Sex Changes with Kleist

Katrin Pahl, "Sex Changes with Kleist"
English | ISBN: 0810140128 | 2019 | 256 pages | PDF | 2 MB
Sex Changes with Kleist analyzes how the dramatist and poet Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) responded to the change in the conception of sex and gender that occurred in the eighteenth century. Specifically, Katrin Pahl shows that Kleist resisted the shift from a one-sex to the two-sex and complementary gender system that is still prevalent today. With creative close readings engaging all eight of his plays, Pahl probes Kleist's appreciation for incoherence, his experimentation with alternative symbolic orders, his provocative understanding of emotion, and his camp humor. Pahl demonstrates that rather than preparing modern homosexuality, Kleist puts an end to modern gender norms even before they take hold and refuses the oppositional organization of sexual desire into homosexual and heterosexual that sprouts from these norms.