Complex Pleasure

Complex Pleasure deals with questions of literary feeling in eight major German writers - Lessing, Kant, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Musil, Kafka, Trakl, and Benjamin. On the basis of close readings of these authors, Stanley Corngold makes vivid the following ideas: that where there is literature there is complex pleasure; that this pleasure is complex because it involves the impression of a disclosure; that this thought is foremost in the minds of a number of canonical writers; that important literary works in the German tradition - fiction, poetry, critique - can be illuminated through their treatment of literary feeling and, finally, that the conceptual terms for these forms of feeling continually vary.