Recognizing Reality

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing's paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognition in its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create. Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, and Adalbert Stifter, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presenceexpands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media's epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool. Through close readings of key works by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Otto Ludwig, Annette von Droste-Hulshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, and Wilhelm Raabe, this book demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Realist recognition scenes not only reflect basic poetic concerns but also reveal authors' efforts to know and transmit knowledge about diverse aspects of the nineteenth-century German world, including assimilation politics and colonialist practices. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Reading Recognition: German Realism and the Mediation of Reality expands on recent media histories of realism and examines the material bases for realist aesthetics while also taking seriously media's epistemological accomplishments and elaborating the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.