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- Title
Playful Distance: On the Relationship between Fossils and Time in Eduard Mörike's "Göttliche Reminiscenz".
- Authors
Dawson, Martin
- Abstract
The nineteenth-century author Eduard Mörike is difficult to pin down. In some previous characterizations, Mörike has appeared as a provincial poet, one whose conversational tone, folksy compositions, and tendency towards fantasy lend him an unserious quality. While modern scholarship has shifted to debating the level of his political involvement and his status as a postclassical or proto-modern author, one characteristic stands out among the majority of descriptions: the playful quality of his works and the characters within them. Dreams, memory, encounters with art, idle pastimes--all common topoi in Mörike's literary output--represent playful events in which varied spatiotemporal relationships emerge, especially in the face of potentially traumatic encounters with death, sickness, or the sublime. Mörike's handling of the fossil in "Göttliche Reminiscenz" involves such an encounter. In the nineteenth century, fossils often set the stage for a traumatic encounter with vast expanses of non-human time. Mörike's playful treatment of the subject offers a productive approach to the sublime that moves beyond a simple negation of its traumatic nature. In Mörike's poem, the fossil exists as both a sublime thought figure and an intimate lyrical object, offering another way to conceptualize non-human experience.
- Subjects
MORIKE, Eduard Friedrich, 1804-1875; FOSSILS; GERMAN poetry; MEMORY in literature; PHILOSOPHY of time
- Publication
Seminar -- A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2023, Vol 59, Issue 4, p354
- ISSN
0037-1939
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/seminar.59.4.3