Description
Book SynopsisMuseums of the Mind explores the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives.
Trade Review“It is the principal merit of this study to have highlighted the connections that bind the process of internalisation of memory in German literature with the tangible nature of museums as both objective and imaginative structures.”
—Daria Santini Oxford Art Journal
Table of ContentsContents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Part 1: Historical and Theoretical Coordinates of Museal and Literary Discourses
1. The Museum Function, Inventoried Consciousness, and German-Speaking Literature
2. Inventoried Consciousness Today: Durs Grünbein and W. G. Sebald
Part 2: The Rise of the Public Museum and Bildung
3. Ottilie Under Glass: Collecting as Disciplinary Regime in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften
4. The Museum of Bildung: Collecting in Stifter’s Nachsommer
Part 3: Acculturation, Commodification, and the Nation
5. Archaeology, Exhibition, and Tourism: Raabe’s “Keltische Knochen”
6. Flâneur Optical, Collector Tactile: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte as Imaginary Museum Landscape
Part 4: Narrative Interventions in the Museal Abuse of Culture
7. “Quiet Violence”: The Army Museum in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina
8. (Re)collecting the Twentieth Century: Siegfried Lenz’s Heimatmuseum
Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
