Im New Books Network Podcast in der Reihe „New Books in German Studies“ sprach Dominik Zechner am 20.6.2025 über seine literaturwissenschaftliche Forschung:
The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence.
The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of „linguistic pain“ (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world.
Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the „novel of the institution“ (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River).
Dominik Zechner is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University.
Das Buch ist unter der Signatur 3K 97269 bei uns verfügbar.
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