The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

Jason Groves

Published by Fordham University Press 2020

The Geological Unconscious

German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary

Jason Groves

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823288120

Overview
Contents

About this book

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown.

Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named.

These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

An urgent book devoted to the pressing question of humankind’s increasingly tenuous relationship to the Earth and the Earth system

Author / Editor information

Groves Jason :

Jason Groves is Assistant Professor of Germanics at the University of Washington. He is cotranslator of Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica.Jason Groves is Assistant Professor of Germanics at the University of Washington. He is cotranslator of Werner Hamacher’s Minima Philologica.

Reviews

Catriona MacLeod, University of Chicago:
“The Geological Unconscious offers subtle close readings of several canonical texts that receive provocative illumination from ecocriticism. The book’s focus on the instability of ground is insightfully paired with a consideration of how already in the nineteenth century literary style and narrative register geological time and planetary wounding.”

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, University of British Columbia:
“An impressive and accomplished study that delves deep into the layers of German mineralogical imagination from Goethe to Benjamin. Stones may not be able to speak, but they have found their spokesman. A pleasure to read.”

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Of Other Petrofictions: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. Goethe’s Erratics: Wandering in Deep Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	36
3. Many Stranded Stones: Stifter’s Spectral Landscapes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	67
4. The Shock of the Earth: Benjamin’s Unarticulated Ground Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	93
Epilogue: Dilapidated Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 208
Illustrations
- Other: 5
Keywords: Anthropocene; Deep time; Ecocriticism; Ecopoetics; Geopoetics; Literary Criticism; Romanticism; Realism; Climate Fiction

eBook

Published: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 9780823288120