title: Pregnancy, thirdness, and the aesthetics of catastrophe in Heinrich von Kleist.
abstract: In documenting his own personal crisis of faith in Enlightenment rationalism through letters and essays, Kleist exposes the epistemological fissures in its edifice. This paper explores in psychoanalytic terms the dilemmas associated with knowing and not knowing, and the relationship between self and other, revealed by these texts. Kleist's literary work goes beyond expressing this crisis of knowledge to enact a kind of solution to it, not resolving the contradictions that are central in his world but presenting them aesthetically, intact and precariously balanced. More specifically, a pregnancy conceived without the knowledge of the mother-to-be--in his novella "The Marquise of O" (1807a)--suggests a modification of the psychoanalytic third to include within it the catastrophe that it also mitigates.
authors.affiliation: Department of German and Russian, Program in Comparative Literature, Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts 01267, USA. gnewman@williams.edu
authors.forename: Gail M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Newman
mesh_terms: D003405:Creativity; D008192:Deception; D004324:Drama / Q000266:history*; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D005858:Germany; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D008093:Literature, Modern / Q000266:history*; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D011247:Pregnancy / Q000523:psychology*; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000266:history*; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation