Complex Pleasure

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author, most recently, of Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form and Borrowed Lives (with Irene Giersing.)

• Preface; Introduction; Proem; 1. Wit and judgment; or, Lessing and Kant; 2. What is radical in Kant's 'Critique of Aesthetic Judgment'; 3. Holderlin's 'Swift Conceptual Grasp'; 4. Nietzsche's moods; 5. Telling Sadism in Musil's Young Torless; 6. Rapture in exile: Kafka's The Boy Who Sank Out of Sight; 7. Hearing Homonymy in Trakl's 'De Profundis'; 8. Benjamin's 'Affective Understanding' of Holderlin's odes 'The Poet's Courage' and 'Timidity'; Notes; Index.

"Elegance and intelligence meet on virtually every page of this intriguing book. I was persuaded by the perspicacity and inventiveness of the individual chapters and even more by the cumulative effect of the readings [of Lessing, Kant, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin]."—Ian Balfour, York University. "Written with enticing rhetoric and in an often-delightful polemical mode, Complex Pleasure vacillates between the temptation of a straight definition, whose premises are continuously undermined, and the pressure of literary texts, which emerges behind every theoretical demonstration. Thus, the book develops in the tension of the two languages, and keeps reflecting on itself, as it reflects the aesthetic experience."—Literary Research / Recherche Litteraire