English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

The present article investigates the literary representation of biographical and geological coherence in Max Frisch’s narrative  Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän  (1979), a story about a pensioner suffering from dementia, who has to cope with both the erosion of his memory as well as the geological erosion in the Swiss Alps. On the basis of Hayden White’s tropics of discourse and Stephen Jay Gould’s study on  Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time , the rhetorical strategies being used by Frisch are examined in order to articulate the tension between human history and the history of nature and earth. Focusing on the two main tropes in the text, synecdoche and irony, the analysis will show how the text tries to escape forms of anthropomorphism – especially by generating a ›transhuman‹ perspective – but ultimately confesses its failure to do so.  Holozän  thus can be seen as an ironical (self-)reflection on the limits of rhetoric and language in terms of depicting non-human history.

»Die Natur braucht keine Namen«: Rhetorik und Geologie in Max Frischs Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979)