On Modernist Aesthetics of Peter Weiss's The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman

By means of fragmentation, collage, defamiliarization, and hallucination, The Shadow of the Body of the Coachman presents the collapse of logic and the dissolution of the reality caused by the decomposition of space, the dismemberment of body and the collapse of language. Radical aesthetic expression, leitmotiv of the crisis of subject and literary creation all originate from the postwar crisis of the German society. Peter Weiss's artistic exploration is the specific reflection of Peter Bürger's argument that it is the alienation reality of the modern western society that generates the radical artistic form of the modernist novels.