Writing the Mountains

Jens Klenner is Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College, USA, and a Fellow of the German Studies Association. He has written extensively on German studies and philosophy, with one of his most recent works being the edited journal, Sprache und Rache (2019, co-edited with Juliane Prade-Weiss).

• AcknowledgmentsNote on Translation1. Mountains Transformed—Towards an Alpine Aesthetic 1779—No Human Eye Could Do it JusticeMountains at Rest? Kant and the Sublime Georg Simmel and The Resistance of Mountains Shifting Forms 2. Figures from Mines—E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Die Bergwerke zu Falun” 1720—Summer Source Material An Aesthetic Existence A Task for Poets An Empty Cipher Inversion, Transformations, Transitions 3. Lost in the Mountains—Perspective and Displacement in Georg Büchner’s LenzArrivals Windows to the World Return to the Mountains A Lethal Gaze Medusa in the Mountains 4. Folded Mountains—Paul Celan’s “Gespräch im Gebirg” Mountains Vanished August 1959—Reading Leibniz Leaving for the Mountains Wordscapes The Folded Eye 5. Liquid Mountains—Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Kinder der Toten Mountain Graves Historical Matters Into the Mountains Metamorphoses—Die Murie. Die Furie Coda Mountains Immaterial Bibliography Index

Jens Klenner’s ambitious, historically sweeping study of German mountain literature takes its reader from the Kantian sublime to contemporary ideas of mountain immateriality, digging into some challenging and complex literary expressions of mountains along the way