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  • Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft Herausgegeben von Michael Gamper, Helmut Hühn
  • Catriona MacLeod
Zeit der Darstellung. Ästhetische Eigenzeiten in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft.
Herausgegeben von Michael Gamper und Helmut Hühn. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014. 398Seiten + 44 s/w and farbige Abbildungen. €34,00.

Emerging from a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project on time and representation in what Michel Serres defined as a polychronic modernity, this collection of essays edited by Michael Gamper and Helmut Hühn aims to consider both how time has been experienced and represented aesthetically and how representation itself is organized temporally. Three sections are devoted, respectively, to visual art, literature, and science, and mainly focus on the period around 1800, which Michel Foucault notably identified as marking a modern shift in the apprehension of time and history and thus as producing culturally specific notions of time, “Eigenzeiten.” Janus-faced, as Gamper and Hühn point out in their introductory essay, citing Niklas Luhmann, modernity looks backward while orienting itself towards the future, thus rendering the present precarious. Historian Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of “Verzeitlichung” or temporalization further accentuated the modern perception of time’s acceleration, while setting forth the role of a new understanding of “history” (versus histories) in dealing with the traumatic ruptures produced by the French Revolution. If Koselleck, who appears repeatedly in the volume, placed the emphasis on temporal change, one of the strengths of this collection is its attention not only to multiple conceptions of time, but to a hitherto neglected perspective: time’s relationship with space and spatialization. An interdisciplinary range of approaches to temporality and space, not a [End Page 464] unitary understanding, emerges from the diverse contributions to this volume, from the simultaneous presence of competing times in Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and the retardation of modernity’s speed in Goethe and Hölderlin to Novalis’s yearning for an “absolute” poetic present crystallizing past and present, among others.

The first section of the volume, devoted to art and architecture, contains several brilliant and rewarding essays. Particularly rich is the cluster of articles on German Romantic art, with Hühn’s subtle exposition of pluriform models of time in Caspar David Friedrich’s late landscape Lebensstufen; Johannes Grave’s attention to temporality in the interaction between artwork and viewer (which surely took on new importance with the dialogism of Romantic art theory and the rise of the museum); and Christian Scholl’s fascinating investigation of the varied reception and translation of Gothic architecture and construction time in the nineteenth century in projects such as the Cologne Cathedral and Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Denkmalsdom. Standing apart from the discussion focused on German Romanticism, if interesting in their own right, are the essays by Verena Krieger on iconicity and eternal time in Kasimir Malevich versus the moment in zen-inspired works by artists such as Julius Bissie and by Thomas Lange on the contemporary South African artist William Kentridge. Color reproductions of artworks enhance this part of the volume, though full-size illustrations of a few key images such as Friedrich’s Lebensstufen would also have been welcome.

More coherently focused on the period around 1800, the section of the collection devoted to literature includes case studies on Novalis, Hölderlin, Schiller, and Goethe. Dirk Oschmann’s essay on Hermann und Dorothea makes a strong case, particularly in the idyll’s response to time, for the reinvestigation of a work that has teetered between charges of reactionary ideology and kitsch. Oschmann argues that Goethe’s late work as a whole abandons the novel for the epic in a move towards deceleration (though one might well ask where the “veloziferisch” Wanderjahre fit in this scheme). In two contributions by Ralf Simon and Klaus Manger, the West-Östlicher Divan and Faust, respectively, are also discussed productively as works that self-reflexively perform pluriform temporalities. Jutta Heinz takes a fragment from Novalis’s “Blüthenstaub” heralding a “geistige Gegenwart” as a poetic potentiation of past and present as her impetus to reread the poem “Astralis” from Heinrich von Ofterdingen against the backdrop of Romantic triadic conceptions of time. Jan Urbich’s powerful reading of the opening stanza...

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