Reading Riddles

Reviews / Votes

In this cogent contribution to scholarship, Tucker argues for a connection between Romanticism and psychoanalysis 'at the level of formal and methodological principles, in a shared notion of how poetic language operates.' The author observes that in German Romanticism the riddle-understood as a 'figure for the processes of writing and reading'-emerges as a key figure for a modern poetics that 'privileges obscurity, difficulty, and interrupted communication.' He develops this idea in discussions of comprehensibility/incomprehensibility and the function of criticism between August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel's conception of the symbol, and the deployment of riddle structures in Ludwig Tieck's 'Blond Eckbert' and William Lowell. Tucker then takes up Freud's work on jokes and dream work to show that the riddle provides a model for Freud's interpretative practices; he offers a plausible path of intellectual transmission of this model from the Romantics. Freud, then, becomes his own Oedipal figure: a man who strives to solve the riddle of the human psyche. Tucker's focus on the riddle is a new and productive approach to the material; it merits attention. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers/faculty. * Choice Reviews * The author manages to do justice to both Romanticism and psychoanalysis on their own terms, displaying a remarkable sensitivity both to rhetorical complexity and historical specificity....What might seem conservative to some -- precisely those techniques that assist in the "close reading" of texts -- is made novel and exciting in the course of Tucker's investigation. * Monatshefte *