Reading Riddles

Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud

Brian Tucker

2010
200 pages
ISBN 9781611480283
New Studies in the Age of Goethe

Reading Riddles: Rhetorics of Obscurity from Romanticism to Freud explores how the riddle becomes a figure for reading and writing in early German Romanticism and how this model then enables Sigmund Freud's approach to the psyche. It traces a migration of ideas from literature to psychoanalysis and argues that the relationship between them must be situated at the methodological level. Through readings of texts by August Wilhelm, Friedrich Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, and Ludwig Tieck Reading Riddles documents how the Romantics expand the field of poetic signification to include obscure, distorted signs and how they applied this rhetoric of obscurity to the self. The book argues that this model of self and signification plays a central role in the formulation of Freud's psychoanalytic theory. If the self is a riddle, as many in the nineteenth century claim, Freud takes the figure seriously and interprets the mind according to all the structures and techniques of that textual genre.

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About the author:

Brian Tucker's interests center on German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the history of aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. He has published articles that range in topic from boredom to wordplay, from historicism to graphic novels, and that treat authors such as Fontane, Kleist, Lessing, Raabe, Schnitzler, and Tieck.

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611480290