Dr. Adrian Renner

Before coming to Hamburg in 2019, I completed my dissertation at Yale University’s German Department, where I had started as Graduate Student in 2013. From 2008 to 2013, I studied Comparative Literature and Philosophy at LMU Munich and spend the academic year 2011/2012 as a Visiting Student Researcher at UC Berkeley’s German Department. My academic focus is on 18th to 20th century literature and philosophy with an emphasis on narrativ forms, the history of aesthetic thought and the history of science. My dissertation, which will be published with Wallstein in 2021 under the title Erzähltes Leben. Möglichkeiten des Romans um 1800, delineates a genealogy of a modern narrative temporality based on a potential future ranging from Wieland’s Geschichte des Agathon to the Romantic novel. My current project deals with concepts of embodiment and agency and the relation of human and natural forces in art, literature and the natural sciences from 1850 to 1900.

Monograph

• Erzähltes Leben. Möglichkeiten des Romans um 1800, Göttingen 2021 (=dissertation).
  Review in Informationsmittel für Bibliotheken 29/4 (2021) and arcadia 57/1 (2022).

Edited Volumes

• together with Frederike Middelhoff: Forces of Nature. Dynamism and Agency in German Romanticism, Boston/Berlin 2022.

Essays

• „Schwellenräume. Institutionelle und erzählerische Ordnungen in Marion Poschmanns Die Sonnenposition und David Foster Wallaces The Pale King“, in: Julika Griem, Kevin Kempe (eds.): Institutionen/Romane der Gegenwart, Göttingen 2025 (forthcoming).
• „Zukunftsmaschinen. Technischer, wirtschaftlicher und sozialer Fortschritt in naturalistischen Romanen und in Kurd Laßwitz’ Auf zwei Planeten“, in: Stefan Tetzlaff, Raphael Stübe (eds.): Gespenstische Technologie. Neoromantische Technik- und Medienreflexion um 1900, Würzburg 2024 (forthcoming).
• „Sinneskräfte. Naturimagination und Wahrnehmungspoetiken in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik um 1900“, in: Frank Fehrenbach, Gerd Micheluzzi, Laura Isengard, Cornelia Zumbusch (eds.): Wahrnehmungskräfte – Kräfte wahrnehmen. Dynamiken der Sinne in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Literatur, Boston/Berlin 2024, pp. 105–128.
• „Genealogische Bilder. Photographie, Ähnlichkeit und Identifizierung bei Sigmund Freud und Walter Benjamin”, in: Mathias Bauer, Nadjib Sadikou, Dominik Zink (eds.), Lektüren der Ähnlichkeit um 1900, Bielefeld 2023, pp. 295–311.
• „Ödipus’ Söhne. Männliche Genealogien im naturalistischen Drama (Vor Sonnenaufgang, Das Friedensfest, Dämmerung), in: Zeitschrift für Germanistik Band 33 2/2023, pp. 295–311.
• „Spiele des Zufalls. Interne Metalepsen in Romanen der Frühromantik (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Florentin, Lucinde), ausgehend von Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre“, in: Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Band 141 4/2022, pp. 493–513.
• together with Frederike Middelhoff: „Dynamism, Agency, Interaction—An Introduction to Forces of Nature in German Romantic Literature and Sciences:”, in: Adrian Renner, Frederike Middelhoff (eds.), Forces of Nature. Dynamism and Agency in German Romanticism, Boston/Berlin 2022, pp. 9–35.
• „Dynamic Perceptions. Forces of Nature and Powers of the Senses in Schelling, Novalis and Günderrode“, in: Adrian Renner, Frederike Middelhoff (eds.), Forces of Nature. Dynamism and Agency in German Romanticism, Boston/Berlin 2022, pp. 101–126.
• „Kräfteflüsse. Literarische Wassermotive zwischen Jugendstil und Symbolismus“, in: Wasser im Jugendstil. Heilsbringer und Todesschlund, ed. by Peter Forster/Museum Wiesbaden, Frankfurt a.M. 2022, pp. 72–79.
• „The Feeling of Forces. Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Robert Mayer’s Physics and Metaphysics of the Body”, in: Thomas Moser, Wilma Scheschonk (eds.): Energetic Bodies. Sciences and Aesthetics of Strength and Strain, Boston/Berlin 2022, pp. 103–122.
• „Ungeheure Kräfte. Robert Mayers und Friedrich Nietzsches Physik und Physiologie der Auslösung“, in: Scientia Poetica. Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Literatur und Wissenschaften Band 25/2021, pp. 123–142.
• „Handelnde Kräfte. Zur Narrativierung der Natur in Herders Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784-1791)“, in: Frank Fehrenbach, Lutz Hengst, Frederike Middelhoff, Cornelia Zumbusch (eds.), Form- und Bewegungskräfte in Kunst, Literatur und Wissenschaft, Boston/Berlin 2021, pp. 79–98.
• „Leselust und Kraft der Bilder. Körper, Natur und Geschlecht in Wielands Don Sylvio (1764)“, in: Luisa Banki, Kathrin Wittler (eds.), Lektüre und Geschlecht im 18. Jahrhundert. Zur Situativität des Lesens zwischen Einsamkeit und Geselligkeit, Göttingen 2020, pp. 181–196.
• „Gesicht und Geschichte. Physiognomien des Ähnlichen in Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk“, in: Weimarer Beiträge 64 (2/2018), pp. 202–221.
• „Mut und Mündigkeit. Zum Bezug auf Schiller und Kant in Hölderlins Oden Dichtermuth und Blödigkeit“, in: Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 61 (2017), pp. 241–266.

Beyond Naturalism. Aesthetics of Forces in Modernist Literature (1850-1920)

As a result of new scientific developments in chemistry, physics and physiology and the thermodynamic principle of the conservation of energy from 1840 onwards, nature is regarded as set of quantities whose laws are described through mathematical models or material processes. However, nature is equally conceived as force in qualitative terms within the cultural reception of natural sciences and within art and literature. Especially the literary movement of Naturalism relies on notions of natural forces in order to grasp social and cultural dynamics that determine individual behavior and the laws of cultural development. On the one hand, Nature as a dynamic and active forces is articulated as an energetic reservoir that can be accessed and appropriated by human culture; on the other hand, nature is seen as a dark, powerful or unconscious counterforce to human life.

The valorization of natural forces during the age of industrialization and societal change at the late 19th century hinges on aesthetic assumptions and transfers between natural and cultural phenomena. Using the conceptual analysis of nature as force within the natural sciences and the representation of nature within naturalism as its point of departure, the research projects investigates the aesthetic investment with forces within literature, the natural sciences and cultural theories of modernity during the late 19th century. The project seeks to delineate the aesthetic strategies of embodiment, agency and cultural transfers by which forces acquire a life of their own: Within modernism, forces become embodied, oftenly strongly gendered agents situated on the boundaries nature and culture, surrounding the modern human being as nature and acting within or against him or her within society. By setting questions of aesthetics, literary form and set by side with the history of natural science and their implicit aesthetic and poetic assumptions, the research project aims at writing a genealogy of natural forces as a central modernist category ranging from thermodynamics, physiology and Nietzschean philosophy to Naturalism, Symbolism and the Lebensreform movements.