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The Shape of Things : = Reading Culture Through Form in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The Shape of Things :/
Reminder of title:	Reading Culture Through Form in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
Author:	Duvernoy, Sophie.
Description:	1 online resource (274 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-01, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-01A.
Subject:	German literature. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=30312291click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798379778453

The Shape of Things : = Reading Culture Through Form in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
Duvernoy, Sophie.

The Shape of Things :Reading Culture Through Form in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. - 1 online resource (274 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-01, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation examines the historical transformation of the concept of form in Germany between 1850 and 1930 into a dynamic term that intellectually enabled the project of liberal cultural critique. It describes how form was reconceived from a static shaping force with Platonic overtones into a mobile, dynamic means of structuration that allowed for internal difference and change. The dynamization of form allowed it to become a central term in the renewal of epistemology, and in turn, allowed philosophy to move into the study of culture and its material products.The project is based around three key figures - the psychologist and philosopher Moritz Lazarus; his student, the philosopher Georg Simmel; and Simmel's student, the journalist and cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer - who form a continuous lineage that engages with and develops the idea of the 'cultural form' first postulated by Lazarus in the 1860s through the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. The project puts their development of form into dialogue with contemporaries who were pursuing similar projects-from the publicist Aron Bernstein, to the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, the young critics Georg Lukacs and Leo Popper, and the Weimar Republic journalist Gabriele Tergit.These authors' theoretical transformation of form is linked to their shared positionality as liberal German Jews. I argue that the transformation of form into something constructive, process-oriented, and open to change was intertwined with the attempt to forge liberal praxes in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, to posit models of social relationality and belonging that relied not on essentialized identities, but on shared sets of cultural forms and practices. The reflections of these thinkers on their outsider status, coupled with their liberal political commitments, meant that they privileged constructive over essentialist notions of German identity, and developed theories of culture that foregrounded constructive and pluralist forms of belonging.Chapter 1 investigates the dialogue between Jewish reformers and public intellectuals Aron Bernstein and Moritz Lazarus in the 1850s. Bernstein inspired Lazarus to develop the idea of the cultural form, an external form or object that was a crystallization of collective psychic energy. A cultural form embodied knowledge, tradition, or social practices: it could be anything from a watch to something large, like an entire language. Bernstein and Lazarus embedded the cultural form within a liberal progress narrative by considering them short-hand repositories of knowledge that could be used to innovate and fuel cultural and scientific developments. Lazarus used this insight in the development of the discipline of Volkerpsychologie, or folk psychology, and again in positing a relational model of a liberal polity in his political response to the Berlin Antisemitism debates of 1879.Chapter 2 charts the anxiety regarding the 'formlessness' of modernity through the work of Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Georg Lukacs, and Leo Popper. Simmel's analysis of the 'Tragedy of Culture' posited a fundamental rift between the forces of form and life to be a tragic condition of cultural creation itself, which Simmel thought could not be overcome in industrial modernity. Cassirer, Lukacs, and Popper responded by redefining form as a process of structural mediation that could overcome the perceived epistemological and social rift in Simmel's diagnosis. While Simmel suggested himself that such mediating forms might be found in the applied arts, Cassirer postulated that the project of creative poeisis was such a generative form. Cassirer also extended his model of formation to his vision of a liberal polity, which he expanded upon in defending his mentor, Hermann Cohen, from an antisemitic attack in 1916. Lukacs and Popper, in turn, pointed to the essay and painting respectively as formats that could permit and disclose the dynamic potential of form through their material affordances.Chapter 3 shows how this theoretical investigation of form was transformed into an aesthetic technique by Siegfried Kracauer and Gabriele Tergit in the liberal feuilletons of the Weimar Republic. It examines discourses around two cultural forms perceived as highly negative in the period, the ornament and fashion, to show how Kracauer and Tergit reproduce and constellate these forms in their prose to develop critiques of contemporary life. By writing articles which foreground the emergence and disappearance of these forms, as well as their constitutive aspect for sociocultural existence, Kracauer and Tergit use the aesthetic affordances of the cultural form to develop a liberal technique of cultural criticism. The cultural critic, as well as the reader, is reimagined as figure who can diagnose, perceive, and probe the constitutive power of the cultural form in structuring our everyday existence.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2023

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798379778453Subjects--Topical Terms:

699188
German literature.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Cultural criticismIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

542853
Electronic books.

The Shape of Things : = Reading Culture Through Form in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
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653 $a Liberalism
653 $a Weimar Republic
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856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=30312291 $z click for full text (PQDT)