Different moods in literature8/10/2023 "This book, like most of Gumbrecht's previous work, will be a trendsetting example of literary criticism. How can one avoid delivering subjective impressions without any objective relevance? His answer is as simple as it is bold, thought-provoking, and charming: You can't." The perspective on literature that he presents here-the study of the emotional reactions, moods, and atmospheres that reading can trigger-entails a serious methodological challenge. "Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is one of the 'Meisterdenker' (Master Thinkers) of our time and a teacher in the best sense of the word. Although the book will be most useful for specialists, less experienced readers would also benefit from engagement with Gumbrecht's heuristic for reading literature. "Writing in prose that is remarkably lucid for a philosophical text, the author illustrates his point with examples that range widely, from medieval verse to the picaresque narrative from the art of Caspar David Friedrich to the music of Janis Joplin. Pierpaolo Antonello, Modern Language Review "In the first part of the book, entitled 'Moments', in a truly comparative tour de force, Gumbrecht moves insightfully and suggestively from Lazarillo de Tormes to Shakespeare's sonnets, from Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau to Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, from Thomas Mann's Venice to Machado de Assis's Memorial de Aries, making these works apt condensations of particular 'forms of "life"' in different historical periods." Conveying personal encounters with poetry, song, painting, and the novel, this book thus gestures toward the intangible and in the process, constitutes a bold defense of the subjective experience of the arts. Perhaps the best we can do is to point in their direction. They present themselves as nuances that challenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as language's potential to capture them. These moods are on a continuum akin to a musical scale. Reading, we discover, is an experiencing of specific moods and atmospheres, or Stimmung. Here, he goes one step further, exploring the substance and reality of language as a material component of the world-impalpable hints, tones, and airs that, as much as they may be elusive, are no less matters of actual fact. What are the various atmospheres or moods that the reading of literary works can trigger? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has long argued that the function of literature is not so much to describe, or to re-present, as to make present.
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