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Marcus Breyer - Final Thesis.pdf (1.67 MB)

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Meerstimmigkeiten: Metapher und Modernekritik bei Eduard von Keyserling

Breyer, Marcus
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8680-842X
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492043075317069

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Germanic Languages and Literatures.
As one of modernity’s central metaphors for existence, the sea has shaped the way in which we as humans have contemplated the earth, the cosmos, and our place within. Images such as life’s journey at sea with its storms and calms, its shipwrecks, its promise of a port of arrival or its calamitous prospect of veering off course have haunted, captured, and exalted human imagination in profound ways: As an imaginary space for human self-reflexion, the cosmic ocean became either associated with hopes of a new sense of eternity (positive infinity) or, more dominantly, laden with an existential fear of forlornness (negative infinity): The philosopher Manfred Frank gives a detailed account about how the image of the endless journey and particularly its most popular example of the Flying Dutchman came to haunt the post-Copernican imagination until the late 19th century: Drifting on a de-centred cosmic ocean without a port, a beacon or a sense of direction, the endless journey became a metaphor for human forlornness in an infinite and desecrated cosmos. Mid and late 19th century psychology and psychophysics, on the other hand, provide an example of sea imagery associated with positive infinity: For Gustav Theodor Fechner, the metaphor of the cosmic ocean indicated that despite modernity’s compartmentalization, everything was connected and all individuals were streaming together as waves of the cosmic ocean. At the threshold to the 20th century, however, neither the negative infinity of the endless journey nor the positive infinity of the Fechnerian waves maintained their presence and significance in the modern cultural imagination: Technological progress and steam navigation rendered the negative infinity outdated and obsolete. Fechner’s theory of the cosmos, on the other hand, seemed increasingly esoteric and was viewed with mockery. My dissertation examines how these two conflicting associations of the sea constitute the basis of a metaphorical topology in the works of Eduard von Keyserling. While the land becomes the space of negative infinity, the sea is presented as a space of contrastive positive infinity. The way in which these two modes of infinity inform Keyserling’s metaphorical topology can be conceived of as ecological: Meditations on the precarious human condition in modernity are not displaced on the waves of the cosmic ocean, but Keyserling instead places them on land, in the environment proper to humans. What appears most precarious about the modern human condition in Keyserling’s novels is that humans have shaped and conquered the land in such profound ways that their proper environment does not sustain them any longer: The land has become second nature, every part of it bears the traces of human labor, and its constraints as well as its restrictive and claustrophobic atmosphere torment Keyserling’s characters. The sea, on the other hand, is the contrastive metaphorical space of openness and pleasure as well as of a utopian potential. At a time when the sea was about to be conquered, and when the maritime imagination was facing new challenges, Keyserling’s metaphorical topology combined key aspects from the sea’s positive as well as negative infinity and offered an ecological reflexion on the land’s second nature that can still be relevant for us today.
Bernhard Malkmus (Advisor)
Katra Byram (Committee Member)
Robert Holub (Committee Member)
297 p.
Germanic Literature
Eduard von Keyserling; Meer; Meeresmetaphorik; Moderne; Fechner; Luhmann; Blumenberg; Heidegger; Dialogizitaet; Schlossgeschichten; Metaphorologie; Oekologie, Baltikum, Deutschbaltisch

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Breyer, M. (2017). Meerstimmigkeiten: Metapher und Modernekritik bei Eduard von Keyserling [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492043075317069

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Breyer, Marcus. Meerstimmigkeiten: Metapher und Modernekritik bei Eduard von Keyserling. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492043075317069.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Breyer, Marcus. "Meerstimmigkeiten: Metapher und Modernekritik bei Eduard von Keyserling." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492043075317069

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1492043075317069
340
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.