Catastrophizing Humanism in Romantic Literature: Mary Shelley, Goethe, and Kleist

Abstract

This dissertation argues for a new notion of catastrophe as an affective encounter between human beings and an overwhelmingly unintelligible nature, which then creates new temporalities. It explores Romantic novels, poetry, drama, and scientific writings by Mary Shelley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, places these texts within the context of the scientific discoveries and innovations of the late 18th to early 19th century, and looks at how the three authors charter their ways against, around, and amid these encounters and the consequent excesses of affects they produce. It argues for a reassessment of causality and proposes an atmospheric or emergent agency to describe how these affective encounters effect changes and traumas. Moreover, this study attends to the material continuation and tensions between the catastrophes that the texts seek to witness and the forms in which they attempt to grasp their objects, as well as the resultant cycles and practices of reading.