugowski and re ferencing Kermode, Genette, and Stanzel, assesses the significance of this for the theory and practice of narration: as the destruction of the sense of an ending. Darwin's empire of contingency undermines the authority of both erzahlte Tele ologie' (the intradiegetic belief of narrated figures in a teleologically structured world) and 'Erzahlteleologie' (the way figures, events, and situations move to or serve an end in the Active domain as directed by the narrator). There remains only 'Basisfunktionalitat', the residual orientation of any text as product of the author's communicative intention, what distinguishes it from aleatoric arrangements of signifiers. Thus ifBlanckenburg's Versuch uber den Roman (1776) offers a narrative model designed tomake teleological perfectibility evident, then Friedrich Theodor Vi scher's Asthetik oder Wissenschafi des Schonen (1846-57), with its continuations and self-critiques (1866,1873), represents the long goodbye ofGermanic aesthetics to all that. The earlier Vischer saw dialectical Aufhebung of chance in experience as the key function of an aesthetic which mediates between...