Heads or Tails: The Poetics of Money by Amy Horning Marschall (review)

Abstract

1052 Reviews Though etymologically appropriate enough, 'stanza' will inevitably be associated in most readers' minds with the separate units of a poem. Despite this idiosyncrasy in the use of terms, Gee does offerthe reader effective strategies for grappling with texts, and he illustrates his methods very effectively. For instance, one chapter is devoted to a sample discourse analysis (based on data from recorded interviews) of the speech of teenagers from differentsocio-economic groups and looks at how these speakers build differentsocially situated identities. Gee illustrates how analysing their first-person or 'I-statements' according to such categories as 'affective statements', 'ability and constraint statements', and 'achievement statements' showed that, while the working-class teenagers were concerned primarily with 'social, physical and dialogic interactions', the upper-middle-class teenagers were more focused on 'their movement through achievement space'. This sample analysis will be motivating to students who want to engage in their own analysis of the speech of teenagers or other social groups. In addition, the appendix on 'Grammar in Communication' will be a useful reference for those needing some guidance on the functional approach to language, on how meanings are built in a text, and on how whole texts are shaped and made coherent. University of Leicester Diane Davies Heads or Tails: The Poetics ofMoney. By Jochen Horisch. Trans. by Amy Horning Marschall. (Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2000. 351pp. $39.95. From Jochen Horisch's perspective, modernity can no longer be read in the light of an anticipatedbetter future,as the Western Marxists, however implicitly, used to do, nor is it simply the condition for a little postmodern cynicism. While he is too sensitive to the contemporary predicament to be able to attempt traditional literary history or criticism in an unreflected way, Horisch's playful virtuosity is nevertheless underpinned by seriousness, both in the form of a certain grand narrative of what he calls 'ontosemiologies' and in the form of his commitment to literature. The idea behind the ontosemiologies is that the relation between 'Sein' and 'Sinn' has been determined in three differentways, firstby the signifying power ofthe Eucharist, then by the code of money, and now by the circulation and institutions of information, the media. It is a relay of 'major' or defining media. The firsthe dealt with in his book Brot und Wein: Die Poesie des Abendmahls (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1992). Kopf oder Zahl: Die Poetik des Geldes, which appeared in German in 1996, now available in this translation by Amy Horning Marschall, turns to the code of money. Ende der Vorstellung: Die Poesie der Medien (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1999) is dedicated to the third. Against this grand narrative, as the subtitles of all three books convey, literature is significant. It is not, however, that these things are simply reflected in literary texts. It is rather that, once the world has been explained in terms of a succession of sign systems that define a succession of differentrealities, one can define and investigate the specific ways in which literature as a sign system, or a series or succession of such, differsfrom the dominant system. In the case at issue here of money, literature can, indeed must, recognize and quixotically contest the historically given semiological dominance of money. Thus the book is not chiefly about how the theme of money appears in literature, but about poetry and money as rival media, with (like all rivals) much in common. Horisch's own writing is on the side of literature in its very style: it is witty and allusive, as if to perform the very struggle which he knows cannot be won, but which alone seems to offer any possibility of resistance, perhaps even of redemption. The book is in fact about much more than this simple (simplistic?) basic MLR, 97.4, 2002 1053 thesis: its literary references range from Matthias Claudius to Lion Feuchtwanger (in one sentence), and from the Middle Ages to contemporary Berlin. It occasionally gives itself up to the luxury of an extended analysis of an individual text, as in the case of Keller's Die mifibrauchtenLiebesbriefe, and the Fortunatus story is an appropriate leitmotif throughout, as is...