The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilke, Benn, Brecht, and Döblin. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) by Larson Powell

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Reviews Mein); Raabe's engagement with Schopenhauer (Soren Fauth), Schiller (Gabriele Henkel), and Thackeray (JeffreySammons); references toWolfenbuttel (Herbert Blume), aswell as rereadings of selected works from theperspective of the period's family journals (Christof Hamann), Homer's epics (Heiko Ullrich), Clemens Lugowski's theory of the novel (Heinrich Detering), and the twentieth-century detective novel (Julia Bertschik). Not all contributors succeed in significantly advancing often well-established knowledge; some resort to rather extensive commentary, others summarize findings or extend lines of enquiry developed more extensively elsewhere. The editors' brief preface wisely resists the temptation of retrospectively imposing coherence on this successful collection of interesting chapters, which often demonstrate the wider relevance of contemporary Raabe research fornineteenth-century literary and cultural studies overall. University of Nottingham Dirk Gottsche The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature: Nature in Rilkey Benn, Brecht, and Doblin. By Larson Powell. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2008. vii+256 pp. $65; ?35. ISBN 978-1-57113-382-3. For Larson Powell, 'the intellectual techno-rave' is decidedly over. Against the 'thinkliness' of cultural-studies accounts of the world and the text, grouped together here as so many 'Imaginary Theories', Powell poses the 'thingliness' of the natural world. Drawing on Adorno's aesthetics, Lacan's psychoanalysis, and Luhmann's systems theory, he protests against the exclusion of nature, technology's repressed other, from studies ofmodernity. A diverse theoretical manifesto (variously referencing Kant, Bataille, Kafka, Langs Metropolis, Eagleton, and Jelinek) is followed by studies of fourmodernist writers. These begin with Rilke's short work on painting, Worpswede, inwhich landscape is seen to recede in anticipation of the indifferent Thing of the Dinggedichte. Throughout, Powell's locating of the subject within nature offers refreshing challenges to widely held views, for instance of Rilke's destabilized lyrical subject: the poem Archaischer Torso Apollos' is shown to offer a potential retrieval of voice in the famous imperative to change. The place of the subject figures equally in the comparative reading of Benn's Tkarus' with Goethe's 'Prometheus' and Nietzsche's 'Dionysios-Dithyramben'. Here, Benn's autopoietic subject is situated within modernity's destructive self-referentiality. But it is theDoblin chapter that offers themost pointed critique of technology's fantasies?repeated by contemporary theory?of sovereign self-construction. Addressing itself to a postcolonial and natural Real, Doblin's Die drei Spriinge des Wang-lun is presented as handling more irreducible traumata than those thematized by an academy locked in 'self-styled subversion'. The concluding chapter on Brecht turns to a different mode of subversion: Luhmannian terminology adds to the established political reading a definition of his poetry as second-order observation, which can index and challenge systemic blind spots. MLR, 105.4, 2010 1185 The backbone of the book, Powell's critique of the 'technological sublime' and the related prevalence of 'rhetorical figurality' in cultural studies, is delivered with an often extraordinary rhetoric of its own: Lyotard's sublime is likened to 'self-parodying camp', and JudithButler's gender performativity to 'the "lifestyle" sections of the newspapers'. Meanwhile a theory of gender underlies the project, as Powell comments on Rilke's 'emancipated' Madchen and Nietzsche's hysterical Ariadne. But the gendering of nature and the articulation of psychoanalytic theory around familial models require further critique. The lack of paternal authority inWang-lun is diagnosed as a cause ofmania; this apparent valorization of the (hetero)norm carries through in repeated references to nature's motherliness, and one aside that casts all transsexuals as psychotic. Powell's theoretical agenda occupies as important a place as the subsequent textual analyses. In this sense, those reading for the poetry may be frustrated. However the close readings that do feature are illuminating: an examination of syntax and movement in Rilke's 'Der Ball' elucidates Lacan's extimacy, and Benn's rhythms,metaphors, and metonymies are related indetail to his competing subject-positions. Although its theoretical density may appear forbidding, the book will be of interest to those working on the radical potential of the 'other' (for instance nature) to disrupt totalizing systems. Moreover, as a manifesto for reading literaturewith, or indeed as, theory, it isworth the challenging read. Newnham College, Cambridge...