Zeitgeist in Contemporaneous Literature

Zeitgeist in contemporaneous literature

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in comparison to other novels and films

Introduction

The paper at hand deals with the question whether and to what extent elements of the zeitgeist can be found in Mark Haddon’s novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”. In order to be able to draw comparisons other pieces of literature and film will be incorporated when focusing on several zeitgeist phenomena.

First of all it might be appropriate to discuss the issue of zeitgeist on its own since the term is highly controversial. Zeitgeist describes the mentality of a particular period by catching the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. Hereby particular attention is given to the ethos of people who are from one or more generations and share a certain view of the world despite their different ages and social backgrounds.

Johann Gottfried Herder, a German philosopher wrote a critique on Christian Adolph Klotz’ work “Genius seculi” and translated “Genius