Rilke's Unnatural Things: From the End of Landscape to the Dinggedicht

The Fading Landscape ...nature, in the form it presents itself to man, as it adapts itself to him, is always profundly denatured. - Lacan, Le Séminaire IV What Rilke calls Nature is not cut off from History. - Heidegger, "Wozu Dichter?" THE BREAKTHROUGH INTO painterly abstraction around 19...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in	The Technological Unconscious in German Modernist Literature pp. 66 - 96
Format	Book Chapter
Language	English
Published	Woodbridge, UK Boydell and Brewer Limited 2012
Subjects	European and world literature European literature Schiller, Friedrich Lacan, Jacques Adorno, Theodor W. works by Heidegger, Martin Goethe, Johann Wolfgang modernism sublime, the metaphysics rhetoric symbolic trauma Deleuze, Gilles Expressionism self-reference fantasy law subjectivity allegory, allegorical Benjamin, Walter history Orientalism Marx, Karl Freud, Sigmund media theory literary history on politics of perversion Romanticism science aesthetics of Lyotard, Jean-François nature and Kant, Immanuel Nietzsche, Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich politics gender Mallarme, Stéphane Kittler, Friedrich media Huyssen, Andreas metaphor within individual subject on the sublime Foucault, Michel Benn, Gottfried paradox Kristeva, Julia Luhmann, Niklas on relation of nature and culture Brecht, Bertolt and Rilke theology Adorno, Theodor W Husserl, Edmund imaginary culture Wellbery, David Lepenies, Wolf
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Summary:	The Fading Landscape ...nature, in the form it presents itself to man, as it adapts itself to him, is always profundly denatured. - Lacan, Le Séminaire IV What Rilke calls Nature is not cut off from History. - Heidegger, "Wozu Dichter?" THE BREAKTHROUGH INTO painterly abstraction around 1900 is associated with the concrete names of local natural places: L'Estaque, Murnau, and earliest of all, Worpswede. In the wide open space of Worpswede's heather and moor, nature itself seemed to strain toward its expression in pure abstract spaces of light and color, spaces whose bareness suggest the subjectivity of Stimmung or mood. "For a few years around the turn of the century, it seemed as if nature painting and avantgarde modernism could enter into a productive liaison." The liaison took the form of what Adorno would later call a Kulturlandschaft, a landscape reflecting nature's own imprint by human history. The promise of epochal renewal felt in those landscapes was inseparable from the primeval quality of heather and moor, their literally antediluvian quality: this was a landscape that had been drained and colonized from flooded marshland only in the eighteenth century. The affect of Angst so typical of the turn of the century, had specific historical origins. Worpswede around 1900 was thus a landscape of memory, painted "around ...moments of recognition ...when a place suddenly exposes its connection to an ancient and peculiar vision of the forest, the mountain, or the river."