THE VALUE FORM: ECONOMIES of PROSE in TIECK, KELLER, and WALSER a Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School O
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE VALUE FORM: ECONOMIES OF PROSE IN TIECK, KELLER, AND WALSER A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Nathan James Taylor December 2017 © 2017 Nathan James Taylor THE VALUE FORM: ECONOMIES OF PROSE IN TIECK, KELLER, AND WALSER Nathan James Taylor, Ph. D. Cornell University 2017 This dissertation explores literary economies of prose in German-language literature from the 1830s to the early twentieth century, granting particular focus to questions of economic value. The problem of value, this study argues, becomes a central literary concern after the end of the Kunstperiode (Heine) when the question of literature’s relation to everyday life – the central problem of prosaic art – turns into a reflection on the value of literature as art, as commodity, as work. While value remains an elusive problem in aesthetic, economic, and moral discourses of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, literary authors such as Ludwig Tieck, Gottfried Keller, and Robert Walser generate an arsenal of value forms (Marx) that, in different ways, interrogate and shape relations between literature and the world, life and art, work and play, and, most of all, the status of the economic in literary texts. I analyze three value forms in Tieck, Keller, and Walser: lack and surplus; credit and debt; performance (Leistung) and invention. The problem of prose’s value is literalized in Ludwig Tieck’s novella Des Lebens Überfluß (1838), which documents how a last-resort Romantic attempt to turn the lack of poetry in a prosaic world into surplus runs up against value’s sine qua non: finitude or, in Tieck’s novella, need. I then analyze relations of credit and debt in Gottfried Keller’s 1874 novella Kleider machen Leute, which, I argue, engages central discussions about what constitutes value in late-nineteenth-century political economy, philosophy, and aesthetics as it reframes the older narrative trope of fortune in terms of a capitalist transfiguration: the risky turn from insolvency to solvency and vice versa. A last chapter argues for a subtype of literary genre, which I call the Leistungsroman, and which I trace specifically to Robert Walser’s novel Der Gehülfe (1908). Walser’s novel about clerical work and the insolvency of an entrepreneurial engineer pivots not around the question of Bildung but around the clerical employee’s (often written) job performance in the context of a division of labor between invention and performance (Leistung). The move to a Leistungsroman enacts a transvaluation of the modern novel, and the values of human and literary innovation and productivity that underwrite it, by reconfiguring the novel’s relation to work, action, and invention. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Nathan Taylor received his B.A. in German Studies and Economics from Austin College in 2005. From 2010 to 2017 he studied in the Department of German Studies at Cornell University, receiving his M.A. in 2014 and his Ph.D. in 2017. In 2014-2016 he was a guest at the Goethe- Universität Frankfurt am Main on a DAAD Research Grant and a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. Since January 2017, Nathan Taylor teaches and works as wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter in the Institut für deutsche Literatur und ihre Didaktik at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to my committee of advisors in Ithaca who provided unrelenting support and inspiration for this project. Paul Fleming, my advisor at Cornell, provided indispensible feedback, encouragement, and good spirits at critical points along the way. I thank him first and foremost for all the support, guidance, and good company. My other committee members – Leslie Adelson, Patrizia McBride, and Geoff Waite – are equally deserving of my thanks for their precise comments, critical input, and helpful advice. I would like to thank the larger German Studies community at Cornell for the years of dialogue and camaraderie, which provided a good sense of place and direction. To Elke Siegel, Annette Schwarz, Peter Gilgen, Peter Uwe Hohendahl I am grateful for conversations and courses that provoked further thought. To Miriam Zubal and Cierra Rae I am grateful for the indispensible administrative support. Beyond the German Department at Cornell, I owe a great deal of thanks to Eva Geulen and Heinz Drügh for their support in Frankfurt. Both have provided a warm and exciting community in Frankfurt and aided in the transition to a new academic setting. Colleagues in both Ithaca and Frankfurt have helped shape this project in crucial ways. Particular thanks go to Timothy Attanuci, Marvin Baudisch, Felix Christen, Lars Friedrich, Jette Gindner, Maria Kuberg, Florian Sprenger, and many others for their input and conversation. For feedback on early work on this project in the context of a writing group sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and Cornell’s Society for the Humanities I am grateful to Bruno Bosteels, Paul Fleming, Amanda Goldstein, Antoine Traisnel, and Johannes Wankhammer. For the opportunity to present work and receive excellent feedback I thank Iuditha Balint and Jochen Hörisch in Mannheim as well. This project was inspired in other ways by Dan Nuckols and Truett Cates, and through courses, reading groups, and conversations with Annie McClanahan and Joshua Clover. Research for this project was generously supported by the DAAD and by a Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. iv My friends in Mainz and Ithaca have provided community and company that directly and indirectly supported this dissertation work. I am particularly grateful to Johannes Wankhammer who has been a source of consistent friendship, distraction, dialogue, and support. Matteo Calla offered solidarity and a fresh perspective on everything under the sun (in addition to a good coffee); Kevin Duong a steady hand in the kitchen, great conversation, and much inspiration; Dan Sinykin was an excellent porch interlocutor and an excellent friend from near and afar. Carl Gelderloos, Anna Horakova, Bret Leraul, Becquer Medak-Seguin, Hannah Miller, Seth and Maggie Soulstein, Kartik and Ali Sribarra, and Facundo Vega made Ithaca an exciting and warm place to be. In Mainz Agitha Anandarajah, Daniela Berner, Björn Bertrams, Daniel Borgeldt, Stefan Born, Jochen Dörrscheidt, Till Hilmar, Jan Peter Ibs, Judith Schmidt, and Judith Wagner made me feel at home and have over the years at kitchen tables, in raunchy bars, and now in living rooms with crawling kids provided good times and good energy to balance the life at the desk. Javier Burdman, Klara Schubenz, Carly and Dominik Ottenbreit also helped me recharge and offered excellent input and dialogue for this work. To my parents in California I am grateful for the encouragement to pursue a PhD. Finally I owe the greatest amount of thanks to my partner Lena Krian, who stood by me with unbelievable commitment through this dissertation and without whom not a single word would ever have made it on the page. I thank Lena for the immeasurable support, steadfast love, and heartwarming companionship that was unwavering throughout the ups and downs of this dissertation. And to Henry, for making me wear that glittering-green cowboy hat when writing the last words of this dissertation, and just generally for all your wacky fun. v TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS IV TABLE OF CONTENTS VI LIST OF FIGURES VIII INTRODUCTION THE VALUE FORM OF LITERATURE 1 A KIND OF PREFACE: PROSE IN THE COMPTOIR 1 TALK OF VALUE 12 THE SUPERFLUOUS VALUE OF PROSE 19 THE VALUE FORM AS METHOD (MARX, SIMMEL) 22 ÜBERFLUSS, SCHULDENVERKEHR, LEISTUNG 26 CHAPTER ONE SUPERFLUOUS PROSE: TIECK’S LAST ROMANTIC GESTURE 35 EXHAUSTED MEANS 35 POETIC WASTE 40 AN ECONOMIC GOSPEL (NOVALIS ON GOETHE) 45 BEHIND THE BACKS OF THE BOURGEOISIE: THE WIRTSCHAFTSWUNDER OF THE NOVELLA 55 SUPERFLUOUS MARVEL (DES LEBENS ÜBERFLUSS) 61 THE LOVE-CHILD OF LACK AND PLENTY: EROS 69 CYNICISM AND ASCETICISM 71 THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE OF LIFE 79 NOVELISTIC CHIT-CHAT – POLICING THE FRIVOLOUS 81 CHAPTER TWO SCHULDENVERKEHR: CONJUNCTURES OF FORTUNE IN KELLER 86 TRANSFIGURATION AND TRANSVALUATION 86 THE FALL OF THE DEBTOR 91 NARRATING WASTE 99 THE “FÜGUNG” OF FORTUNE I (KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE) 105 MARX, NIETZSCHE, KELLER 106 THE “FÜGUNG” OF FORTUNE II (KLEIDER MACHEN LEUTE) 113 CHAPTER THREE PERFORMANCE & INVENTION: ROBERT WALSER’S LEISTUNGSROMAN 131 SCENES OF PERFORMANCE 131 THE LEISTUNGSROMAN 134 THE INSTITUTION OF LEISTUNG 139 THE TECHNE OF LEISTUNG 144 CLERICAL FEHLLEISTUNG 147 vi PERFORMANCE ANXIETY 161 DISRUPTION OF SERVICE 170 THE SERVICE WORKER (LEISTUNG AND IMMATERIAL LABOR) 177 TECHNICAL PERFORMANCE 183 PERFORMANCE, INVENTION, OR REALIZATION? 188 WALSER’S PREIS-LEISTUNGSVERHÄLTNIS 199 CONCLUSION GELD ODER LEBEN: VALUE AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES 205 BIBLIOGRAPHY 211 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Robert Walser’s Clerical Handwriting ................................................................................. 160 Figure 2. Advertisement for Carl Dubler’s Gnom Steam-Trap Device ............................................... 185 viii INTRODUCTION The Value Form of Literature “In Kunst ist mit mehr Fug von Wert zu reden als sonstwo” Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie A Kind of Preface: Prose in the Comptoir In the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Schiller was drafting his treatise on how the fine arts might pave the way to a truly free aesthetic state, Goethe was grappling with how to make great art and still appeal to the taste of an emerging literary public, and Kant was inaugurating aesthetic autonomy by arguing for the judgment of the beautiful as distinct from practical and epistemological matters, another literary author in Germany was confronting the very question of what his art was worth in a particularly parodic, head-on manner. That author was Jean Paul, whose confrontation was marked by embracing, rather than shunning, the overlaps between art and the utilitarian sphere of the economic.