Roll over image to zoom in Click on image to zoom

Museums of the Mind

Name: Museums of the Mind
Brand: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
SKU: 9780271029917
Price: 148.0 AUD
Availability: InStock

PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESSISBN: 9780271029917

German Modernity and the Dynamics of Collecting

Price:

$148.00

Stock:

Out of Stock - Available to backorder

Quantity:

By Peter M. McIsaac
Imprint: PENN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Release Date: January 14, 2008
Format: HARDBACK
Dimensions:
Weight:
Pages: 336

Share this product

Button Actions

Please copy the ISBN for submitting review copy form

Museums of the Mind is the first book to explore the evolving relationship of collecting and the German literary imagination since the invention of the public museum. This study shows that in addition to redefining categories of art, history, and identity in modernity, the museum transforms the relationship between material objects and imaginative narratives. Using new categories, Peter McIsaac constructs a critical genealogy using key texts by Johann Goethe, Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Siegfried Lenz, W. G. Sebald, and Durs Grünbein and the material record of Germanophone museums.

McIsaac rethinks how fundamental cultural “truths” define what it means to belong to acculturated communities, showing that the activation of meaning in museums depends foremost on what people bring, in their minds, to those real and imagined environments, resulting in what McIsaac calls museums of the mind. This notion elucidates the vital shifts wrought by museum culture over the past two centuries and illuminates how museums, literature, and digital media shape thought and behavior today.

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Part 1: Historical and Theoretical Coordinates of Museal and Literary Discourses

1. The Museum Function, Inventoried Consciousness, and German-Speaking Literature

2. Inventoried Consciousness Today: Durs Grünbein and W. G. Sebald

Part 2: The Rise of the Public Museum and Bildung

3. Ottilie Under Glass: Collecting as Disciplinary Regime in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften

4. The Museum of Bildung: Collecting in Stifter’s Nachsommer

Part 3: Acculturation, Commodification, and the Nation

5. Archaeology, Exhibition, and Tourism: Raabe’s “Keltische Knochen”

6. Flâneur Optical, Collector Tactile: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte as Imaginary Museum Landscape

Part 4: Narrative Interventions in the Museal Abuse of Culture

7. “Quiet Violence”: The Army Museum in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina

8. (Re)collecting the Twentieth Century: Siegfried Lenz’s Heimatmuseum

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

“It is the principal merit of this study to have highlighted the connections that bind the process of internalisation of memory in German literature with the tangible nature of museums as both objective and imaginative structures.”

—Daria Santini, Oxford Art Journal

Museums of the Mind

Request Academic Copy

Description

You may also like

Recently viewed