TRANSPORTS OF IMAGINATION: POETRY AND THE REHABILITATION OF EXPERIENCE, 1830–1860 Martin Dawson A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German Studies Chapel Hill 2021 Approved by: Gabriel Trop Eric Downing Stefani Engelstein Aleksandra Prica Christina Weiler © 2021 Martin Dawson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Martin Dawson: Transports of Imagination: Poetry and the Rehabilitation of Experience, 1830-1860 (Under the direction of Gabriel Trop) This dissertation examines how poets of the German late romantic and restoration periods between 1830 and 1860 disrupt the systematizing drive of technological, cultural, and industrial advancements during the nineteenth century in Germany by establishing connections with the past: both a large-scale geological past and discrete historical moments. My dissertation focuses on the lyric works of Joseph von Eichendorff, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Eduard Mörike. Often read as nostalgic, quietist, or political conservatives, I argue that their works enact in their readers an experiential, temporal expansion in contact with modes of "pastness" that can in turn serve as a normative standpoint of critique and explore alternative forms of experience. The first chapter examines how Eichendorff’s transformative poetic practice that at once emphasizes the disruptive and connective potential of acts of "transcription." Transcription involves writing that crosses boundaries: from nature to text (in lyric); from life to text (in autobiography); or from text to text (in translation). In these different domains, I show how Eichendorff' creates texts that at once transcend the life and context of their creator and bear his unmistakable character. The second chapter locates in Droste-Hülshoff’s lyric works what I call uncanny animation, an imaginative strangeness that repurposes the contemporaneous technical advancements of the daguerreotype and the railway in order to disrupt their respective logics of reproducibility and temporal acceleration. In her lyric works, Droste-Hülshoff disrupts the tight fit between subject and technology to reincorporate the reader into a more imaginatively iii expansive world. She performs an analogous operation in lyric works that focus on more abject aspects of nature—dust, earth, and bones, for example—which are animated in order to challenge dominant patterns of intelligibility. In the final chapter, I show how Mörike mobilizes play as an aesthetic operation responding to the temporally inflected traumas of modernity that prioritize the present's relentless drive to produce a future. I argue that Mörike develops a concept of poetic play with forms in which the past is conserved—such as the fossil and the elegy—to loosen potentially constraining frameworks of time, space, and genre associated with industrialization and modernization. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………... 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE PURSUIT OF TRANSFORMATIVE TRANSCRIPTION ACROSS JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF’S LYRIC, AUTOBIOGRAPHCIAL WORKS, AND TRANSLATIONS………………………………………………………………………………. 20 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 20 Transformation Through Lyric: “Wünschelrute,” “So oder so,” “Dichterlos,” and “Symmetrie”………………….. 22 Words That Resonate: Eichendorff’s Autobiographical Projects……………………….. 40 Conversations Across Time: Eichendorff’s Translations from Spanish………………… 52 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………. 67 CHAPTER TWO: UNCANNY ANIMATION OF THE DAGUERROTYPE AND THE GROUND IN THE LYRIC OF ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HÜLSHOFF………... 69 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………… 69 Moving Beyond the Frozen Reflection: On the Daguerreotype in Droste-Hülshoff’s Lyric……………………………………… 76 The Broken Mirror: “Das Spiegelbild”………………………………………….. 82 The Wandering Eye: “An Elise in der Ferne mit meinem Daguerrotyp”……….. 87 Finding an Alternative Image Beyond the Frame: “Das Bild”………………….. 92 Between Sterben and Reisen: Embodied Ground in Droste-Hülshoff’s “Der Hünenstein,” “Im Grase,” and “Die Mergelgrube”………………………………. 100 Finding Hollow and Hallowed Ground in “Der Hünenstein”………………….. 108 Becoming One with the Earth: “Im Grase” and “Die Mergelgrube”…………………………………………………………………...116 v Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...128 CHAPTER THREE: THE PLAYFUL AS AESTHETIC OPERATION IN EDUARD MÖRIKE’S “GÖTTLICHE REMINISZENZ,” IDYLLE VOM BODENSEE, AND MOZART AUF DER REISE NACH PRAG ………………. 131 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………. 131 Crossing Layers of Time: Playful Creation and Fossil Memories in “Göttliche Reminiszenz” …………………………………………………………... 140 Uniting Two Halves of a Whole: “Aus dem Gebiet der Seelenkunde” and “Doppelte Seelentätigkeit”………………………………………………………… 153 Playing with Genre: Idylle vom Bodensee……………………………………………... 161 Returning to Creative Play in Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag………………………. 173 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………... 191 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………… 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………… 197 vi INTRODUCTION: Lateness therefore is a kind of self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it. […] Late style is in, but oddly apart from the present. […] Late style does not admit the definitive cadences of death, instead death appears in a refracted mode, as irony […] the irony is how often lateness as theme and as style keeps reminding us of death.1 Edward Said, On Late Style This dissertation, and consequently my interest in the nineteenth-century authors Joseph von Eichendorff, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Eduard Mörike has at its center a preoccupation with dislocation. As Edward Said draws out in his final essay collection, On Late Style, lateness entails a curious temporal dislocation. The term “lateness” suggests a confusion of time; one has failed (accidentally or intentionally) to keep pace in transitioning into the next moment; one falls out of step. Said calls this lateness both an exile from the present and a position squarely situated within the present. As such, lateness simultaneously produces distance and contact. To exist in “lateness” is to maintain contact with both the present and the past while never fully occupying either position. Where Said’s essays deal with late period of work of composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten, this dissertation expands Said’s conception of lateness to look at authors whose entire style exhibits this quality. 1 Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, Reprint edition (Vintage, 2007), 26, 32–33. 1 The period from 1830 and 1860 saw great political, technological, industrial, and scientific advancements. The development of biology, paleontology and ecology as disciplines, the growing interest in genealogical studies, the increasing importance of national identity, and the invention of the steam engine and photography contributed to increasingly teleological formulations of “progress” along with temporal modes of experience that favor momentum and acceleration at the expense of contemplative and exploratory ways of being in the world. I argue, that in the wake of such totalizing projects and rapid developments, the works of Joseph von Eichendorff, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Eduard Mörike exhibit a form of “lateness” similar to Said’s conception, and through this “lateness” they enact in their readers an experiential, temporal dilation that can serve as a normative standpoint of critique and explore alternative forms of experience. This particular period was especially productive for Eichendorff, Droste-Hülshoff, and Mörike. Eichendorff had published his first poetry collection in 1838 and the first completed collection of his poems in 1841; Droste-Hülshoff’s first collection of poems also appeared in 1838, with an expanded collection following in 1844; and finally, Mörike published a poetry collection in 1838 with an expanded second edition in 1848. In their poetry collections and closely-related prose works, Droste-Hülshoff, Eichendorff, and Mörike gesture toward various imaginative poetic operations that emphasize a connection with the past. At first glance, these authors appear preoccupied with different themes and interests; however, in their texts, they address the problems of experience that appear concomitant with radical acceleration. They all strongly identify with their geographical region; their works are infused with a feeling of epigonism; and they all view the past as a space of imagination, and have thus often been characterized as provincial, traditional, innocuous, or apolitical. Much of these characterizations 2 are due in part to the position of these authors in literary histories, namely, within a historiographical construct of German literature not commonly associated with a progressive agenda: the late romantic and restoration (or Biedermeier) periods. The historiography of both late romantic and Biedermeier style has emphasized a reductive, narrowing, or tame quality within their historical and ideological boundaries. These styles overlap historically, while also taking up a critical position vis-à-vis the literary projects of the early nineteenth century, which has also received measurably greater scholarly attention. The works of the late romantic style have often raised the suspicion that authors of this period pursued a more reactionary political agenda, adopted a regressive perspective on