Somnambulistic Lucidity

Eric J. Klaus earned his Ph.D. in German studies from Brown University. He is currently Associate Professor of German at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has published in Seminar, Modern Austrian Literature, and Garmano-Slavica.

• List of Figures – Foreword – Acknowledgments – Prelude: Of Sleepwalkers and Semiospheres – Gustav Meyrink—Living, Writing, and Searching on the Periphery – The Modern Condition and the Semiosphere of Religiosity – Interlude: The Somnambulist in the Semiosphere Modern Religiosity – The Early Works: Meister Leonard and Liminality – The Early Novels (1915–1917) – The Late Novels (1921–1927) – Coda: Consonance in Dissonance – Index.

“In his conceptually engaging and well-written study, «Somnambulistic Lucidity», Eric J. Klaus portrays Gustav Meyrink’s development from a flamboyant outsider to a spiritualistic recluse and concentrates on his esoteric response to what Max Weber called the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Quite in tune with anti-rationalist, spiritual and occultist movements of his time, Meyrink searched for non-traditional revelation and redemption and created, beyond the iconic «Golem» (1915), somnambulistic characters who claimed to have access to the beyond. While exploring such ideas and narratives runs the risk of giving in to the ideological subtext, Klaus avoids this danger by putting Meyrink’s occultism in the context of Yuri Lotman’s semiotic theory, with emphasis on the ‘semiospheres’ in the explosion of alternate meaning.”Hinrich C. Seeba, Professor Emeritus of German, University of California at Berkeley