Topisches Erzählen bei Adalbert Stifter: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung von Bildungsgängen in ausgewählten Werkkomplexen by Hendrik Achenbach

Abstract

Reviewed by: Topisches Erzählen bei Adalbert Stifter: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung von Bildungsgängen in ausgewählten Werkkomplexen by Hendrik Achenbach Jan Hohenstein Hendrik Achenbach, Topisches Erzählen bei Adalbert Stifter: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung von Bildungsgängen in ausgewählten Werkkomplexen. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. 467 pp. Bildung, or education, assumes a critical role in the writings and biography of Adalbert Stifter. Many of his stories depict the development of children, adolescents, and young adults. Moreover, Stifter became directly involved in the educational institutions of the Habsburg Empire when he served as a school inspector for the district of Upper Austria. Ever since the reading public rediscovered his works at the turn of the twentieth century, critics have attempted to characterize the educational practices and processes in them. In Topisches Erzählen bei Adalbert Stifter: Untersuchungen zur Gestaltung von Bildungsgängen in ausgewählten Werkkomplexen, critic Hendrik Achenbach applies the concept of "topisches Erzählen," or "topical narration," to elucidate the problem of Bildung in Stifter's works. His study provides a concise history of the concept of the topos and its place within modern literary criticism. Readers with an interest in that history and those wanting to learn more about Bildung in selected works of Stifter will find what they are looking for in this book. The study offers a concise survey of the history of the term topos—from its origins in classical rhetoric and decline beginning in the eighteenth century—and a profile of the Topikforschung as a current within modern literary criticism, influenced by the works of the prominent Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius. Achenbach defines the topos as a "zeichenhaftes, im Gedächtnis gespeichertes Vorstellungsmuster" (19) for his analysis. The study presents the model of the topos and "topisches Denken," or thinking along the lines of the topos, as [End Page 63] a founding principle of literature and approaches the characters in Stifter's stories as "Konstrukte, an die sich kulturell determinierte Vorstellungsmuster anlagern" (3), with the aim to isolate these culturally determined cognitive patterns on the level of character development. Achenbach posits that topoi can only develop their full potential for literary analysis if critics address them by finding a "Deskriptor," a phrase that encapsulates the "Deskription," that is, the content of a pattern. In addition, the author utilizes charts to synthesize his findings from the close readings of individual texts. Achenbach limits the scope of his analysis to three different "Werkkomplexe": the stories "Die Narrenburg," "Turmalin," "Kazensilber," and "Der Waldbrunnen"; then, Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters, with a focus on the second and fourth editions of the novella; and, lastly, the novel Der Nachsommer. This selection—which excludes most of Stifter's pre-1848 works—reflects Achenbach's assumption that different topoi can and do occur in more than one of Stifter's works and that Stifter's engagement with them often continued after their publication. For the benefit of his readers, Achenbach prefaces his own analysis in each of these sections with an account of the scholarship on each "Werkkomplex" and then follows up with a summary of individual findings before moving on to the next. In his textual analyses, Achenbach reconstructs how topoi related to Bildung manifest themselves, such as, for example, the topos of the "Mittelpunkt der kultivierten Natur" in the character of the "wilde Mädchen" in the first group of texts or the topos of the "Macht der Leidenschaften" in the Freiherr von Risach in Der Nachsommer. This methodology allows Achenbach to combine and systematize the findings of other scholars, leaving the reader with a detailed account of how the problem of Bildung recurs in different topoi across various texts. A strength of Achenbach's study, as the author himself highlights, is that the model of the topos as a comprehensive category accounts for central aspects of Stifter's prose such as artificiality, repetition, and (infamously) the lack of plot. Also, Achenbach's knowledge and adroit handling of the scholarship on Stifter makes his isolating and naming of individual topoi overall cogent. That the author chose to include graphic representations of these topoi is a welcome addition. There are still a few things to consider: The author...