Martin Klepper Livres

Modernism in Europe and modernism in the United States – at first glance these two concepts seem to be quite different if not opposing. European modernism, it appears, is innovative and even iconoclastic (Joyce, Schönberg, Gropius, Schwitters). American modernism, it would seem, is rather reconciliatory and even conservative (Fitzgerald, Gershwin, Wright and Hopper). The collection of essays in ‘Transatlantic Modernism’ disproves this point. ‘Transatlantic Modernism’ tackles the modes of transfer, translation, cross-fertilization and reinterpretation which actually characterize the complex relations between European and American cultures within the period of modernism. The essays collected in this volume cover a broad array of forms of cultural expression: literature (Döblin, Dos Passos, Faulkner etc.), philosophy (Bergson, James, Dewey), painting (Gleizes, Stella, Shahn), photography (Ray, Steichen, Sheeler), fashion (Poiret, Delaunay, Schiaparelli), film (Fox, Stroheim, Lubitsch), architecture (Bauhaus, Johnson, Hitchcock) and opera (Thomson, Stein).

The nineteenth century, like no century before or after, witnessed a revolution in narrative devices differentiating perspective and focalization. While narratives of the 1790s were all but dominated by either strictly authorial, confessional or epistolary formats, the entire gamut of modernist techniques had evolved by 1910: interior focalization, figuralization and reflectorization, stream of consciousness, unreliable narration, the dual voice. This book explores the reasons for this development, drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of second-order observation and the historical changes in visuality and spectatorship. It historicizes the emergence of point of view as a central narrative technique and as theoretical concept in literature, but also in philosophy, physiology, optics, psychology and sociology. From the rise of the novel in England it traces the sources and modes of complex literary perspectives through Romanticism and the American Renaissance to the modernist novels of Henry James.

Dieser Band verbindet eine kulturgeschichtliche Einführung in die amerikanische Postmoderne-Literatur mit einer Interpretation von Werken ihrer wohl namhaftesten Vertreter: Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo und Paul Auster. Dabei zeichnet der Autor eine Entwicklungslinie in der bisher fast ausschließlich als statisches Phänomen beschriebenen Literaturrichtung. Alle Impulse werden durch Interpretationen von Pynchons erstem und letzten Roman, V. und Vineland, eine der ersten deutschsprachigen Werkanalysen von Austers Romanen und eine Deutung von DeLillos Roman White Noise beschrieben. Autor: Martin Klepper studierte Englisch und Geschichte und promovierte an der FU Berlin.