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9780801478123

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Reviews

Blumenthal-Barby (Rice Univ.) explores literary and scholarly discussions of overtly negative topics such as doubt, lying, death (by torture), paradoxical justice, violence, terrorism, and enmity in 20th-century German texts (including one film), all in the context of an ethics of literary representation . The author provides footnotes and helpful, on occasion critically reflective, English translations of quotations throughout . Specialists familiar with the texts will be able to absorb the layered analysis. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students and faculty. Choice (January 2014)

<p> This smart, ambitious book traces the relationship between ethics and poetics. Discussing the work of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Heiner M ller, and a group of German film directors, Martin Blumenthal-Barby argues that the styles of these theorists, authors, and filmmakers produce not a particular ethical position but ethics effects, not an ethical stance but an (aesthetic) practice of ethics. The ways in which authors engage with their genres amount to a staging of the ethical dilemmas that are addressed thematically in the texts. Ultimately, this ethics effect-or ethics as aesthetic practice-is the ethics of the singular, always tied to a specific text and its form. Inconceivable Effects brillantly demonstrates the value of dismantling the barriers between aesthetic practice and political theory. -Julia Hell, University of Michigan

<p> This smart, ambitious book traces the relationship between ethics and poetics. Discussing the work of Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Heiner Muller, and a group of German film directors, Martin Blumenthal-Barby argues that the styles of these theorists, authors, and filmmakers produce not a particular ethical position but ethics effects, not an ethical stance but an (aesthetic) practice of ethics. The ways in which authors engage with their genres amount to a staging of the ethical dilemmas that are addressed thematically in the texts. Ultimately, this ethics effect-or ethics as aesthetic practice-is the ethics of the singular, always tied to a specific text and its form. Inconceivable Effects brillantly demonstrates the value of dismantling the barriers between aesthetic practice and political theory. -Julia Hell, University of Michigan

Author Information

Martin Blumenthal-Barby is Assistant Professor of German and Film Studies at Rice University.

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