| This dissertation examines selected texts of German literature in which a human being gains access to knowledge outside human scope by means of an encounter with the water nixie, seen in her mythological variations as siren, water sprite, undine, melusine, nymph, or mermaid. Texts to be considered include Das Nibelungenlied (ca. 1200), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "Der Fischer" (ca. 1779), Franz Kafka's "Das Schweigen der Sirenen" (1917), Ingeborg Bachmann's "Undine Geht" (1961), and Johannes Bobrowski's "Undine" (1964). In each of these texts it is not the eyes that play the central role in the epistemological character of the human-nixie encounter, but the ears. In this project I argue that the human posture of attentive listening that precedes the encounter with the nixie indicates a state of readiness that leads to a moment of extraordinary awareness, in which the epistemological experience is transformational. Further, I suggest that poetry plays a pivotal role in the moment of epiphany, or of transformational knowing, for the reader. By pursuing the hypothesis that audial awareness underlies the moment of epiphany, both on the textual and poetological levels, it is my intention to contribute to the scholarship on the nature of the encounter between the mythical and the human in literature as a figuration of the larger epistemological confrontation between the eye and the ear, particularly with respect to the transformative potential of this encounter and its poetological implications. |
