Winter facets: Traces and tropes of the cold (Johannes Kepler, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, Gottfried Keller, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Germany)

This dissertation analyzes ice and snow motifs in different texts, traversing several national literatures and literary as well as non-literary discourses. Compared with other instances of “reading the book of nature”—stars or stones, for example—the intrinsically ephemeral status of snow or ice configurations renders their textual representation and readability a priori precarious. This transitory aspect shared by language and snow accounts for the attraction that this and related themes have exerted on modern authors to this day. The selection of texts is guided by the question of how each author thematizes the affinity between the delicate literary object and the fragile status of language and readability. This focus also allows to address the interdisciplinary implications of this subject matter. Thus, the analysis of ice and snow motifs is concerned with the shifting status of aesthetics at the intersection of older natural history and the emergence of modern sciences. A series of detailed readings traces the constellation of nature, art, and science through its permutations from the 18th to the 19 th and into the 20th century. Texts discussed include, among others, Kepler, Goethe, Tieck, Keller, Th. Mann, and R. Walser. The final chapter turns to visual representation end explores winter rhetoric in selected films. Within the field of existing research on this topic, this dissertation seeks to fill the lacunae left by the important contributions of Manfred Frank and Helmuth Lethen. Since neither has addressed in detail the role of ice and snow in the 19th century, this neglected time period assumes prominence in this work. Methodologically, the dissertation aims at superseding the mutually exclusive interpretive models by Frank and Lethen: The history of philosophy on the one hand and cultural anthropology on the other. What allows for the integration of those and other approaches is the determining interest in the specific conditions of snow and ice's textual, literary, and visual representation.