caa a22 4500 378936123 CHVBK 20180305123641.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161128e20041023xx s 000 0 eng 10.1515/ANGL.2004.63 doi (NATIONALLICENCE)gruyter-10.1515/ANGL.2004.63 Merten Kai Giessen "To turn the gazer's spirit into stone”: Deutsche und britische Medusen in der Repräsentationskrise des 19. Jahrhunderts [Elektronische Daten] [Kai Merten] This essay explores the reception of the Medusa myth in 19th-century German and British writing, with Foucault's thesis of a shift from a taxonomic order to an episteme centered on the human being as a starting point. In the texts studied, the Medusa myth becomes a highly charged site of both epistemic reassurance and unsettling. The Medusan scenes in Goethe's work testify to an attempt at setting at rest the discontents of human self-representation by underscoring the gender difference between the male hero / onlooker and the female figure looked at. In contrast, Shelley's ekphrastic poem - in many ways a reaction to Goethe's Medusa - imagines the collapse of all differences underlying human representation and points up the violence both within representation and in a world without it. Thus, what Shelley passes on to later writers is a problem and not a solution. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones' text-image collaborations on the Medusa myth introduce the male hero / onlooker as a representational object. Thereby, however, epistemic differentiations are not reinstalled but once more unsettled in what is in one case an uncanny human sameness under an all-encompassing representational order and in the other the detachment of a female discourse. The latter dimension is further explored in C. F. Meyer's brilliant Medusa poem of 1892 - another instance of across-the-Channel reception -, which points the way towards the feminist episteme advocated in some 20th-century readings of the myth. Taken together, however, the Medusa receptions of the 19th century warn against segregationist reactions to the challenge of human representation. © Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2003 Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 122/1(2004-10-23), 63-88 0340-5222 122:1<63 2004 122 ANGL https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2004.63 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1515/ANGL.2004.63 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Merten Kai Giessen NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Anglia - Zeitschrift für englische Philologie Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG 122/1(2004-10-23), 63-88 0340-5222 122:1<63 2004 122 ANGL CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-gruyter