Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur by Giulia Agostini

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur by Giulia Agostini Ian Ellison Nach der Literatur: Studien zu einer Theorie der Literatur. By Giulia Agostini. (Neues Forum für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 57) Heidelberg: Winter. 2021. 275 pp. €38. ISBN 978–3–8253–4681–2. At least in the context of modern German culture, literature and philosophy were long considered inseparable. This is perhaps best encapsulated in the phrase ‘Volk der Dichter und Denker’ (‘people of poets and thinkers’) regularly in use since the mid-eighteenth century to describe the German philological tradition. Over the centuries, this was often reconceptualized in an ongoing attempt to grasp how literary writers confront questions of human understanding and knowledge through philosophical discourse. Until the early 1900s, the phrase was increasingly used to commemorate the intellectual greats of the Enlightenment, Classicism, and Romanticism. As the horrors of twentieth-century conflict and persecutions unfolded, it became distorted and parodied—perhaps most notably by Karl Kraus in Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (1915–22) as a ‘Volk der Richter und Henker’ (‘people of judges and executioners’)—before becoming threatened with obsolescence. The certainty of literature’s potential to offer a means of understanding oneself and the world was no longer a given. In a high-wire act of intellectual comparison, Giulia Agostini’s Nach der Literatur considers afresh these philosophical stakes, less in a historicized mode than in a form of metaphysical counterplay. Over the course of six densely written chapters, she seeks to test out ‘Die Grenzgänge zwischen Literatur und Philosophie’ (‘the border crossings between literature and philosophy’, p. 15), pursuing the thorny question of what literary works mean for us today, at a time when, she claims, literature seems to be disappearing as much as it proliferates. Hence her study’s curious focus on literary theory after literature (‘nach der Literatur’), which is to say, its attempt to unlock new—if oblique—prospects on what literature itself does not know but strives to understand (‘einen Ausblick auf das zu eröffnen, was die Literatur selbst nicht weiß, was sie jedoch zu verstehen strebt’, p. 16). This is not so much after literature as beyond its gaze. Moving from Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetics of the absolute to the quasi-mystical dimensions of Maurice Blanchot’s and George Bataille’s readings of Marcel Proust, Agostini elaborates a literary metaphysics that traces the impersonality of language and literature (‘Unpersönlichkeit von Sprache und Literatur’, p. 101). A reading of recurring images of growing plants in Proust’s work as metaphors of literature’s inner workings leads Agostini to the abstract flow structures of Najia Mehadji’s visual artworks. Later chapters consider indifference in the philosophical and poetic work of María Zambrano alongside the artwork of Auguste Rodin, Eva Hesse, and Francisco de Zurbarán, as well as the sensual ultra-philosophy of Giacomo Leopardi’s lyrical poetry in relation to the stark black-and-white photography of Mario Giacomelli, and, last but not least, the distinctions between Samuel Beck-ett’s experimental theatre that plumbs the depths of literature and Julio Cortázar’s eschewing temporal realities through the figuration of the Möbius Strip. Agostini demonstrates a remarkable command of numerous languages and philosophical [End Page 692] discourses, though the threat that the ungraspable in literature may tip at any moment into theoretical inscrutability is never entirely absent from her prose. A tendency to overemphasize through italicization may also confuse as much as enlighten. Nonetheless, for those willing to venture down the rabbit hole, there is much to admire in this erudite attempt to construe the forms and implications of various literary and artistic portrayals of a gaze that desires understanding. Beautifully presented by the Winter publishing house, this is a richly researched study that brings together a chorus of twentieth-century European cultural figures accompanied by plentiful illustrations. After all, as the quotation in Agostini’s dedication from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland reads, ‘what is the use of a book [. . .] without pictures or conversations?’ Ian Ellison University of Kent Copyright © 2022 The Modern Humanities Research Association