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The Doppelgï¿1/2nger: Double Visions in German Literature

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The idea here is intriguing, but runs into difficulties immediately. To start with, English-speaking readers need to be warned that this book is incomphrensible without access to the original texts, some of which are unavailable in translation. (He does get a bonus point here for his attention to G.H. Schubert.) In an academic book, however, this can't really be held against him. But there are more serious problems. The book is not really a unit in itself, but chapters which were apparently originally published as separate articles - an introduction, Jean-Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kleist then a jump forward to the end of the century and chapters on the novelle (short story) and on post-war modernism in the 1920s. To do so, he stretches the concept of the "doppelganger" out of its literal meaning as a double of a living human (now more usually referred to as astral projection or bilocation) through "split" personalities, schizoid or multiple, into ghosts and nightmares, and then into all types of "realistic" doubles - characters with parallel lives, role models, stream of consciousness, and thereby diluting his point. He is, alas, an academic addicted to jargon, worse yet, a Freudian, and worst of all, a Lacanian. The combination ends up as a book chasing its own tail - or a more Freudian part of the anatomy.