Transfiguring Social Nature: Environmental and Aesthetic Transformations in German Realism
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TRANSFIGURING SOCIAL NATURE: ENVIRONMENTAL AND AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATIONS IN GERMAN REALISM 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 Alexander Robert Phillips August 2015 © 2015 Alexander Robert Phillips TRANSFIGURING SOCIAL NATURE: ENVIRONMENTAL AND AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATIONS IN GERMAN REALISM Alexander Robert Phillips, Ph.D. This dissertation investigates the relation between post-1848 German realist aesthetics and the representation of nature as physically reconstituted by the human labor process. Environmental transformation in the form of cultivation, pollution, and sprawl would appear to pose a challenge to a realist poetics invested in achieving artistic status through “transfiguration” (Verklärung), or the synthesis between material reality and poesy, inasmuch as the mimetic representation of ecological depredation carries with it a reassertion of both prosaic capitalist relations and the base material reality capitalism produces. This study asks how Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane negotiate the mimetic and poetic imperatives of realism where their texts encounter environmental depredation. I argue that the environment's increasingly social character feeds into each author's poetic project, such that environmental transformation grounds a dynamic realism that binds political critique with a broader theoretical reflection on the conditions of possibility for poesy in modernity. The encounter between the social production of nature and poetic realism is crucial for Stifter, for whom the cultivation of the environment mirrors the task he assigns to realist narrative of making perceptible the general moral order that sustains the universe. These cultivated utopias are impossible for Wilhelm Raabe, for whom environmental depredation becomes an agent of generative destabilization that stymies the transfiguration gesture and catalyzes a critical reevaluation of the status of art in a degraded world. Finally I turn to Fontane's Stechlin to consider how the poetic character of Brandenburg is determined by an emerging Anthropocene reality. By looking at the relation between environmental depredation and art, “Transfiguring Social Nature” develops a line of ecocritical inquiry that moves beyond the focus of much earlier ecocritical scholarship on nature and place to account for the poetically constitutive aspects of environmental transformation while also considering its deleterious effects. At the same time considering environmental issues as integral to the texts' otherwise social framework allows us to see realism both as a dynamic literary and theoretical discourse that also figures within the genealogy of contemporary environmentalism. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Alexander Phillips received his B.A. in German Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2007, having also studied at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. From 2007-2008 he studied again at the Humboldt Universität with a DAAD Fellowship. He began studying German literature at Cornell University in 2008, receiving his MA in 2012 and his PhD in 2015. In January 2015 he began working as a Collegiate Assistant Professor with University of Maryland University College Europe. iii For Amy iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have been very fortunate to have completed this project in the company of people whose inspiration, encouragement, and suggestions contributed to it in ways both large and small. I wish to extend my gratitude first to my advisor, Anette Schwarz. Not only have I benefited from her guidance in developing this dissertation, but as the one who introduced me to two of the three authors included in this project, I have many hours of reading pleasure to thank her for. I am also grateful to the other two members of my dissertation committee, Patrizia McBride and Paul Fleming, for their invaluable commentary and helpfulness in sounding out the ideas that went into this project. I wish to thank the faculty and graduate students of the Department of German Studies at Cornell as a whole. In particular I wish to acknowledge Peter Uwe Hohendahl, who has been a valued supporter and interlocutor for my entire graduate career. Special thanks also go to Roland Berbig of the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, who has been a constant supporter of my academic endeavors since the days when I was first getting my feet wet in German Studies. A grant for Doctoral Research in Sustainability and the Humanities from the Society for the Humanities and the David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell, a Graduate Travel Grant from the Cornell Graduate School, and a Graduate Travel Grant, also from the Society for the Humanities, all supported travel to Germany in order to conduct research critical for this dissertation. I extend my appreciation also to the people at the Stadtarchiv Braunschweig, the Theodor-Fontane-Archiv in Potsdam, and the Stadtmuseum Berlin for their assistance in navigating the archives. Thank you also to the Institute for German Cultural Studies at Cornell for creating opportunities for me to present parts of this work both at Cornell and at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This project profited greatly from the insights developed in the v conversations that happened in both places. I had the pleasure of developing part of this dissertation with the members of my writing group, Xine Yao, Lily Cui, and Alex Lenoble. For years of camaraderie I thank the other members of my graduate cohort, Miyako Hayakawa and Andreea Mascan. A special Dankeschön also to the participants of the German Circle's Kaffeeklatsch for all the years of Wednesday afternoon geselliges Beisammensein. A thank you to my parents, Benjamin and Anita (now a Stifter fan herself), to my brothers, Andrew and Eugene, and to my grandparents for their interest in this project and their encouragement over the years. And above all a very special thank you to Amy Williams, my wife, best friend, and fellow traveler. Her intellectual support is reflected in the pages of this dissertation, but it was her love and companionship that made it possible in the first place. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH..........................................................................................................iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................v TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................................vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.......................................................................................................viii INTRODUCTION: Realism and the Social Character of Nature....................................................1 Nature and Environment.............................................................................................................8 Realism......................................................................................................................................20 Chapter Overview.....................................................................................................................28 CHAPTER 1: Producing Nature, Preserving the World: Adalbert Stifter.....................................31 Social Nature and the Order of Reality in Stifter's Poetics.......................................................33 Cultivating Nature and the Cheerful Abyss of Realism: Brigitta.............................................46 Cultivation and Catastrophe: Abdias.........................................................................................77 CHAPTER 2: The Styx Flows through Arcadia: Environmental Depredation and Aesthetic Reflection in Wilhelm Raabe's Pfisters Mühle and Die Akten des Vogelsangs...........................103 Where Have All the Pictures Gone?: Pfisters Mühle..............................................................107 From Green Hedges to Brick Walls: Die Akten des Vogelsangs.............................................139 CHAPTER 3: Towards a Poetics of the Anthropocene in Theodor Fontane's Der Stechlin........160 CONCLUSION: Realism's Environmental Poetics.....................................................................205 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................210 vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BA: Wilhelm Raabe Sämtliche Werke (Braunschweiger Ausgabe) GBA: Theodor Fontane Große Brandenburger Ausgabe HFA: Theodor Fontane Werke, Schriften und Briefe (Hanser Fontane Ausgabe) HKG: Adalbert Stifter Werke und Briefe: Historsich-kritische Gesamtausgabe ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment VASILO: Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter-Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich viii INTRODUCTION Realism and the Social Character of Nature In May 2000 atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biological scientist Eugene Stoermer argued that the scale of the human impact on the earth's systems meant that the planet had entered a new geological epoch, the “anthropocene.”1 “Holocene,” the officially recognized term for the current interglacial period, does not adequately account for the global scale of anthropogenic changes to the environment nor their duration, which may continue for the next 50,000 years.2 “Anthropocene” has yet to officially replace “Holocene” as the name for our