Has Dionysus only become Dionysian in the course of modernity? Dionysus, son of Zeus, god of ecstasy, has been ascribed many characteristics. But only one of them discerns him from all the other gods: his sudden »appearance«, that mysterious eventfulness that is connected to his entrance and which was already thematised in the Greek texts. In his new book, Karl Heinz Bohrer explores the traces of this Dionysian feature and shows how it has been detached from the myth successively and became the token of romantic-modern literature and philosophy after 1800.
Hölderlin’s Dionysian moment, Nietzsche’s Dionysian aesthetics and the mythopoetical metaphor of modern poetry in the works of Pound, T.S. Eliot, Rilke and Paul Valéry are the most prominent instances in which the Dionysian feature of the modern Dionysus is observable: it serves as the form of expressing the »incident« and the »appearance«, both of which become central categories of contemporary theories of art and literature. A discussion of the theory of the »incident« in surrealism as well as its prominence in the works of Heidegger and Jean-François Lyotard concludes this compelling study on the Dionysian discourse of modernity.
Karl Heinz Bohrer, born in Cologne in 1932, was a literary critic, publisher, scientist and creator of numerous works focusing on the central ideas of Momentanism and »suddenness«. He worked as a secondary school teacher in Germany, England and the USA. In 2007, he was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize and received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2014. Karl Heinz Bohrer died in London on August 4, 2021.
Karl Heinz Bohrer, born in Cologne in 1932, was a literary critic, publisher, scientist and creator of numerous works focusing on the central...
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Karl Heinz Bohrer is one of Germany’s most pugnacious intellectuals. The steadfast expectation that the banal present will turn into the fantastical now – this is what drives Karl Heinz Bohrer’s autobiographical, adventure-filled story. Spanning more than five decades and unfolding through nine chapters, his story plays out in various locales: in European cities like London and Paris, at...
»Suddenness or epiphany – an expression of discontinuity and rupture – resists aesthetic integration. This argument is the centrepiece of Bohrer's collection of...
English world rights (Columbia UP), Chinese simplex rights (China South Publishing & Media Group)
Previously published in the respective language / territory; rights available again: Poland (Oficyna Naukowa)