Image in Outline ─ Reading Lou Andreas-Salom懁

Image in Outline introduces the reader to Lou Andreas-Salome's significant engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations o fsome of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salome's contributions to contemporar ydiscourses on meaning, perception, memory, and the unconscious. Situating her analyses within Andreas-Salome's historical, social, and intellectual contexts, this new reading utilizes a theoretical frame informed by thinkers such as Benjamin, Bergson, and Freud, and current theoretical perspectives by Irigaray, Grosz, and Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salome — committed as she was to the"double direction" of rigorous thought and individual nuancing — refocused dominant visions of gender, sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity through a female lens. In a "disenchanted world" (Weber), Andreas-Salome offered an image epistemology or"aesthetics of b(u)ilding," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, that seeks to retrieve the multilayered past embedded in individuals and cultural forms, thus providing positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference,experience, narcissism, and creativity in modern life.

Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. She has previously taught at the University of Cologne (Germany), the University of Essen (Germany), and the University of Florida (USA). She is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1978, 5th revised and extended edition 2007), Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (1996), and "If We Had the Word. "Ingeborg Bachmann: Views and Reviews (2004, with Markus Zisselsberger).