THE SELF-DESTRUCTING TEXT: HERMANN BROCH'S DER TOD DES VERGIL AND THE LIMITS OF AVANT-GARDE NARRATIVE
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- VanderKolk, Jacob Allan
- Graduate Program:
- German
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 16, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Daniel Leonhard Purdy, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Samuel Mark Frederick, Committee Member
Sabine Doran, Committee Member
Jonathan Paul Eburne, Outside Member
Thomas Oliver Beebee, Committee Member - Keywords:
- German Studies
Hermann Broch
Der Tod des Vergil
The Death of Virgil
Reader Response
Avant-Garde - Abstract:
- Hermann Broch's novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945) echos its author's contemporaneous cynicism toward belletristic literature. Following the Roman poet Virgil's renunciation of aesthetics over the waning hours of his life, it punishes the reader with harsh formal and stylistic challenges, enacting Broch's Rezeptionsästhetik der Resignation, a concerted attempt to have reading efface avant-garde literature's intervention in everyday life. To do so, Vergil perpetuates and expands on the avant-gardiste inner monologue, refocusing it from the cognitive to the existential. Instead of a coherent subject, Broch's reader must speculate a transcendent account of being out of the given story of one being. In so doing, the text reorders the act of reading into a self-inquiry. Emphasizing the process of speculation over its result, the novel compels the reader to interrogate the putative certainty of reading itself. Vergil specifically subverts the narrative desire for resolution through discrete plot at both intra- as well as intertextual levels. Within itself, Vergil erects a semiotic counter-plot qua fate that digresses away from endings that offer final completeness, imposing an logic of eternal recurrence and incompleteness. At an intertextual level, Vergil situates itself in thematic, formal, and even geographical similitude with other “hellish” labyrinthine texts such as The Aeneid and Dante's Divine Comedy, encompassing them together as unique instances within a larger trans-textual counter-plot of fate. By undermining narrative unfolding, Vergil exposes the impossibility of reading to positively affect life. Allegorized in the unattainability of sexual desire, the failed promise of an ending serves as a dead end within the labyrinthine text. The self-inquiry involved in readerly speculation denudes prevailing readerly expectations to the point of nihilistic aporia, where the renunciation of reading itself becomes the ultimate epiphany. In so doing, Vergil reveals the immanent failure of the avant-garde. By denuding both Virgil and the reader, it demonstrates the moment where the avant-garde's critical self-awareness turns against itself, revealing its institutionalized fetishization. By succeeding in intvervening in the life of the reader, it renders itself void; the pinnacle of its receptivity demonstrating the impossibility of reception.