Overview

Endings are not just singular moments in time, but the outcomes of a process. And whatever a book's conclusion, its form has a history. Literary Conclusions presents a new theory of textual endings in eighteenth-century literature and thought. Analyzing essential works by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Heinrich von Kleist, Oliver Simons shows how the emergence of new kinds of literary endings around 1800 is inextricably linked to the history of philosophical and scientific concepts. Simons examines the interrelations of Lessing's literary endings with modes of logical conclusion; he highlights how Goethe's narrative closures are forestalled by an uncontrollable vital force that was discussed in the sciences of the time; and he reveals that Kleist conceived of literary genres themselves as forms of reasoning. Kleist's endings, Simons demonstrates, mark the beginning of modernism. Through close readings of these authors and supplemental analyses of works by Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his study crafts an elegant theory of conclusions that revises established histories of literary genres and forms.

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This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons's command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book's contribution to current discussions in the scholarship-about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study-is substantial. -David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons's book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment. -Rudiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn. -Marton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)

Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons's book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment. --Rudiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons's command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book's contribution to current discussions in the scholarship--about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study--is substantial. --David E. Wellbery, editor in chief of A New History of German Literature This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn. --Marton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)

This is a well written and forcefully argued study that succeeds in bringing out an important and heretofore unrecognized curve of literary-historical development across what must be regarded as the most significant phase of German cultural history. Simons's command of the scholarship is exemplary, combining close textual analysis with a broad view of literary and intellectual history. The book's contribution to current discussions in the scholarship--about the historical study of form and the place of the history of knowledge in literary historical study--is substantial. --David E. Wellbery, editor-in-chief of A New History of German Literature Simons operates on an elaborate and cutting-edge theoretical level. The readings in the book can be described as combining new formalist thinking with historical epistemology in the tradition of Foucault and the New Historicism. Simons's book is innovative and exemplary at the same time, and this, in my view, is an enormous accomplishment. --Rudiger Campe, author of The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal to Kleist This thought-provoking book greatly enriches our understanding of a key juncture in literary history by drawing attention to the ways in which literary genres, patterns of emplotment, and syntactical structures follow, critique, and complicate forms of reasoning in an age that glorifies reason and despairs of it in turn. --Marton Dornbach, author of The Saving Line: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Caesuras of Hope (Northwestern University Press, 2021)

Author Information

Oliver Simons is a professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University. He is the author of Raumgeschichten: Topographien der Moderne in Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Literatur and Literaturtheorien zur Einführung and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt.

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