Proceeding from its lucid analysis of relatively known territory in Andreas-Salome criticism-the 'Human Being as Woman' essay - to the less discussed Rilke texts, Brinker-Gabler's Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salome opens new vistas and insights on Andreas-Salome's surprisingly multidisciplinary writings and thought. Fascinating throughout is the kaleidoscope of links that integrate Andreas-Salome's developments to a broad historical range of influences and echoes, likewise preceding from the known - Nietzsche, Freud - to the new, fostering new insights on this author's range and contexts: back to Spinoza, Baroque emblems, Leibniz,and Darwin; forward to Irigaray, Kristeva, and Benjamin. Theoretically dense yet lucid, Image in Outline is a welcome new pillar in recent decades' discourse on Andreas-Salome's contribution to modern cultural and literary thought at the turn of the twentieth century. * Raleigh Whitinger, Professor of German, University of Alberta, Canada *
With this book, Gisela Brinker-Gabler makes an important contribution to the scholarship on Lou Andreas-Salome, bringing Andreas-Salome into dialogue with some of her own contemporaries, such as Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, and Martin Buber, as well as with some of our contemporaries, including Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, and Julia Kristeva. Brinker-Gabler shows convincingly that Andreas-Salome was an important and innovative modern thinker who made significant contributions to discourses on gender and cultural difference, border crossings, creativity, and the human condition. This book will be of interest both to Lou Andreas-Salome scholars and to those who want to learn more about the interdisciplinary discourses circulating in Europe at the turn of the last century. * Muriel Cormican, Professor of German, University of West Georgia, USA *
Brinker-Gabler's erudition is stunning; she clearly commands voluminous knowledge of modern literature and philosophy and draws on this knowledge to make connections and illuminate points ... Image in Outline clearly succeeds in its aim of locating Andreas-Salome's work in the context of contemporaneous and future theories ... Scholars of modernism should read this book, for it allows a voice and a context to emerge that have received less critical attention than they deserve. * German Studies Review, Volume 38, Number 2, May 2015 (reviewed by Laura Deiulio, Christopher Newport University, USA) *
Brinker-Gabler offers readings of a number of Andreas-Salome's nonfictional works that (with the exception of Der Mensch als Weib) have received little or no critical attention up to now. In her exploration and explication of Andreas-Salome's thought, she draws on a wide and interesting variety of thinkers from Spinoza, Leibniz, and Darwin to Benjamin, Irigaray, and Derrida ... Given its broad scope, this book promises to be of interest to everyone who works on the artifacts and the culture of the twentieth century, whether Germanists or not. * Monatshefte, Vol. 106, No. 3, 2014 (reviewed by Muriel Cormican, University of West Georgia, USA) *
The author makes generous use of Andreas-Salome's rich oeuvre and filters her analysis through the prism of Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Dilthey, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, et al. to make her point that Andreas-Salome was part of the avant-garde of her generation, contributing to understanding of gender differences, advancing psychoanalysis with a varied view of narcissism and a subtle concept of post-mourning, furthering modernism's critique of rationalism and positivism, helping to shape that paradigm shift at the turn of the 20th century. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * Choice (reviewed by R. C. Conard, University of Dayton) *
