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Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture
Series: - Literary Modernism, Volume: 9
Our contemporary society is obsessed with the idea of self-optimization, a concept that implies the need to constantly work on improving oneself and one’s appearance. The roots of postmodern self-optimization, however, lie in the cultural industries that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its equally profound and transient interest in new forms of expression, new ways of life, and new technologies, modernism thoroughly and critically embraced the idea of the self as something that can be created and recreated, either in accordance with or in contradiction to social norms. This book explores strategies of self-optimization developed in modernist literature and culture. In doing so, it offers a panoramic view of an often-overlooked aspect of European and North American modernity that anticipates our current postmodern crisis of the self.
Thorsten Carstensen is Lecturer of German at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and International Scholar of German at Indiana University – Indianapolis, USA. His current research interests include the life reform movement around 1900 and architectural discourses in German literature. He is the author of Romanisches Erzählen. Peter Handke und die epische Tradition (2013) and co-editor of Heimat in Literatur und Kultur. Neue Perspektiven (2023). He has also published on Hollywood cinema and Anglophone literature.
Mattias Pirholt is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on aesthetic issues such as autonomy, imitation, and intermediality. He has written extensively on Swedish, German, and American literature, from the eighteenth century to today. His publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (2012), Grenzerfahrungen. Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018), and the co-edited volume Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (2021).
Mattias Pirholt is Professor of Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on aesthetic issues such as autonomy, imitation, and intermediality. He has written extensively on Swedish, German, and American literature, from the eighteenth century to today. His publications include Metamimesis: Imitation in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Early German Romanticism (2012), Grenzerfahrungen. Studien zu Goethes Ästhetik (2018), and the co-edited volume Beyond Autonomy in Eighteenth-Century British and German Aesthetics (2021).
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture
Thorsten Carstensen and Mattias Pirholt
Part 1
The Self
1 The Freedom to Become: Henri Bergson’s Recovery of the Unquantified Self
Thomas Sutherland
2 Making the Violin Happy: A Posthumanist Analysis of the Failure of Self-Optimization in Selma Lagerlöf’s The Story of a Country House
Ann-Sofie Lönngren
3 Policing the Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction
Peter Childs
Part 2
Emotions and Nerves
4 “To Win Back the Right to Great Affects!” Nietzsche, Vitalism and Self-Optimization
Paul Bishop
5 Knut Hamsun, America, and Walt Whitman: On the Use of Literary Criticism as Self-Optimization
Eirik Vassenden
6 William and Henry James, the Neurasthenic Generation, and the Quest for Illness
Wenwen Guo
7 Paul Lasker-Schüler and the Troubled Legacy of “Crip Pedagogy” at the Odenwaldschule
Gunther Martens
Part 3
Body and Gender
8 Naked Triumphs and National Renewal: Heinrich Pudor and the German Life Reform Movement
Thorsten Carstensen
9 Perfect Bodies: Physical Culture and Self-Optimization in the United States Around 1900
Simon Wendt
10 “Perfection of the Life, or of the Work”: W.B. Yeats and the Struggle for Self-Optimization
Peter Liebregts
11 The Tragedy of a Woman: Alma Karlin and the Fragmented Self
Nicole Perry
12 Gender and Self-Optimization in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi. Eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Mädchen
Brangwen Stone
Part 4
The Technology of Self-Optimization
13 Planning for Success: Gustav Großmann’s Method of Self-Rationalization as an Economic Theory of Behavior
Ralph Köhnen
14 Henry Parland’s Cyborgs: The Problematic Perfection of Man
Mattias Pirholt
15 Anthropotechnik? Ernst Jünger’s Organic Constructions, Self-Optimization and Modernity
Nicholas Saul
16 Neues Bauen, Neues Wohnen: Self-Optimization through Better Architecture
Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Index
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Self-Optimization in Modernist Culture
Thorsten Carstensen and Mattias Pirholt
Part 1
The Self
1 The Freedom to Become: Henri Bergson’s Recovery of the Unquantified Self
Thomas Sutherland
2 Making the Violin Happy: A Posthumanist Analysis of the Failure of Self-Optimization in Selma Lagerlöf’s The Story of a Country House
Ann-Sofie Lönngren
3 Policing the Self in Malcolm Lowry’s Fiction
Peter Childs
Part 2
Emotions and Nerves
4 “To Win Back the Right to Great Affects!” Nietzsche, Vitalism and Self-Optimization
Paul Bishop
5 Knut Hamsun, America, and Walt Whitman: On the Use of Literary Criticism as Self-Optimization
Eirik Vassenden
6 William and Henry James, the Neurasthenic Generation, and the Quest for Illness
Wenwen Guo
7 Paul Lasker-Schüler and the Troubled Legacy of “Crip Pedagogy” at the Odenwaldschule
Gunther Martens
Part 3
Body and Gender
8 Naked Triumphs and National Renewal: Heinrich Pudor and the German Life Reform Movement
Thorsten Carstensen
9 Perfect Bodies: Physical Culture and Self-Optimization in the United States Around 1900
Simon Wendt
10 “Perfection of the Life, or of the Work”: W.B. Yeats and the Struggle for Self-Optimization
Peter Liebregts
11 The Tragedy of a Woman: Alma Karlin and the Fragmented Self
Nicole Perry
12 Gender and Self-Optimization in Irmgard Keun’s Gilgi. Eine von uns and Das kunstseidene Mädchen
Brangwen Stone
Part 4
The Technology of Self-Optimization
13 Planning for Success: Gustav Großmann’s Method of Self-Rationalization as an Economic Theory of Behavior
Ralph Köhnen
14 Henry Parland’s Cyborgs: The Problematic Perfection of Man
Mattias Pirholt
15 Anthropotechnik? Ernst Jünger’s Organic Constructions, Self-Optimization and Modernity
Nicholas Saul
16 Neues Bauen, Neues Wohnen: Self-Optimization through Better Architecture
Deborah Ascher Barnstone
Index
The market for the book is primarily academic, targeting established scholars, undergraduate and graduate students studying international modernist literature and culture.