Cultural history of discourse. Robert Müller's »lrmelin Rose«

Cultural hermeneutics between analytical strategy and postmodern critique of ideology

Abstract

On the eve of World War I the Austrian essayist Robert Müller produced a subtle fictional description of the change of literary paradigms from fin-de-siecle to early expressionist prose. In his short story »Irmelin Rose « this change is symbolized in the protagonist's journey from her private, isolated garden in the country to the big city, bringing about a double textual >revolution<: in motiv as weil as in style. Thus, the text appears as centre of the century's most prominent discourses, as poetic point of intersection, where the different discourses (advertising, female flanerie, new media, aestheticism, violence, and city traffic) meet and interfere, creating a specific cultural concept that may be described as >Culture of Attractions<. In Müller's story the shopping window serves as it's poetic and discoursive metaphor. The paper investigates into the close relations between the professional contemporary >shopping-window-discourse< (as presented, e.g., in the business journals) and it's fictional representation and poetological transgression in »Irmelin Rose«.