This dissertation is composed of readings of four novellas: two by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller and two by the English novelist George Eliot. It focuses on the motif and concept of treasure (Schatz). Beginning with the figurative and rhetorical employment of "treasure" in the stories, each reading proceeds to identify traces of authorial anxiety concerning the status of literature itself as a fetishized object of desire. In their novellas, the study shows, Keller and Eliot stage a dramatic struggle between two broad concepts of desire, one that would underwrite the subjective authenticity of treasure and one that undercuts it by pointing up desire's implication in an irreducibly intersubjective dynamic of mimesis. In contradistinction to their common mentor, the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, Keller and Eliot can here be seen to anticipate certain strains of psychoanalytic thought, in particular the Freudian theory of narcissism. This is established not only by way of the themes and representational strategies of the stories, but through issues of textual identity and integrity. It is moreover in this context that Keller and Eliot's insistent return to femininity as a theoretical problem is placed. Starting from the idea of a fundamental female conservatism, even fetishism -- a tendency to cling to things or forms that have outlived their usefulness and are valued only for their own sake - the novellas of Keller and Eliot simultaneously conceive of femininity as a fount of generosity. This gendered notion of gift is deeply implicated in the genre of the novella itself, which is postulated as a treasure beyond price by the same token that its most characteristic temporal gesture is (fruitless) repetition. While thus self-consciously failing to represent something fundamentally new, the novellas of Keller and Eliot are deeply invested in delineating the conditions for the emergence or appearance of novelty. With a particular eye to textual excesses, surpluses, and above all remainders, the "search" for treasure in the novellas of Keller and Eliot yields insight into their realist representations of fetishism as well as a certain fetishization of literature that their texts both exemplify and diagnose.

Last modified

• 06/05/2018

Creator

• Teresa Ritterhoff

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2XM7R

Subject

• Comparative Literary Studies

Keyword

• english literature
• general literature
• german literature
• novella
• comparative literature

Date created

• 2007-05-09

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright