Philology of the Eye

The Photographic Discovery of the World in the 19th Century

 

The relationship between media and literary history has become a central research area in literary studies in recent years. Nevertheless, the relationship between photography and literature remains almost a terra incognita . Stiegler's study closes this research gap and focuses on a material-rich reconstruction of the photographic and poetic discourses, as well as on an interpretation of numerous well-known and newly discovered literary texts from the perspective of their perceptual theoretical implications.

 

The first part presents the first decades of the history of photography in detail as a history of theory and perception, from the invention of the daguerreotype through stereoscopy to instant, X-ray and spiritualistic photography. A second part is devoted to the interference between the new technical medium and the poetological discussions of realism and naturalism. Theoretical texts are given a voice as well as literary examples (Champfleury, Nerval, Zola, Pfau, Heyse, Raabe, Turgenjew, Strindberg). Finally, exemplary interpretations (Gautier, Toepffer, Stifter, the Goncourt brothers, Taine and Flaubert, Maupassant, Verne) are used to show how, against the backdrop of photography, a new way of seeing is emerging that rediscovers the life of things and the surface of the world and thus explicitly relates to the theory of the avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century. A detailed bibliography rounds off the volume.

info

Author: Bernd Stiegler

Number of pages: approx. 472 pages

Published: 1st edition 2001

ISBN: 978-3-7705-3627-6

Publisher: Fink

Type: Hardcover

Language: German

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