Präsenztheorie

How is it that literature can overwhelm a reader and leave him or her completely speechless? Presence Theory takes on this question by describing the philosophical foundations of intensive aesthetical experiences and by detecting the specific strategies that produce these special moments. The aim of this book is to examine the most important concepts of the six leading presence theorists (George Steiner, Jean-Luc Nancy, Karl Heinz Bohrer, Martin Seel, Dieter Mersch and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht) and to evaluate how they can contribute to a new form of literary analysis. For the first time, the common grounds and the differences of these concepts are explored in great detail, followed by an extensive analysis of three contemporary German novels (Rainald Goetz’s ‚Rave‘, Helmut Krausser’s ‚UC‘ and Wolfgang Herrndorf’s ‚Tschick‘) that demonstrates the advantages of Presence Theory as a method. The findings of this book indicate that Presence Theory has the potential of becoming a new paradigm for literary studies.