Review of Dances of the self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffman and Heinrich Heine, by Ruprecht, L.
Hodkinson, James R. (2008) Review of Dances of the self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffman and Heinrich Heine, by Ruprecht, L. Modern Language Review, Vol.103 (No.3). pp. 895-896. ISSN 0026-7937Full text not available from this repository.
Official URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20467992
Lucia Ruprecht’s study provides a hitherto unwritten chapter in the history of the dialoguebetween the media of dance and literaturein German culture of the Romantic period. This ﬁrst English-language monograph on the topic deals with Kleist, Hoffmann, and Heine, and explores how each understood and represented the relationship between writing and bodily movement. The study is partly historical, reconstructing aspects of the eighteenth-century discourse on dance by reviewing such texts as manuals for the instruction of classical ballet. Examinations of the three authors’ letters, diaries, and aesthetic treatises show how each responded critically to these traditions, developingtheir own understandings of what dance was and could be made to express in a text: each drew more widely on cultural traditions involving relatively unorthodox, subversive practices of movement such as the cancan and the performances of the commedia dell’arte. However, Ruprecht also employs contemporary theory to good effect, citing critics such as Judith Butler, who employ psychoanalytic theory and hence see the physical as an expression of the psychic: if the body plays an important role in subject formation, then the dancing body in text can also enact the suffering and imperfections of a subject’s inner life (p. 7). The bodily performance of self can also be conceived in relation to normative cultural conventions such as gender roles and can define the subject as either resisting or adhering to these. [...]
|Item Type:||Book Review|
|Subjects:||P Language and Literature > PT Germanic literature|
|Divisions:||Faculty of Arts > German Studies|
|Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):||Kleist, Heinrich von, 1777-1811 -- Knowledge -- Dance, Hoffmann, E. T. A. -- (Ernst Theodor Amadeus), 1776-1822 -- Knowledge -- Dance, Heine, Heinrich, 1797-1856 -- Knowledge -- Dance, Dance in literature, Dance -- Germany -- History -- 19th century|
|Journal or Publication Title:||Modern Language Review|
|Book Title:||Dances of the self in Heinrich von Kleist, E. T A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine|
|Official Date:||1 July 2008|
|Number of Pages:||2|
|Page Range:||pp. 895-896|
|Access rights to Published version:||Restricted or Subscription Access|
Actions (login required)