This study investigates how the aesthetic concept of Stimmung [‘mood’ or ‘attunement’] informs the affective and experiential dimension of the reading process through the lens of modern philosophy and literature. It seeks to establish ‘mood’ as a key concept in literary theory and to outline the modes and articulations of this aesthetic phenomenon as an integral part of the modern discourse on existentialism and aesthetics. Modernity, I propose, fundamentally redefined Stimmung as an intersubjective phenomenon, and has sparked a sustained exploration of this concept in pivotal philosophical and literary texts of the modern age. The study first examines the conceptual history of this term and its musical origin to then focus on Martin Heidegger’s redefinition of attunement as a crucial aspect of his ontology. From these considerations, a phenomenological theory of Stimmung in literature is developed, in which the reading process is defined through the attunement between text and reader. I subsequently further refine this notion by analysing the central role of Stimmung in the narrative fiction of three key authors of modern literature: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard. What these readings demonstrate is a significant shift towards an aesthetic of intensity and immediacy, in which the experience of the reading process takes centre stage. Stimmung as an attunement between text and reader uncovers the dynamic relationality of aesthetic reception, and is inextricably connected to dominant modes of conceptualising existence and experience in the modern age. Ultimately, I demonstrate how the specific modern configuration of Stimmung answers to a sense of crisis and vicissitude that aesthetic modernity has transformed into a mood in its own right.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:731378 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Breidenbach, Birgit |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/95560/ |
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