The temptation of symmetry: Hamann, Herder, Kierkegaard, and Henry James
Item
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Title
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The temptation of symmetry: Hamann, Herder, Kierkegaard, and Henry James
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:31ad3ba7e104:11569
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identifier
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12056
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Creator
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Yamato, Lori,
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Contributor
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Joshua Wilner
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Comparative literature | American literature | German literature | Philosophy | fragment | Hamann | Herder | James | Kierkegaard | limping
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Abstract
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The texts that The Temptation of Symmetry: Hamann, Herder, Kierkegaard and Henry James treats, by J. G. Hamann (Aesthetica in nuce ), J. G. Herder (Zerstreute Blatter), Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling and Stages on Life's Way), and Henry James (The Sacred Fount), are united by a shared skepticism toward systematic thought and by a quirk of writing that pairs truncated figures of symbolic speech with broken bodies. These preoccupations seem at first to have little relation to each other. But in the works under examination in this project, they coalesce around an emblematic structural trope: symmetry. This study examines how and why symmetry is such a loaded issue in these texts. Symmetry, after all, would seem to be an inherently desirable principle, eternally beautiful and valid across disciplines and centuries, able to unite opposition and create a unified whole out of miscellany and fragmentation. I propose that each of these writers explodes symmetry as a temptation and a false ideal.;Symmetry, an inherently structural concept, is suspect as a willful external imposition, but it has the virtue of also being a concept that can be examined as narrative content. That is, these authors seize the spatial design of symmetry (which would normally direct and control a text as a kind of unseen hand), thematize it, and allow the texts to engulf, digest, dissect, and dismember the abstraction. The questioning of symmetry is an explicit core preoccupation in their texts.;The peculiar intensity of the interest in symmetry common to the texts in this study lies in the sharp twist that the hallmark combination of syncopated figural language and fragmented physical bodies gives to their rejection of symmetry's urge to completeness. And, while ruined bodily figures and truncated figurative language are individually obvious choices for keeping symmetry at bay---and the term figure creates a deeper-than-merely-homonymic connection between the two---the interweaving of the two is particularly powerful as it strikes at the level of form and content and forces reader and author alike to confront questions of genre and discipline, word and physical body.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Comparative Literature
