Modernism's Struggle for the Soul

Rainer Maria Rilke's Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge and Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina , despite their distance from one another in time and many other profound differences, are, it is argued here, comparable in that they both mimic the modern deformation of the soul in order to mount aesthetic opposition to it. Since the advent of postmodernism in the 1970s, this struggle for the soul belongs to the past. However, a structure of hope for a newly conceived idea of the soul remains in place, even though this structure must remain without a content. Only the complex clear‐sightedness of Modernism could have left such a legacy

Art · Art history · Humanities · Literature · Modernism (music · Postmodernism · Soul · Theology · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy