Ragg-Kirkby, Helena; (1997) Adalbert stifter maß and unmaß: Medium and message. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which Stifter's texts, so maßig and unruffled on the surface, reveal subtexts that are unfailingly unmaßig and disturbing. The three main sections of the thesis very broadly reflect what I consider to be the three central aspects of his fiction. The first section deals with perspectives. We find an attempt in both medium and message to fathom the ultimately unfathomable meaning behind existence, the 'letzter Grund aller Dinge'. This opens up fundamental questions about the nature of human perspective and 'reality' - the latter, so the texts imply, being nothing more than one of the fictions by which all humans live. This multiple mode in turn gives rise to multiple signifiers; symbols that change their 'meaning' depending on the provenance and perspective of whoever happens to be interpreting them. Stifter clearly has a desire to offer symbols with clear and benign meanings - but the dark, oblique symbolism which he actually gives us suggests a hidden realm of Unmafi and 'un-meaning'. The third section deals with the ways in which these multiple signifiers generate an ever-increasing anxious desire for wholeness, for unequivocal, absolute meaning, in terms both of Stifter's own existence and the 'existences' of the characters in the fiction. This need for Maß, Ordnung, Meaning, Truth, however, shows itself so obsessively that it emphatically indicates only a proto-absurdist vision of ineffable Unmaß. This reaches a climax in the extraordinary novel Witiko, in which Stifter's world seems at once supremely intact and supremely fragmented. Here, as in the whole thesis, I seek to demonstrate that the power of Stifter's fiction derives from the way in which his medium comes to be his message.

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