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Language Unmoored: On Kleist's The Betrothal in St. Domingue
Ist Teil von
The Germanic review, 2010-01, Vol.85 (1), p.20-43
Ort / Verlag
Washington: Taylor & Francis Group
Erscheinungsjahr
2010
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
Situating Kleist's novella in the context of contemporary philosophical responses to the French Revolution (Kant, Hegel), this article suggests that Kleist's text is unique in taking revolution not merely as its theme but also as its mode of presentation. At the core of revolution is the loss of referential stability and the realization that words are not anchored in an extra-linguistic world of facts and objects but are held in place by open-ended systems of association and regularity without further foundation or solidity. Kleist's writing is seen both to intensify linguistic instability and ambiguity and to articulate different political and psychological responses to the revolutionary unmooring of meaning. In this context, the promissory act of betrothal is read as a sign through which the text self-reflexively explores the possibility of social and linguistic connectedness in the absence of established meanings and conventions.