The Vulnerable Modernism of Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.G. Sebald

This dissertation is dedicated to exploring the “vulnerable modernism” of three authors: Adalbert Stifter, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W.G. Sebald. In all three writers, I argue, we witness a shared, fundamental ambivalence toward the very qualities that make their texts modern. That is, while all three writers manifest traits that pull them within the gravitational pull of “modernism,” they simultaneously display a sense of insecurity or uncertainty toward their own modernity. My dissertation demonstrates how this ambivalence can be attributed to the structural relationship between “modernity” and “world loss,” although the specific nature of this relationship varies among the three writers.

Stifter’s modernity, for instance, has often been attributed to his self-reflective consciousness that paradoxically threatens the unity of his own realist utopia. Insofar as Stifter’s modernity is contingent on the disruption of the harmonic oneness of his literary world, his modernity is won at the price of ontological vulnerability. There is a similar tradeoff between modernity and worldly unity in Rilke’s novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, but with a more conspicuous dramatization of world loss as the price that the narrator must pay for his new writing. The “modernist” writing of Malte is thus accompanied by a deep sense of melancholy, even horror. If world loss emerges as a persistent threat in Stifter, and as an ongoing catastrophe in Rilke, then in Sebald, it is presented as a disaster that has already taken place and constitutes the very condition of the narrator’s writing. If Sebald’s narrators self-consciously position themselves as the “final” modernist—as competent and erudite humanists writing at the twilight of modernity—this self-presentation is internally defeated by the awareness that, in fact, incompetence and impotence are the only adequate response to modernity’s world loss. By foregrounding traumatic speech as the only mode of articulation appropriate to ontological vulnerability, Sebald retroactively illuminates Stifter’s and Rilke’s modernism as similarly wounded articulations.

            The relationship between modernity and world loss can be contextualized within the larger contrast between realism and modernism as divergent responses to what Georg Lukács called modernity’s “transcendental homelessness.” If realism can be understood as an attempt to overcome modernity’s groundlessness by prioritizing the solidity of a shared world, vulnerable modernism responds by structurally incorporating world loss as the condition of its own enunciation. Understood this way, modernist literature carries existential stakes that transcend conventional discourses about its formal innovations. The works of Stifter, Rilke, and Sebald encourage us to situate these innovations within a larger discussion about modernism’s freedom and autonomy, more specifically, about how modernism’s freedom from tradition is often accompanied by the melancholy of accepting ontological fragility.