Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article reads two of Wilhelm Raabe’s late novels to show how his work complicates the thinking of materiality and material objects essential to German realism: more specifically, how his work plays with the relationship between valued object and meaningless matter in the context of poetic realism’s fraught negotiation thereof. In both Der Lar (1889) and Die Akten des Vogelsangs (1896), Raabe’s elliptical and self-referential narration enacts a shift from the appropriative humanization of material objects to the intimation of their factical resistance. At the same time, Raabe’s work increasingly comes to demonstrate the inherent performativity of all previous efforts at humanization, as well as how that humanization ultimately serves, against its own intentions, to create an image of resistant matter as its definitional other. That is, even while working squarely and indeed almost manically within a poetic realist idiom, Raabe also ironizes poetic realism’s implicit ontology to show how the attribution of meaning to matter is always a narrative artifice: one that either compels the reader to posit meaning preemptively as telos, or denies it to the reader except in the mode of irony and obsolescence.
Author: Erica Weitzman
Institution: Northwestern University
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7128932094
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