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Recycling of Doubles in Narrative Fiction of the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries

  • Amit Marcus

Date Published:

June 1, 2013

Abstract:

Doppelgänger narratives of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries relate in different and sometimes incompatible ways to their Romantic precursors. They often parody these precursor narratives, criticize their popular interpretations, or tinker with their conventions. Some of them follow the Romantic tradition in highlighting the harsh rivalry between "original" and double and its catastrophic results, whereas in others the double acts as a catalyst for self-reflection and selftransformation. Doppelgänger narratives of the last decades tend to focus on the intersection of the psychological with the scientific or the aesthetic domains, while the significance of the supernatural principle is reduced, eliminated, or replaced by implausible coincidences and analogical relations typical of (post)modern fiction. In order to demonstrate these ideas, the article begins with an analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816) and continues with an exploration of five types of later Doppelgänger narratives.

 

Amit Marcus is an independent scholar. He is the author of Self-Deception in Literature and Philosophy (2007) and fifteen articles on topics that include unreliable narration, “we” fictional narratives, narrative ethics, and clone narratives. He has held scholarships, funded by the Minerva and the Humboldt Foundations, at the Universities of Freiburg and Giessen in Germany.

Updated Sept. 15, 2016

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/15/2020