ABSTRACT
This chapter develops a concept of “nonhuman literary genre,” while exploring the turn to description in the metaphysical naturalism theorized and practiced in Germany by Alfred Döblin and Wilhelm Lehmann. It seeks to bridge the gap between the literary forms of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the nonhuman ontology of objects articulated, in different ways, by Jane Bennett and Graham Harman. In the end, the chapter argues that both Bennett's “horizontal materialism” and Harman's “vertical immaterialism” can be detected in the formal strategies adopted by Döblin and Lehmann.
