Things You Can Do to an Author When He’s Dead: Literary Prosthetics and the Example of Heinrich von Kleist

This chapter explores the adaptations allowed—if not demanded—by the death of the author in terms of what this author dubs a “literary prosthetics”, in which the corpus is imagined as being aesthetically supplemented and potentially also enhanced by new and artificial devices. Taking the example of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), the author examines the space for adaptation left by his premature death and the various lacunae in his biography and literary corpus, and asks if the ultimate act of Kleist reception lies in adaptations which forge new authentic works by the long dead author. This begs the question: what kind of critical reception might this prosthetic Kleist literature engender.