Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Heinrich Heine (review)

The intermedial study of dance and literature has been developing since the early 1990s as part of a larger trend towards interdisciplinary studies. Important contributions to this subfield, such as Sarah Davies Cordova's Paris Dances (1999) and Felicia McCarren's Dance Pathologies (1998), have tended to focus on late-nineteenth-century or modernist examples from French literature. The reasons for this focus are twofold: classical and romantic ballet developed primarily in France, and French literature echoed these developments. Studies on dance and literature have been slower to emerge in German studies, and Lucia Ruprecht's Dances of the Self adds several new dimensions to the intersecting discourses of movement and textuality: 1) she considers dance in the work of three major German writers, 2) she takes us back almost a full century from the symbolist dancophiles of Mallarmé, Valéry, or even Hofmannsthal, and 3) she moves away from a purely textual metaphor of dance to discuss the actual dances of the period and the ways in which these are represented in language. She documents choreography and dance history, and she brings into discussion real dancers who influenced these authors.

Though one might assume a book on dance to treat the frivolous entertainment for the bourgeoisie, Ruprecht's book is anything but lighthearted. At least as much philosopher and theorist as literary scholar, she takes us on a swift trip through Enlightenment concepts of the body to poststructuralist positions on subjectivity. Her readings of Kant are framed in a post-Foucauldian rhetoric. At times, the pace at which new ideas are introduced – Winckelmann, Kant, and Schiller, then on to Foucault (disciplining the body and the care of the self), Butler (gender performativity), Austin (performative utterances), Derrida (reiteration and iterability), Freud (primacy of the visual in psychosexual development), Lacan (mirror stage), Kristeva (subject in process), and Benjamin (politics and poetics of allegory) – is dizzying, and leaves one struggling to follow Ruprecht's own thread. On the one hand, the book has the feel of a dissertation in its efforts to cover all the bases and demonstrate breadth and erudition. On the other hand, it is all the richer because Ruprecht casts such a wide net.

The principle argument is that Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine, each in his own way, pick up on Winckelmann's classicist body idealized in the Greek statue, but challenge this harmonious perfection by contaminating its static purity with movement and erotic sensuality. Each author uses the paradoxes of form and expression within dance, but also the tensions between writing and dancing to extend and even modernize notions of corporeality. Furthermore, through extended metaphors of dance and movement, the three writers in question produce new configurations of subjectivity. Terpsichorical allegories create movement landscapes that enable these writers to produce a counteraesthetics and a counterpolitics of the self all in one sweep. While ballet is at the core of dance aesthetics in the eighteenth century, Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine turn to other related movement arts – puppet theatre, commedia dell'arte, mime, and cancan – to explore alternative corporeal and textual expressions. The writers use self-reflexivity and rhetorical playfulness, argues Ruprecht, as forms of both entertainment and "performative exercises for the articulation of cultural and personal narratives embodied in the dances of the self."

Kleist's marionettes, functioning as prosthetic limbs and uncanny pseudohumans, do not meet the aesthetic requirements for the ideal body, but instead perform clumsy, mechanical, or even dysfunctional dances. As such, Kleist counters Schiller's discourses on grace as well as thwarting practices of ballet around 1800. Moving away from Kant's Critique of Judgment and the disinterested gaze, Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater and Schiller's Gracefulness and Dignity perform beauty as relative, and devise a concept of grace that includes gravity. Romantic ballet goes to great lengths to create illusions of antigravity, but can go no further than pointe, the result of...