Intellectual culture in early twentieth-century Austria reached
levels of originality and excellence that have rarely been equalled
before or since. Shadow Lines examines works by major novelists,
dramatists, poets, and intellectuals of that extraordinary
era-among them, Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil,
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
Franz Kafka. Lorna Martens considers how each of these authors
contributed to a decisive transformation in Austrian culture,
involving a shift away from the dialectical syntheses of much
nineteenth-century German thought and culture to potent,
unresolvable dualisms of known and unknown-orderly and
chaotic-features of human experience: consciousness and the
unconscious, reason and the irrational, language and the
inexpressible. In most of these writers, according to Martens, all
that is knowable, reasonable, and orderly is grounded in that which
is dark, irrational, chaotic. What Martens calls "the dark area"
emerges variously "as the unconscious (Freud), the sexual drive
(Freud, Schnitzler, Musil), the death instinct (Freud, Schnitzler),
the dangerous chaos below the surface of things (Rilke), the
inaccessible totality (von Hofmannsthal), or the unsayable
(Mauthner, von Hofmannsthal, Musil, Wittgenstein)." The essential
yet enigmatic relation between the known and the unknown leads to
much that is unsettling-and strangely fascinating-in these writers'
works. A book that shrewdly relates the works of these authors to
the intellectual and political turmoil of the times, Shadow Lines
is a new critical appraisal of Austrian literature and intellectual
culture at the dawn of the century.
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