Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond : Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence

Our main words defining emotional states suggest that we have clarity about them: expressions like "love," "hatred," "anxiety," or "sorrow" seem clear enough. The reality, however, tends to be more complicated. We are often faced with gestures and utterances that are difficult to interpret; we thus find ourselves wondering about the affective force of what has just been said: "Was that an insult?" "Flirtation?" "Aggression?"

Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond looks at three interlocking forms of social violence--flirtation, passive aggression, and domestic violence. In order to understand their circulation, it traces their literary-historical genealogy in German realism and modernism--in scenes from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Robert Walser, and Franz Kafka, covering a historical period from the middle of the 19th century to the early decades of the 20th century.

Reading realist and modernist literature through 21st-century affect theory and vice versa, the analyses collected in this book show the deep literary history of our current cultural predicaments and predilections.

“Diverging with many contemporary understandings of aggression, which moralize, simplify, or blame, Nagel engages with aggression as a complex and ambiguous social and psychological phenomenon whose semantics were systematically explored in the literature of German realism. Ambiguous Aggression is a study of gendered and domestic violence that deliberately redraws many lines: between modernism and realism, scholarly and essayistic idioms, contemporary and historical discourses, literary and theoretical sources, interpretive and rhetorical dimensions.” —Kirk Wetters, Professor of Germanic Languages & Literatures and Department Chair, Yale University, USA

“Barbara Nagel's Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond takes German Studies to difficult, necessary places--where canonical works of literature both participate in and allow us to reflect on the most subtle and perfidious forms of violence. Nagel is a literary critic of rare wit and sensitivity, but also an inventive theorist, judiciously drawing on but never simply reproducing the major insights of both 20th- and 21st-century theory, from Freud and the Frankfurt School through rhetorical deconstruction to the affective turn. Suggesting a compelling taxonomy of forms of violence in German literature, this book is a watershed publication, modeling for all of us what 21st-century feminist literary criticism can (and must) do.” —Silke-Maria Weineck, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan, USA

“With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel not only makes an important addition to the German cultural and political history of affect, but also highlights an epoch that, so far, has not been in the focus of German affect studies. Theoretically, Nagel takes her inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of affect: within cultural and literary studies we need to address affects not in their ontological opacity, but in their manifestation as aesthetic forms, down to very specific linguistic details, in the case of this study of the German language. For Nagel, it is the German realist novel that provides a rich archive for the study of affect.


This turn is both original and highly productive. For with her choice of an affective register--Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence--Nagel manages to link her literary analysis of texts by Keller, Fontane, Droste-Hülshoff, Stifter, and others to the most recent and controversial debates about sexual harassment in the context of the #MeToo movement. Nagel's choice of topic and material is both courageous and clever: by looking at forms of aggression and violence between the genders within a heterosexual setting, she takes up moral issues of responsibility and victimhood. By working through these complex questions within a literary and historically distant setting--German realism in the last third of the 19th century (and beyond)--however, she creates a space of interrogation that a contemporary context could not provide. Boldly, her project takes the risk, in a way, of prioritizing textual analysis over power structures; the result being that she very productively and stunningly sharpens and extends our understanding of the force of violence through and beyond language.” —Peter Rehberg, Head of Collections and Archives, Schwules Museum Berlin, Germany

“Barbara Nagel's rich, deceptively compact book joins a growing body of scholarship on the history of feelings. More specifically, it extends an ongoing intervention within the turn to affect by scholars including Lauren Berlant, Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Eugenie Brinkema, Mel Y. Chen, and Marta Figlerowicz, insisting that affect can, and even should or must, be read. [...] Departing from an ontological strain of affect theory that risks, ironically, reifying the very materiality that it celebrates into yet another abstraction precisely by declaring it ineffable, these feminist and queer theorists adopt the methods of phenomenology and aesthetics. By replacing 'openness' with ambiguity, Nagel opens affect itself to close reading. In so doing, she also renders it a fruitful site for reading the social.” —Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating and Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do -- And How They Do It

“A compelling intervention in feminist literary studies, this is a book which comes at the right moment, but I am sure is here to stay: avoiding the contemporary inclination to moralize aggressive behavior, Nagel instead dismantles the structural bearings of such exit strategies. The book is a lesson in comparative studies-not as an academic discipline but as a consciousness aware of the ways in which violence simultaneously entangles and undoes language. In that, it serves as a compass for reframing canonical German Studies from within. Even more importantly, it provides a reality check for each of us as social animals.” —Syndicate

“Ambiguous Aggression is, in excess of all its scholarly merits, a highly entertaining book-there is plenty of humor, suspense, and surprise to be had-qualities not exactly ubiquitous in publications of (literary) theory. This book will even have something to offer to those outside the field of academia, as long as they have an inclination to follow Nagel into the realms of the quizzical, the absurd and share her enjoyment of staring at familiar words and phrases until they turn bizarre, silly, or monstrous.” —Nadine Hartmann, Universität Siegen, Germany

“With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel has for the first time systematically measured the confusing emotional terrain that lies between [insult and intimacy]. Whoever does not want to enter this terrain unknowingly – and who could possibly want that? – should read her book.” —Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie

“[I]f one is interested in German realism or in the representation of violence in literary works, this book is a must-read. It refreshes the discourse on everyday violence and offers a substantial new way of reading violence, especially in our contemporary context.” —German Studies Review

“Barbara N. Nagel's innovative approach in her new book Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence shows how interesting new directions in German studies can be. This approach to German realism is refreshing because it focuses on aesthetics linked with the social and political implications of affect. [I]f one is interested in German realism or in the representation of violence in literary works, this book is a must-read.” —German Studies Review

“Barbara Natalie Nagel has published widely on the topic of flirtation, a subject that also occupies the center of her recent, intellectually ambitious book, Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence. [Nagel] is a deft cultural critic: she wonders what [the texts of German Realism] can mean for us today-not for German readers of the past but for American readers now-and if a reflection upon them could contribute to contemporary discussion of the broader meanings to #MeToo. In this way, Nagel has provided us with her own open letter.” —The Berlin Journal

“[A]n original contribution to the research of emotions in literature ... With admirable analytical energy, Nagel raises what appears to be a phenomenon at the object level as a phenomenon that is determined by reluctance and frustration as the subject of a study that arouses “lust for the text” (Barthes) and the topic.” —Magazine for German Philology

“With Ambiguous Aggression, Barbara Nagel has for the first time systematically measured the confusing emotional terrain that lies between [insult and intimacy]. Whoever does not want to enter this terrain unknowingly – and who could possibly want that? – should read her book.” —Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie

“Aesthetically argued, passive aggression is an issue between Sein and Schein, "being" and "appearance." A person presents herself in a weaker position while simultaneously using it to manipulate her counterpart. [Nagel's] book turns into an unveiling of sorts, one in which the partners' behavior reveals increasing violence as the ambiguity of what is unseen diminishes. In the end, she is a deft cultural critic: she wonders what these texts can mean for us today-not for German readers of the past but for American readers now-and if a reflection upon them could contribute to contemporary discussion of the broader meanings to #MeToo. In this way, Nagel has provided us with her own open letter.” —The Berlin Journal