Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence

Reveals how literary scenes of recognition stage the process of coming to know reality

In this deeply researched and thought-provoking study, Jessica C. Resvick traces nineteenth-century German realist writing's paradoxical investment in mediated accounts of the world and the direct, unfiltered experience of reality. Focusing on the motif and operation of recognitionin its Aristotelean sense, Resvick examines self-reflexive narratives in which the authors struggle to resolve this tension between the media they choose and the immediacy they hope to create.

Through close readings of key works by canonical authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, and Adalbert Stifter, Resvick demonstrates the medially influenced and historically contingent ways in which they represent reality. Each chapter focuses on a different form of recognition, reconstructing the techniques that allow these authors to generate an effect of presence. Exploring the history and poetics of knowledge exchange, Recognizing Reality: German Realism and the Mediation of Presence expands on recent media histories of realism, examining the material bases for realist aesthetics while also investigating media's epistemological accomplishments, and astutely elaborates the role of recognition as a medium-specific tool.