Synopses & Reviews
Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salomé's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations o fsome of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's contributions to contemporar ydiscourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salomé's historical, social, and intellectual contexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson, and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salomé — committed as she was to the"double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing — refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salomé offered an image epistemology or"aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference,experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.
Review
“In her exploration and explication of Andreas-Salome´s thought, [Brinker-Gabler] draws on a wide and interesting variety of thinkers from Spinoza, Leibniz, and Darwin to Benjamin, Irigaray, and Derrida. Given its broad scope, this book promises to be of interest to everyone who works on the artifacts and the culture of the twentieth century, whether Germanists or not.” -Muriel Cormican,
Monatshefte
Review
Proceeding from its lucid analysis of relatively known territory in Andreas-Salomé criticism—the 'Human Being as Woman' essay — to the less discussed Rilke texts, Brinker-Gabler's Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé opens new vistas and insights on Andreas-Salome's surprisingly multidisciplinary writings and thought. Fascinating throughout is the kaleidoscope of links that integrate Andreas-Salomé's developments to a broad historical range of influences and echoes, likewise preceding from the known — Nietzsche, Freud — to the new, fostering new insights on this author's range and contexts: back to Spinoza, Baroque emblems, Leibniz,and Darwin; forward to Irigaray, Kristeva, and Benjamin. Theoretically dense yet lucid, Image in Outline is a welcome new pillar in recent decades' discourse on Andreas-Salomé's contribution to modern cultural and literary thought at the turn of the twentieth century. -
Raleigh Whitinger, Professor of German, University of Alberta, CanadaWith this book, Gisela Brinker-Gabler makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Lou Andreas-Salomé, bringing Andreas-Salomé into dialogue with some of her own contemporaries, such as Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Buber, as well as with some of our contemporaries, including Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and Julia Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler shows convincingly that Andreas-Salomé was an important and innovative modern thinker who made significant contributions to discourses on gender and cultural difference, border crossings, creativity, and the human condition. This book will be of interest both to Lou Andreas-Salomé scholars and to those who want to learn more about the interdisciplinary discourses circulating in Europe at the turn of the last century. - Muriel Cormican, Professor of German, University of West Georgia, USA
Synopsis
A exploration of Lou Andreas-Salomé's critical and creative transformation of modern thought
Synopsis
This new study introduces the reader into Lou Andreas-Salomé's critical and creative engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to meaning, perception, memory and the unconscious. Making use of conceptual frameworks of Irigaray and Benjamin, Freud and Kristeva, among others, Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salome displaces dominant visions of gender and sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity with multifaceted revisions through the female lens of a creative thinker. With her aesthetics of the "in-visible," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, Andreas-Salomé seeks to retrieve the multilayered past that is embedded in the present and to give positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and becoming.
About the Author
Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. She has previously taught at the University of Cologne (Germany), the University of Essen (Germany), and the University of Florida (USA). She is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1978, 5th revised and extended edition 2007), Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (1996), and "If We Had the Word. "Ingeborg Bachmann: Views and Reviews (2004, with Markus Zisselsberger).
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: Umriss--B(u)ilding Woman or Sexual Difference
Chapter Two: Andreas-Salomé's Aesthetics
Chapter Three: Icon: B(u)ilding Russia or Cultural Difference
Chapter Four: Nachtrauer: B(u)ilding Rilke or Modern Creativity
Chapter Five: (Un)doing Modern Thought
Bibliography
Index