Suddenness

Suddenness or epiphany - an expression of discontinuity and rupture - resists aesthetic integration. This argument is the centrepiece of Bohrer's collection of essays, the first English translation of his work. The study examines a romantic and modernist literary phenomenon and traces its textual appearance in the works of early German Romantics - Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Kleist - through Nietzsche to such modernists as Proust, Joyce, Musil and Benjamin. Although Bohrer discusses the influence of the French poststructuralists Foucault and Derrida, by concentrating on the "incommensurability" of fictional language, he ultimately develops his arguments from the literary texts themselves. As he concludes this study, Bohrer states that "suddenness" transcends history and yet is tied to it, especially to the processes of acceleration typical of modernization since the industrial revolution.