Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Germanic Languages and Literatures

First Advisor

North, Paul

Abstract

This dissertation unfolds the ways in which description emerged as an active site for reconfiguring human experience in the writing experiments of the 20th century. Description, as a procedure for presenting and arranging the phenomena of reality, typically constructs an epistemological realm of experience that progresses toward comprehension and internal consistency. Understood in this way, description mediates one kind of experiential reality while foreclosing others. This project enlarges description’s operative capabilities toward a presentational mode that does not merely re-describe the phenomenal objects in this reality. To do so, it foregrounds writers and thinkers who conversed directly with philosophical traditions ofdescription and experience over the course of the 20th century: Robert Musil (1880 – 1942), Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940), and Ingeborg Bachmann (1926 – 1973). Their corresponding interlocutors: (1) the worldmaking of the physical sciences; (2) the mapping of conscious experience in experimental psychology; and (3) the models constructed in philosophies of language. Through their own writing experiments—namely Musil’s essayistic novel, Benjamin’s hashish reports, and Bachmann’s postwar poetics— my writers show that description’s unintending impulses often threaten to undo the experiences it had supposedly set out to construct. Far from hypostatizing a universal experiential substrate that one either “has” or simply lives “through,” description’s displacements (or de-scriptions) point to the possibility of a “living experience” whose teachings remain open to new ways of writing and thinking.

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