Daniel Kehlmann’s novel Mahlers Zeit questions the role of time as a fundamental tool through which humans access the world. While the novel’s protagonist believes that he can debunk the linearity of ...time, the narration of the text remains ambiguous about whether or not he is right. As the text oscillates between different conceptions of time—each presented as plausible only to be denied again—it develops an image of the world as an inscrutable place where humans cannot transcend the sphere of phenomena because they are always thrown back to their sensorium. The unmediated juxtaposition of the incompatible that prevents obtaining metaphysical certainty implies a rejection of the concepts of Magical Realism as well as Surrealism, both of which presuppose a knowledge of the metaphysical structure of the narrated world. Therefore, Mahlers Zeit requires a different classification: Gebrochener Realismus (Broken Realism). Moreover, because of the strict functionality of the moments of uncertainty, the category of Gebrochener Realismus is even more appropriate than Todorov’s fantastic.
Auf der Grundlage einer allgemeinen textphanomenologischen und -theoretischen Bestimmung des Phanomens einer poetica scientiae versucht die vorliegende Studie, mit Fokus auf der Literatur der ...Postmoderne und Gegenwart, zur Profilierung des ebenso strittigen wie konstruktiven Dialogs zwischen Literatur und Wissenschaften beizutragen. Ihrem Erkenntnisinteresse entsprechend gliedert sich die Untersuchung in drei Abschnitte: (I) Ein historisch-systematisch angelegter Grundlagenteil problematisiert die Leitdifferenz Literatur' und Wissenschaft' und erarbeitet sodann in dezidiert literarischer Perspektive das theoretische Fundament fur eine Poetik und Hermeneutik der literarischen Transformation wissenschaftlicher Diskurse. Die Abschnitte (II) und (III) gliedern sich in eine Reihe von Fallstudien und widmen sich der literarischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung (II) sowie der literarischen Epistemologie (III). Die Literatur erweist sich dabei nicht nur als passiver Speicher wissenschaftshistorischer Ereignisse und epistemologischer Theoreme, sondern ubernimmt ihrerseits wissenschaftshistorische und -historiographische sowie epistemologische Funktionen, von denen auch die Wissenschaften profitieren konnen.
This article approaches postsecularity from a historical angle by considering three recent German-language novels which reflect present-day ambivalences regarding religion and secularity through a ...genealogy of the present. Daniel Kehlmann’s Measuring the World, Ilija Trojanow’s Collector of Worlds, and Sibylle Lewitscharoff’s Blumenberg explore the gaps, fissures, and contradictions in the dichotomy of faith and reason which so haunts the present engagement with religion. They depict nineteenth- and twentieth-century protagonists who embrace a disenchanted outlook on the world, yet struggle with the specters of an older, enchanted cosmos. Through variants of the literary fantastic, and unreliable and polyperspectival narration, these books develop a view of the world that goes beyond facile dichotomies of faith and reason.
In his bestselling novel from 2005,
(
), Daniel Kehlmann brings together the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss in an effort to show that the scientific ...progress preached by the Enlightenment is a double-edged sword. Hence the double entendre of the title: Humboldt's and Gauss's "surveying" (
) enterprises typify human "arrogance" (
) toward nature. The ideas presented in Kehlmann's book were no doubt influenced by Thomas Pynchon's
(1997), a metafictional history in which the Mason and Dixon survey is represented as a rationalist endeavor that transforms the primitive American landscape into an organized grid of human control. Both authors are critiquing, from a postmodern vantage, eighteenth-century instrumental reason, which manifests itself in the urge to measure, chart, and demarcate the world. At various points in his narrative, Pynchon sums up this basic anthropocentric view as
, a term that recalls the early modern scientific project of
or the attempt to "mathematize" nature. According to Heidegger, mathesis, which sums up our modern technological attitude toward the world, developed as a result of Galilean geometry, Newtonian science, and Cartesian philosophy, all of which conceptualize reality according to purely speculative mathematical laws. This article brings Heidegger, Pynchon, and Kehlmann into dialogue with one another in an effort to show how they each critique, in remarkably similar fashion, the conceptual as well as physical lines of demarcation that mathesis inflicts upon the world.
The World We Have Lost Olesko, Kathryn M.
Isis,
12/2007, Letnik:
98, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Among the recently published historical novels and “little books” on topics in the history of science, Daniel Kehlmann’sMeasuring the World(trans. 2006) offers an opportunity to reflect critically on ...the relationship between narrative structure and historical evidence.
Daniel Kehlmann's best selling novel Measuring the World has been widely discussed as an example of the recent surge in German travel writing and as a historical novel. This article suggests ...understanding the book as an exploration of the poetics of fiction writing in opposition to the 'naïve realism' (Kehlmann) that dominated German literature after 1945. Through a densely woven web of literary references, from Goethe to South America's magic realism, from Walter Benjamin to E. L. Doctorow and Jonathan Franzen, the novel reaches out to literary traditions far beyond the common framework of German postwar writing. Ultimately, it should be perceived as a narrative that explores or measures the world of literature.
In person, Kehlmann is gregarious, charming, self-effacing, and disarmingly fascinated by nearly everything; upon meeting at a cavernous restaurant a stone's throw from NYU, where he is a visiting ...scholar in the German department, our interview lapsed into considerations of the science behind spotting dragons ("Where you don't see the dragon, that's where it is, because it's hiding"), the vogue for "nonfiction novels" (Kehlmann prefers Emmanuel Carrère and forerunner Max Frisch to Knausgaard), American gun violence, and the controversy engulfing the new Joker movie ("It's apparently easier on the conscience to ban fiction than guns"). A success in nearly every language it appeared in, Measuring the World established Kehlmann's light touch regarding subject matter that would otherwise be encumbered with mind-boggling complexity. Tracing the origins of modern science through the diametrically opposed genius of curmudgeonly mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and that of indefatigable natural scientist Humboldt, and featuring supporting characters such as Louis Daguerre, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant, the novel extracts a bracingly funny and altogether thrilling human story from the birth of science as we know it, in the pocket of time just before "people would go up in balloons and measure off distances on magnetic scales... and work out distances by the diminution of electrical intensity."
Daniel Kehlmann Kehlmann, Daniel; Enrigue, Álvaro
Bomb (New York, N.Y.),
01/2020
150
Magazine Article
Enrigue interviews German novelist and playwright Daniel Kehlmann. Among other things, Kehlmann talks about his new book, Tyll, which takes its title from the mythical vagabond performer and ...trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel, whom Kehlmann here places into a seventeenth-century Europe convulsing with the Thirty Years' War.
![Aber was, […] wenn es nicht...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/0028-2677/small "Aber was, […] wenn es nicht so ist?“ Ambivalente Figurationen der Zeit in Daniel Kehlmanns ‚Mahlers Zeit")
