Die Wirklichkeit im 'Hohlspiegel der Sinne'

This dissertation investigates the problem of perception in the texts of Austrian author Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) vis-à-vis contemporary physiology (J. Müller, H. v. Helmholtz) and in the context of the history of the philosophical and literary debates on sensuality, perception, and epistemology since the Age of Enlightenment. While Stifter's engagement with science has long been regarded as belonging to an older regime of physico-theology, I argue that he engages with modern science in two significant ways: by employing scientific concepts and forms of observation (experiment, case study, and microscopy), and by making the problem of perception the focus of his literary investigations. I show that Stifter develops a poetics of perception that, while building on German idealism (especially J.G. Herder and J.W. Goethe), parallels scientific knowledge around 1850 by discussing the mechanisms of nerve physiology and the disjunction between perceptive stimuli and cognitive ideas--concepts which were also central to Helmholtz's influential sign theory of perception. This categorical disconnect between subject and object and the subsequent unreliability of perception are the basis of Stifter's realism. His poetics of perception focuses on two principal sites of investigation: the intersection of the physiological and psychological experience of reality, and the integration of psychological concepts into collective systems of knowledge. Analyzing a broad range of texts from his early and middle period and contextualizing them with secondary scientific and cultural sources, I show that Stifter's works deliver a critique of romantic self-adulation, investigate the effects of a deprivation of sensory input for the notion of realistic vision, and devise rigorous schemes of Bildung to ensure the correct ('realistic') understanding of perceptive signs (especially in his utopian novel Der Nachsommer ). In Stifter's texts, it is ultimately the community which guarantees access to a `tested' reality beyond precarious subjectivity. My analysis shows Stifter's scientific gaze to be genuinely modern in exposing reality as constructed solely by the subject. At the same time, his texts--informed by the ideal visions of science and art--strive to push beyond constructivism to capture nature as an ensemble of lawfulness existing outside the self.