Verstörungsprosa

The paradigm of disturbance is a powerful and, to date, unexplored mode of literary modernism. Through individual analyses of selected German-language prose from the Romantic period to the present (Tieck, Droste-Hülshoff, Büchner, Kafka, Aichinger, Kracht, and others), this study examines this strategy of entanglement and attempts to open up a perspective beyond the alternative of hermeneutics and deconstruction in terms of literary theory. The concept of literary disturbance used in the work sets itself apart from previous concepts of disruption research in a decisive way because it neither has a purely negative connotation nor contains a positive resolution, but is located exactly in the middle of these two poles as a persistent state of doubt.