The exotic, it is demonstrated in this book, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to and reconfigurations of the landscape and experience of modernity. In evocati ... More

The exotic, it is demonstrated in this book, provokes central questions about the modern self and the spaces it inhabits as reflected in major works of German literature and in the philosophy and art that inspires it. Exotic spaces in the writings of such authors as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gottfried Benn, and Bertold Brecht, along with the thought of Nietzsche, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and Simmel and the art of German Expressionism, are shown to present alternatives to and reconfigurations of the landscape and experience of modernity. In evocations that may be principally descriptive, symbolic, imaginative, or aesthetic or metaphysical, exotic spaces contest and reconfigure the relationship between the familiar and the foreign, the self and the other. Exotic spaces may serve not only to affirm the subject in a symbolic conquering of territory, as emphasized in post-colonial interpretations, or project the fantasy of escapism to a lost paradise, as utopian readings suggest, but condition moral, aesthetic, or imaginative transformation. Such transformation, while risking disaster or dissolution of the self as well as endangerment of the other, promotes new possibilities of perceiving or being, and reconfigures the boundaries of a familiar world. As exotic spaces are conceived as mystical, liberating, erotic, infectious, frightening or mysterious, several possibilities for transformation emerge in their exposure: re-enchantment, collapse of the rational self, liberation of the imagination, and aesthetic transformation, revealing the paradoxically ‘primitive’ nature of modern experience. In original new readings of canonical authors and rediscoveries of forgotten ones, this study establishes that exotic experience can evidence the fragility and possibilities of the European or Germanic self as depicted in modernist literature.