REVIEWS: 20th Century Literature and Culture 243

Auch wenn die Leitgedanken der Aktualität Brochs und der Verankerung seines
Werkes im interdisziplinären zeitgenössischen Kontext nicht in jedem einzelnen Arti-
kel wirklich federführend wirksam waren (z.B. in Robert Rizzos interessantem Beitrag
zur Entstehung von Brochs Dramen, Jürgen Heizmanns eleganter Darstellung der ne-
gativen Poetik im Tod des Vergil und Bernhard Fetz’ anregender textgenetischer Untersu-
chung), ist der Band aufgrund der Qualität der hier versammelten Aufsätze, der Breite
der behandelten Themen und Ansätze und dank einer relativen Ausgewogenheit von
affirmativer und kritischer Broch-Forschung für jeden an Broch Interessierten äußerst
lesenswert. Wesentlich erscheinen dabei die Vorzüge, dass Brochs Werk hier in einem
sehr breiten Kontext von Entstehung und Wirkung gesehen wird—ein in der allzu oft
immanent verfahrenden Broch-Forschung eher seltenes Phänomen—und dass im aus-
führlichen und differenzierten Aufzeigen konkreter Verbindungslinien über die hier
und anderweitig geleistete problematische Vereinnahmung des Dichters für eine vage
definierte Postmoderne (7) hinausgegangen wird.
JUDITH SIDLER
Dalhousie University

Hargraves, John A. Music in the Works of Broch, Mann, and Kafka. Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2001. 204 pp. $65.00 hardcover.

Although the discipline of literary criticism has long ago embraced the notion of
intertextuality and inter-art aesthetics, music has noticeably lagged behind painting
and film as an object of comparative scholarly endeavor. Indeed, the emergence of cul-
tural studies and the status of the body as the dominant critical trope of the past decade
have generally served the eyes than better than they have the ears. John Hargraves’s
study, Music in the Work of Broch, Mann, and Kafka, brings much-needed attention to the
presence and influence of music in the themes, styles, and sensibilities of these three
major modernist authors. Hargraves, who, in addition to being a literary scholar, is a
musician and presides over a chamber music series, brings first-hand knowledge to bear
on the subject. Readers may hesitate before a study of music and literary modernism be-
cause of the formalism of traditional musicology or out of the suspicion that they will
be treated to an ungainly historical survey weighted down by biographical details.
Happily, Hargraves opts for an approach that manages to be historically informed as
well as conceptually arresting—his monograph is easily accessible to those without
formal training in music, and is written in a clear and elegant style that does justice to
the complex issues he confronts.
Of the three authors under consideration, it is the least prominent modernist,
Austrian novelist and philosopher Hermann Broch who receives the most sustained at-
tention. Hargraves devotes five chapters to Broch, covering his biography, theoretical
writings, and novels, whereas he gives Mann and Kafka a single chapter apiece. The
work of Broch serves as an apt starting point for theorizing the links between music and
literature, as music for Broch was a figure for the simultaneity he sought to evoke in his
writing. Hargraves gives an intensely compelling and eloquent account of how music
provides Broch with a “cognitive method” that informs and shapes his act of driving
244 GERMAN QUARTERLY BOOK REVIEWS Spring 2004

literary language to the very boundaries of its expressive power in his masterpiece, The
Death of Virgil. Music in this sense serves as a principle of productive constraint that
structures as well as resists the flow of Broch’s dense, poetic meditations, which eluci-
date the attitudes of the gravely ill Roman poet towards his death. The status of music
as that which is beyond speech privileges it as a means to illuminate the limits of poetry
against the imperatives of ethical duty and revelatory insight. The other sections on
Broch examine the operatic motifs, drawn primarily from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, in
The Guiltless, and the function of popular forms of music, from folk music to nightclub
tunes to Salvation Army hymns, in The Sleepwalkers and The Spell. If Hargraves’s read-
ings of Broch’s other novels are somewhat less forceful than his masterly analysis of The
Death of Virgil, this arises in part from the more conventional forms these works take.
Thus, there is a greater focus on treating music as a literary theme in these chapters than
on the challenges it presents to the literary representation of temporality as well as to
mimetic theories of art.
This problem carries over into the sections on Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
When Hargraves deals with the formally more conservative Mann, he devotes consider-
able energy to unraveling the texture of allusions to music in The Magic Mountain. With
regard to Doctor Faustus, the study does not venture far afield of Adorno’s influential
account of twelve-tone music. In the chapter on Kafka, on the other hand, Hargraves
takes a risky approach that bears unexpected fruit. Proceeding from Kafka’s own admis-
sions of his unmusical nature, Hargraves plunges once more into the question of the
“hierarchy of the arts,” but this time through the opposition of silence and noise. What
emerges is a fascinating reading of “Investigations of a Dog” and Josephine in which mu-
sic, in properly Kafkaesque fashion, is shown manifesting powers of the occult that is
another name for the banality of history. Although Hargraves then lapses into a some-
what cursory Freudianism regarding Josephine, nonetheless this chapter—as well as
much of the rest of the book—rewards the reader with profound insights that are bound
to expand his or her view of Broch and Kafka.
PETER Y. PAIK
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Hagen, Anja. Gedächtnisort Romantik. Intertextuelle Verfahren in der Prosa der 80er
und 90er Jahre. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2003. 523pp. i48.00 paperback.

In der vorliegenden Untersuchung geht die Autorin der Frage nach, inwieweit die
postmoderne Prosa intertextuelle Auseinandersetzungen mit Textelementen und Text-
strukturen der deutschen Romantik sucht, und welche Funktion diese Verweise erfül-
len. Dabei erstellt Hagen ein eigenes Intertextualitätsmodell, das eine “Kommentierung
der intertextuellen Referenzen” unternimmt, indem sie die Sinnvervielfältigungspro-
zesse nachzeichnet und das Spiel der sich wechselseitig akkumulierenden und destruie-
renden Sinnhypothesen rekonstruierend aufnimmt und fortsetzt. Dieses theoretische
Modell findet in der Analyse postmoderner Romane und Erzählungen praktische An-
wendung. So gelangt sie schließlich zu dem Schluss, dass sich die AutorInnen der