Comprises papers from the International Conference on [title] held Nov. 1988, London, UK on economics, planning, environmental impact, safety, control, generators. Acidic paper; no index. Holub (German, U. of California, Berkeley) contends that realism is not primarily a textual property, but a matter of reception, and reexamines 19th-century German literary realism by considering traditionally representative texts--novellas and novels--from the perspective of effects on readers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Aquis Submersus by Theodor Storm

The Waiting Water addresses one of the most recurrent and troubling motifs in German Realist literature—death by drowning. Characters find themselves before bodies of water, presented with the familiar realm above the surface and the unobservable, uncanny domain beneath it. With somber regularity, they then disappear into the depths. Alexander Sorenson explores the role that these hidden deaths in water play within a literary movement that set out precisely to reveal universal truths about human life. The poetics of submergence, he argues, revolve around two concepts fundamental to Poetic Realism—order and sacrifice. Focusing on texts by Adalbert Stifter, Gottfried Keller, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, along with material from earlier and later epochs, The Waiting Water shows that the pervasive symbolism of drowning scenes in German Realism, which typically occur in zones of narrative invisibility on the social periphery, reveals the extent to which realist narrative uses the natural environment to work through deeply embedded and hidden tensions that troubled the social and moral life of the age.

What makes stories about portraits so gripping and unsettling? Portrait Stories argues that it is the ways they problematize the relation between subjectivity and representation. Through close readings of short stories and novellas by Poe, James, Hoffmann, Gautier, Nerval, Balzac, Kleist, Hardy, Wilde, Storm, Sand, and Gogol, the author shows how the subjectivities of sitter, painter, and viewer are produced in relation to representations shaped by particular interests and power relations, often determined by gender as well as by class. She focuses on the power that can accrue to the painter from the act of representation (often at the expense of the portrait’s subject), while also exploring how and why this act may threaten the portrait painter’s sense of self. Analyzing the viewer’s relation to the portrait, she demonstrates how portrait stories problematize the very act of seeing and with it the way subjectivity is constructed in the field of vision.

Ebner-Eschenbach, Heyse, Raabe, Storm, Meyer, and Hauptmann>

When he died in 1957, Wilhelm Reich had been the most revolutionary figure in psychoanalysis and the only student of Freud's to carry his libido theory into experimental science. Reich's legacy includes such essential volumes as Character Analysis, The Function of the Orgasm, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Passion of Youth is the latest of Reich's writings to appear posthumously, and it reveals that Reich's life, no less than his work, was provocative and instructive. In a reminiscence composed in 1919, "Childhood and Puberty," Reich tells of his earliest years, spent on a country estate in Bukovina. He describes his first conscious experiences of sexuality, and the further development of his sexual life; his schooling; and, above all, the catastrophic infidelity that led first to his mother's suicide in 1910 and then to his father's death in 1914. With the outbreak of the Great War, Reich fled Bukovina and enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he became a battalion commander. In an excerpt from his 1937 History of Sexpol, he recounts how his four years in the military impressed on him the masses' numb obedience to authority and the automatic quality of a ceaselessly operating "war machine." Reich began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1919 and graduated in the summer of 1922. His diaries from these years record his encounter with Freud; the growth of his conviction that sexuality is the core around which all social life, and the inner life, revolves; his first political stirrings; and his analysis of the woman who would become his first wife. These diaries abound in turbulent emotions and the passion of youth.