Gisela Brinker-Gabler is Professor of Comparative Literature at The State University of New York at Binghamton, USA. She has previously taught at the University of Cologne (Germany), the University of Essen (Germany), and the University of Florida (USA). She is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (1978, 5th revised and extended edition 2007) and Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (1996).

This new study introduces the reader into Lou Andreas-Salomé's critical and creative engagement with modern thought. Through detailed explorations of some of her major texts, Brinker-Gabler examines Andreas-Salomé's unique perspective within contemporary discourses attentive to meaning, perception, memory and the unconscious. Making use of conceptual frameworks of Irigaray and Benjamin, Freud and Kristeva, among others, Brinker-Gabler argues that Andreas-Salome displaces dominant visions of gender and sexuality, culture, religion, and creativity with multifaceted revisions through the female lens of a creative thinker. With her aesthetics of the "in-visible," as Brinker-Gabler calls it, Andreas-Salomé seeks to retrieve the multilayered past that is embedded in the present and to give positive accounts of sexual and cultural difference, experience, narcissism, and becoming.

Introduction /
Chapter One: Umriss--B(u)ilding Woman or Sexual Difference
/ Chapter Two: Andreas-Salomé's Aesthetics
/ Chapter Three: Icon: B(u)ilding Russia or Cultural Difference
/ Chapter Four: Nachtrauer: B(u)ilding Rilke or Modern Creativity
/ Chapter Five: (Un)doing Modern Thought /
Bibliography/ Index