Dissertation

Framing Realism: The Motif of the Frame in the Works of Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, and Theodor Storm

Doose, Susan Bentley

2018

Overview

This project investigates the frame as a recurring motif in works of German poetic realism. Despite the frame’s pervasiveness throughout this body of literature, its function has remained largely unaccounted for by scholarship. Accordingly, my analyses reposition the frame as a signifier that requires interpretation. Focusing primarily on the role of picture frames within these narratives, my analyses also include other types of extra-aesthetic frames, as well as certain linguistic, structural, and discursive frameworks. In Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich ( Green Henry, 1855/1879), Adalbert Stifter’s Nachkommenschaften (Descendants, 1864), and Theodor Storm’s Viola tricolor (1874), the frame represents a privileged site for reflecting on the aesthetic agenda of poetic realism. At the same time, frames often communicate ideas of a non-literary nature. An analysis of Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich reveals the frame’s essential function as a moderating force between excesses relating to economics, aesthetics, and gender. Keller’s novel is thereby situated as both a timely social critique and an important means for explicating a theory of realism based on aesthetic moderation. Harnessing the frame’s ability to represent absence, Stifter’s Nachkommenschaften reveals a fundamental message about the power of certain invisible realities that not only provide life with immanent meaning, but are also essential to the author’s specific conception of the realist project. Finally, Storm’s Viola tricolor employs the frame in order to theorize the construction of literary and gender identity, both of which are the product of exclusion, an attempt to order an inherently disordered system. The residual traces of such exclusion are evidenced by the presence of various frames, which shed light on a tension between superficial order and an underlying disorder, a tension between “fiction” and “reality” that lies at the heart of Storm’s understanding of the realist literary enterprise.

• Publisher: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
• Subject: Disorders / Fiction / German language / Keller, Gottfried (1819-1890) / Modern language / Novels / Self concept / Simmel, Georg (1858-1918) / Storm, Theodor / Storm, Theodor (1817-1888)
• ISBN: 9780438992214, 0438992210