- Title
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Theodor Fontane in the Age of Appearance: Critical Aestheticism in "Die Poggenpuhls".
- In
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Colloquia Germanica, Tübingen, Bd. 52, Heft 1-2, [Januar] 2021, S. 87-108
- Year
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2021
- Remarks
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Zusammenfassung: "Fontane’s penultimate novel Die Poggenpuhls shows striking parallels with current discourses on the politics of aesthetics. The author’s most distinct stylistic device is the art of dialogue and its obfuscating potential. At the same time, the reader can observe the shift from a text-based to an image-based culture in Fontane’s writing. Nobility has become a hollow performance due to the decline of its political influence, but the author exposes its true core as its theatrical element as well as the act of fictionalizing and aesthetically elevating one’s life. Regarding the relevance of Fontane’s works today, I compare his visual writing strategy with contemporary German artists who dedicated their poetic strategies to the image, both in the literal as well as the philosophical sense of the age-old Platonic differentiation between Schein and Sein. Andy Kassier and Rafael Horzon’s Nietzschean affirmation of modernity’s concomitant cultural frustrations connects these contemporary German artists to Fontane’s figures. In the midst of the digital revolution we have again reached a period of momentous change. Schein as a new aesthetic mode of being challenges the notion of Sein; realizable by anyone, this aesthetic worldview resists the capitalist narrative, for it operates within the discursive system of art. We can either interpret social media networks like Instagram as the Auseinandertreten von Schein und Sein or see them as a democratic opportunity to create our own aesthetic existence."
- Bibliographic reference
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33/15.2.2021.01.1
- Print edition
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Nachträge
- Signature
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P 83
