Overview

In The Chain of Things, Eric Downing shows how the connection between divinatory magic and reading shaped the experience of reading and aesthetics among nineteenth-century realists and modernist thinkers. He explores how writers, artists, and critics such as Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Walter Benjamin drew on the ancient practice of divination, connecting the Greek idea of sympathetic magic to the German aesthetic concept of the attunement of mood and atmosphere. Downing deftly traces the genealogical connection between reading and art in classical antiquity, nineteenth-century realism, and modernism, attending to the ways in which the modern re-enchantment of the world-both in nature and human society-consciously engaged ancient practices that aimed at preternatural prediction. Of particular significance to the argument presented in The Chain of Things is how the future figured into the reading of texts during this period, a time when the future as a narrative determinant or article of historical faith was losing its force. Elaborating a new theory of magic as a critical tool, Downing secures crucial links between the governing notions of time, world, the ""real,"" and art.

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9781501715914

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Reviews

Eric Downing's approach to divination promises to break new ground with an erudite scope that ranges ambitiously from classical antiquity to the works of Benjamin and Freud in the twentieth century. This is the work of a scholar at the height of his considerable powers. -- Catriona MacLeod, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania Eric Downing succeeds in giving new depth to the practice of tracing images and leitmotifs by regarding them as more than merely technical ways of assuring textual coherence. Downing's introduction of the term 'magic' is well attuned to our time, concerned as it is with a perceived loss of relevance in the humanities. -- Judith Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University

Eric Downing succeeds in giving new depth to the practice of tracing images and leitmotifs by regarding them as more than merely technical ways of assuring textual coherence. Downing's introduction of the term 'magic' is well attuned to our time, concerned as it is with a perceived loss of relevance in the humanities. --Judith Ryan, Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Harvard University Eric Downing's approach to divination promises to break new ground with an erudite scope that ranges ambitiously from classical antiquity to the works of Benjamin and Freud in the twentieth century. This is the work of a scholar at the height of his considerable powers. --Catriona MacLeod, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of German and Chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania

... this is a work of engaged and engaging criticism whose dis-disenchanting programme will move its readers to (re)visit not just the two target novels but, in principle, any other work marked 'realist.' * MODERN LANGUAGE REVIEW *

Author Information

Eric Downing is Professor of German, English, and Comparative Literature and Adjunct Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina.

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