1st Edition
Aesthetic and Philosophical Reflections on Mood Stimmung and Modernity
Preface
Introduction. Stimmung and Modernity: Theoretical Explorations
Stimmung in Modern Philosophy
Conceptualising Stimmung in Literature
Chapter 1: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Moody Modernity
Alienation in the Modern City
The Intensity of Aesthetic Experience
Aesthetic Intensity and the Modern Condition
Chapter 2: Aesthetic Attunement in Samuel Beckett’s Narrative Fiction
The (Pre- and Post-)Cartesian Subject in Murphy and Watt
‘All I am is feeling:’ The Textual Dynamics of Molloy
Decomposed Selves, Voices in the Dark
Chapter 3: Eine ‘Stimmungssache:’ Thomas Bernhard’s ‘Trilogy of the Arts’
Music and Artistic Ideal in The Loser
Woodcutters: Irritation and the Creative Process
Bernhard’s Aesthetics of Stimmung and the Failure of Art in Old Masters
Conclusion
Bibliography
Biography
Birgit Breidenbach is a Lecturer in Literature and Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. She completed her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick and gained teaching and research experience at Warwick and Queen Mary University of London before joining UEA in 2018. Her published and presented work focuses on literary and aesthetic theory, mood and affect and the interplay between philosophy and literature.
