Understanding the Present

Understanding the Present examines the thematization of the historical present in nineteenth-century German literary texts. In theorizations of political literature, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings on “committed literature,” an emphatic concept of the present is a given. Of course, the present is a notoriously elusive temporality. The texts discussed in this dissertation, rather than focusing on accurate sociological representations of the present or an intensive rhetorical engagement in its political discourse, interrogate how the present can be evoked in literature in the first place. Understanding the Present discusses the forms privileged by certain authors in the representation of the present – prose, periodicals, drama – as well as the paradoxes such approaches posed. Rather than discussing these texts in terms of “operative literature” or “committed literature,” which has been a trend in scholarship since the 1960s, this dissertation approaches the nineteenth century from the perspective of so-called Gegenwartsliteratur. It does not claim the successful or unsuccessful political intervention of these texts, but rather shows how their authors imagined a literary intervent