Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Berndt, Frauke

Titel

Grass: Gottfried Keller’s Structural Realism

Ist Teil von

• Colloquia Germanica, 2021-12, Vol.53 (4), p.421-448

Ort / Verlag

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH Co. KG

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag Zeitschriften und Jahrbücher

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich (1854–55), the “green places” are where vegetation grows in particular abundance. Narrative sequences in which such places are described can be related to the concept of structural realism, which has been put forward as a way of understanding several authors in the age of realism. To this end, I begin by introducing the relevant positions in research on realism, distinguishing between reality and that particular world realized in narrative fiction. I then reconstruct several aspects of vegetation, particularly grass, as a motif with highest self-reflexive potential both in the visual arts and literature of premodernity, before analyzing two narrative sequences from Keller’s novel. It is my claim that Keller does not represent reality, but rather that the ontological structure of the world realized in the novel becomes manifest in both a concrete (cemetery) and an abstract form (drawing).