'Menschenleer.' The Aesthetics of Humanity in the Novels of Christoph Ransmayr: Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation is a comparative study which traces the development of a distinctive aesthetics in the late twentieth century novels of the Austrian writer, Christoph Ransmayr. The three novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara, while quite different in terms of spatial and temporal orientation, share several key features which contribute to the operation of what I define and examine as the aesthetics of humility in the texts. These recurrent thematic, structural and symbolic elements in the three novels relate to the texts’ critique of scientific modernity, their privileging of myth (both thematically and stylistically), the representation of nature and the texts’ readings of apocalypse and transformation. The theory of myth developed by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos provides an interpretative framework to explain the re-emergence of myth as a contemporary response to the “absolutism of reality” which the systems and technologies of scientific modernity have produced in the twentieth century. The first part of this thesis examines the representation in individual novels of the collapse and breakdown of selected metanarratives of modernity. The second part consists of an examination of three core myths which function to restructure the narrative of human existence in each novel. This thesis determines that the development of the aesthetics of humility in Ransmayr's novels is dependent on the reader's recognition of the changed perspective and the changed perception which characters in each novel experience. To different extents the characters in each novel abandon a rational perception of reality. The aesthetics of reality acknowledges a textual consciousness and privileging of the projected Other of reason; nature, myth, fantasy, irrationality and barbarity. The human subject no longer occupies the privileged central position in humanist cosmology. Displaced from the centre to the periphery of civilization, the…
abstract: This dissertation is a comparative study which traces the development of a distinctive aesthetics in the late twentieth century novels of the Austrian writer, Christoph Ransmayr. The three novels, Die Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Die letzte Welt and Morbus Kitahara, while quite different in terms of spatial and temporal orientation, share several key features which contribute to the operation of what I define and examine as the aesthetics of humility in the texts. These recurrent thematic, structural and symbolic elements in the three novels relate to the texts’ critique of scientific modernity, their privileging of myth (both thematically and stylistically), the representation of nature and the texts’ readings of apocalypse and transformation. The theory of myth developed by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos provides an interpretative framework to explain the re-emergence of myth as a contemporary response to the “absolutism of reality” which the systems and technologies of scientific modernity have produced in the twentieth century. The first part of this thesis examines the representation in individual novels of the collapse and breakdown of selected metanarratives of modernity. The second part consists of an examination of three core myths which function to restructure the narrative of human existence in each novel. This thesis determines that the development of the aesthetics of humility in Ransmayr's novels is dependent on the reader's recognition of the changed perspective and the changed perception which characters in each novel experience. To different extents the characters in each novel abandon a rational perception of reality. The aesthetics of reality acknowledges a textual consciousness and privileging of the projected Other of reason; nature, myth, fantasy, irrationality and barbarity. The human subject no longer occupies the privileged central position in humanist cosmology. Displaced from the centre to the periphery of civilization, the…
author: Cook, Lynne Patricia
language: EN
keywords: Ransmayr Christoph 1954, Schrecken des Eises und der Finsternis, Letzte Welt, Morbus Kitahara, Humility in literature
license: https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/
date published: 2001
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:34:32Z
provider: University of New South Wales
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: UNSW, Sydney

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/32898

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.26190/unsworks/17743