Complex Pleasure

Complex Pleasuredeals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writersLessing, Kant, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German traditionfiction, poetry, critiquecan be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling; and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary. The types of feeling treated inComplex Pleasureinclude wit (the startling perception of likeness) and the disinterested pleasure of aesthetic judgment; Holderlin's "swift conceptual grasp," in which "thetempoof the process of thought is stressed"; "artistic imagination," mood, sadistic enjoyment, rapturous distraction, homonymic dissonance, and courage as a mode of literary experience. At the same time, through the deftness, range, and surprise of its execution, the book itself conveys complex pleasure. The reader will also find fascinating, hitherto untranslated material by Nietzsche ("On Moods") and Kafka (important sections from his journals and from his unfinished novelThe Boy Who Sank Out of Sight).

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.