Alguma poesia, poesia alguma

REVIEWS Thompson, G. R. Foes Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1973. 254 pp. Cloth: $12.50. This carefully documented and closely reasoned study weaves the comic and Gothic strands of Poe's fiction into a unified and coherent fabric. More immediately, it offers serious readers a sound and sensible alternative to the arguments of interpreters such as Richard Wilbur and Joseph J. Moldenhauer. My suspicion is that their assertions that Poe celebrated death, even perceived"murder as a fine art," have hadtoo great an influence on recent thought and criticism. How many teachers have caught quizzical looks on the faces of undergraduates presented with the reading of Eureka as a celebration, or tested Moldenhauer's arguments in light of the morbidity of Charles Manson's atrocities? Concluding that Poe was consistently the skeptic, Thompson argues that "the 'effect' aimed at in Eureka is an almost mystical, poetic perception of and simultaneous transcendence of the absurd hoax of individual existence" (p. 195), the hoax being "the appalling possibility of void at the bottom of existence" (p. 191) . Contrast this to the views of Wilbur and Moldenhauer that through death the poet (madman, murderer, suicide) transcends the mundane to rediscover primal unity, God. Thompson sees equally tragic and ironic assertions informing Pym (1838-39) and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una" (1841). Out of this essentially dark vision emerges Poe's ironic stance, "a psychological way of avoidingspiritual self-destruction bylaughing at the sources of one's own despair" (p. 139). If, for Poe's heroes and narrators, for mankind, the universe is deceptive, perverse, absurd (God's "gigantic hoax" on man), the mind can transcendonly by contrasting and balancing man's ill-fortune with a comic, satiric, or ironic perception. The point is not that of Poe's sixty-eight tales, thirty-three are obviously comic and thirty-five serious. The central thesis tested is that the serious or Gothic fictions possess "satiric and comic elements thematically related to the macabre elements, . . . [possess] a kind of ambivalent mockery" (p. 14). By virtue of their ironic elements theGothic tales are of the same cloth as the comic fictions, that is, are articulations of the same dark and ironic Romantic vision. Individual annihilation is the only certitude, however intensely Poe's characters may yearn for ultimate knowledge beyond death. The truly Gothic dimension of the fiction is the mockery of such an absurd universe by means of irony and hoax. Poe employs the grotesque and arabesque (distinct but strongly similar modes) to merge the "ironic opposites" in transcendent vision. Viewed from this perspective, the early Gothic piece "Metzengerstein" is a satire on the established conventions of English and American Gothic writing. "The Philosophy of Furniture" becomes a biting joke on "decorist" theory. "The Assignation" is a "synecdoche of . . . serio-comic, ironic ambivalence." Dramatic irony in "The Oval Portrait" is aimed at the naive reader seeking conventional Gothic entertainment . And a piece such as "Valdemar," playing to and on the period's taste for pseudoscience , is a hoax on the occult tale. 104Reviews Skepticism, despair over man's ability to penetrate objective reality, or even comprehend his own mind, informs masterworks such as "Ligeia" and "Usher." While displaying stunning linear logic, Poe's narrators are "capable of gross misperception, unreal construction, and instant irrationality" (p. 103). And the Gothic lighting and interior decor, frequently judged tawdry and melodramatic, are weird, but from Thompson's angle of vision also objective correlatives of tormented minds. This study will also be welcomed by intellectual and literary historians. Poe is directly linked to the German Romantic Ironists, especially Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (first translated into English in 1815) alone joined Romantic melancholy with the ironic and comic. And, for a period, German Romanticism pointed the way "toward an ultimate harmony involving a unification of opposites, an annihilation of apparent contradictions and earthly limitations, and a merging of the subjective human personality and objective rational understanding into a penetrating view ofexistence from the height ofthe ideal—butalways with an eye to the terrors of an ultimately incomprehensible, disconnected, absurd, probably decaying, and...

According to Friedrich Schlegel, theorist of German Romanticism, art is autonomous and idiosyncratic and is not subordinate to any utilitarian or mundane goals. Its essence is confined to manifestation of beauty and creation of visualized images that do not imitate the world’s visible forms but express certain essential foundations of human existence. F. Schlegel applies two art concepts: “expressive arts” that are based on the idealizing principle and “fine arts” that center around beauty, “depiction”, and spiritual fulfillment. Art is grounded upon the principles of diversity, unity, and integrity, and its main law is the internal consistency of a work of art with itself. Art combines fullness, harmony, beauty, and morality. Classical art created by a genius is always aesthetically relevant and symbolic and can never be fully understood. The supreme art is complete fullness, and an example of such is the art of Classical Greece. Schlegel often uses the terms of art and poetry as synonymous, viewing poetry specifically as the aesthetic quality of art. To Greek Classical art, he opposes contemporary Romantic art, which, in many ways, refrains from visible manifestation of the principle of beauty, knows no mythological roots, but is founded upon the laws of the characteristic, individual, interesting, disharmonious, contradictory, ironic, ingenious, and marvelous. Romantic art originates from Dante’s, Shakespeare’s, Cervantes’s, and Goethe’s “novels”. It is exactly Romantic art that F. Schlegel considered to be the future of aesthetic culture.

Fichte's moral [theory] contains the most correct views of morality. Morality says absolutely nothing determinate - it is conscience - a mere judge without law. Morality commands immediately, but always individually. It is decision through and through. correct idea of conscience. Laws are thoroughly opposed to morality.1 As is well known, the relationship between Fichte and the early German Romantic writer Novalis has been broadly explored in the last century and a half, though with diametrically differing conclusions. Both the extent of Fichte's influence on Novalis as well as the quality of Novalis's interpretation of Fichte have been the subjects of fierce dispute.2 Most recent work on the relationship between Novalis and Fichte has been devoted to the early notebooks, written by Novalis in the years 1795-1796 and normally referred to as the Fichte-Studien, and has considered this early work almost exclusively in its relationship to the 1794 Wissenschafislehre, and, even more narrowly, to its beginning sections.3 In this essay, I will be exploring this relationship at the extreme opposite end of Novalis's albeit very short career, focusing primarily upon the last completed section of the second part of the unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen in relation to Fichte's later Jena writings, specifically the System of Ethics. This section of the novel is composed of a dialogue between the title figure, the burgeoning poet Heinrich, and an older man, introduced as Sylvester, the doctor, who, as I will demonstrate, enunciates a particular reading of the ethical views developed in the System of Ethics. This dialogue appears to be the place where Novalis attempts explicitly to come to terms with his philosophical influences, in particular, with Fichte's ethics, and to find a place for his poetic vocation in relation to it, which as I will suggest in the first half of my paper, remains problematic in Fichte's system. A close analysis of this final scene will form the second half of my essay. Sylvester passage, which fairly brims over with words such as Gewissen (conscience) and Tugend (virtue), has not been especially popular among advocates of what has been the prevailing interpretation of the early Romantics in the past few decades, as avatars of an ironic, deconstructive, and/or postmodern sensibility.4 As with any passage in Novalis, a number of possible influences come to mind, here including such figures as Hemsterhuis, Schleiermacher, and Baader. 5 Here, however, I will focus my reading of this passage on its parallels with SE, seeing the passage also as a commentary upon it. Following Beiser,6 1 will thus highlight the importance of the ethical project for Novalis and its direct relationship to his aesthetic aspirations. Fichte on Aesthetics and Ethics I thus begin with Fichte's views on the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. One of the central texts in Fichte's work explicitly addressing this topic is §31 of the System of Ethics, titled The Duties of the Aesthetic Artist.7 As Hartmut Traub notes,8 this section contains a variety of ideas which can only be understood against the backdrop of Fichte's earlier writings, especially the essay written in 1795, the Spirit and the Letter in Philosophy,9 the subject of the famed dispute with Schiller, who refused to publish it in his journal. Because it appears in the System of Ethics, the fundamental question addressed by this section is the role which the fine arts have in the development of humanity toward its final goal, namely, the self-sufficiency of reason. At the beginning of the section, a certain resistance to the topic is palpable; Fichte discusses the theme if only for the sake of completeness and because such discussions must happen due to the necessities of our age.10 This latter comment is likely a reference to the claims that Schiller made in his On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity which posit the pedagogical effects of beauty as the only way to escape the dilemmas of modern society which have led, for example, to the failure of the French Revolution. …

“Novalis, Nature and the Absolute” examines the ways in which the early German romantics understood nature as a world both independent from and constitutive of the human sphere. Drawing upon the works of Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), the essay shows that this period of post-Kantian German philosophy (for which Novalis is taken to be paradigmatic) offers a neglected but much needed antidote to instrumental views of nature. The essay examines the role of the “Absolute” or noumenal nature in early German romanticism, as well as the notions of “inner” and “outer” nature as the early German romantics understood them. Inner nature, i.e. individual human subjectivity, is fundamentally determined by the individual’s relationship to nature outside the subject. This outer nature includes both the non-human and the human environment, and the reunification of the individual with that environment is what the early German romantics came to see as the Absolute. In this regard, their ontological commitments are far different from those of the German idealists after Kant.

This article examines the portrayal of romantic love in the works of P. G. Wodehouse, the preeminent English humorist of the 20th century. The concept of «romantic love» is considered through the lens of early German Romantic philosophy. By analyzing the works of F. Schelling, F. Schlegel, Novalis, as well as major scholarly studies on early German Romanticism, the article elucidates the Romantic concept of love. The image of romantic love in Wodehouse's oeuvre is analyzed using examples from different periods of the author's career, including early novels (Ruth in Exile, A Gentleman of Leisure), mature works (The Luck of the Bodkins), and later texts (French Leave, Money in the Bank). Particular attention is paid to the short story The Reverent Wooing of Archibald. The study employs the comparative method. Wodehouse's works are compared with texts by the early German Romantics and A. Tennyson, specifically his cycle Idylls of the King. Wodehouse's writing is also examined within the framework of Yu. N. Tynyanov's theory of parody. Drawing on existing scholarly literature, the article interprets the motif of chivalric love in Wodehouse's work. This study is the first in both Russian and international literary scholarship to focus specifically on the image of romantic love in his writing. While previous researchers have traditionally emphasized the comic aspects of love in Wodehouse's works, this article argues that irony and parody function not to diminish the concept of romantic love, but to reveal and revitalize it. This leads to the conclusion that the portrayal of love created by Wodehouse is unique in 20th-century literature. The findings of this research provide grounds for a partial reconsideration of the established view of Wodehouse's place in the 20th-century literary process and may be utilized in courses on the history of English literature.

Reviewed by: The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 by Dalia Nassar Leif Weatherby Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Pp. 360. $50.00. Dalia Nassar’s The Romantic Absolute proposes a major shift in the way we view the movement known as Early German Romanticism, a shift contained in the book’s title: the conception of the “absolute” is at the center of the widely varying strands of metaphysical, epistemological, and literary work of the central figures in Jena. Nassar is seeking to overcome a division between those who emphasize epistemology (especially Manfred Frank) and those who emphasize ontology (especially Frederick Beiser). The claim, reinforced with compelling evidence throughout this finely argued book, is that the “absolute” is conceived as both, and that this combination of being and thinking instantiates itself in such a way that the cognizer participates in, and can even change, the nature she cognizes. The “absolute” is therefore a singular contribution of what Nassar classes as “Romantic”—it differs from the theories of Kant and Fichte, but also, pace Beiser, significantly from that of Hegel. In a sense, this Romanticism is Spinozan, but that is only one of the surprising and fascinating results of this study. The three parts of the book address Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schlegel, and Friedrich Schelling. The latter is often counted as an “Idealist,” but Nassar makes a strong case for his inclusion in the project of Romantic philosophy. All three fashion the absolute as beyond the distinction between thought and being, and yet immanent to the world. And all three share an interest in the figure of “intellectual intuition,” as well as a strong relationship to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Intellectual intuition [intellektuelle Anschauung] was formulated by Kant as an impossible kind of infinite knowing that displays a necessary relation between the sensible contents of perception and the intellectual forms of cognition. As Nassar details, Fichte used this figure to describe the basis of self-identification. But the Romantics took it in a different direction, starting with Hölderlin (whose work is not explored here) and Novalis. Nassar explores their varied takes on this figure, which threatens to reawaken metaphysics after Kant’s proscriptions, in what is probably the most detailed and illuminating investigation of this topic to date. The book consistently sets this Idealist figure into dialogue with Goethe’s natural-scientific methods, as well as with recent work (especially that of Eckart Förster) on this topic. What emerges is a deep historical account of the emergence of Romantic metaphysics, juxtaposing Goethe and Idealism and finding between them a Romantic philosophical voice all its own. The “absolute” is both intellectual intuition and metamorphosis, a combination of being and knowing in expressive development. The chapters on Novalis reconstruct the development of his philosophical thought beyond the early Fichte Studies, which have received much attention. Nassar points to the centrality of Novalis’s 1798 turn to Hemsterhuis and Kant, during which he conceives of the crux of his later thought, an absolute that transcends antinomies and is immanent to the world. Novalis’s concern for building a “moral organ” and his attempt to write a Romantic encyclopedia find their complement in the section on Friedrich Schlegel, a truly interdisciplinary study in which we find Nassar deftly moving between Schlegel’s understudied and extraordinarily hermetic philosophical writings (her account of the Lectures on Transcendental Idealism of 1800 is a major contribution to English-language scholarship on Schlegel) and his [End Page 316] genre-projects (not only an encyclopedia, but also the “new Bible”). The suggestion that the famous “Wechselerweis” is not only an epistemological tool but also an ontological structure (122) will surely provoke debate. The section ends in one of the highlights of the book, a reading of Schlegel’s Lucinde that explores the complexity of his notion of the novel as a “plant” that remains true to the conception of the absolute. This reading will surely be of great interest to literary scholars. In the masterful Schelling chapters, Nassar succeeds in showing that Schelling’s systems...

At once lucid and multifaceted, Alexander J. B. Hampton’s Romanticism and the Re-Invention of Modern Religion offers a fresh understanding of the German Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century. As its subtitle promises—and as its cover image illustrates with the personification of Germany and Italy embracing—the book maintains that key figures of the movement reconcile the German post-Kantian emphasis on idealism and immanence with the Platonic-Christian legacy of a realist transcendent absolute. Tracing in particular Early German Romanticism (‘Frühromantik’, 1795–1801) as embodied in Schlegel, Hölderlin, and Novalis, this work argues that the Romantic project was a creative pursuit of a religious nature. It thereby distinguishes itself from two common and simplified characterisations of Romanticism, the first being part of the secularisation narrative, a picture that ‘associate[s] its ideas with the progressive decline and disappearance of religion’, and the second placing the movement firmly in one of two intellectual camps, that is, as ‘a development of either post-Kantian Fichtean aesthetic egoism or Spinozistic monist pantheism’ (p. 6). Both characterisations, according to Hampton, depend on a narrow definition of the term ‘religion’, as institutionally- and doctrinally defined, and as strictly separated from philosophy (pp. 5, 6). Challenging these characterisations, Hampton argues for a Romanticism that had an intrinsic constructive religious dimension by highlighting the movement’s elements of transcendence and the absolute (p. 7).

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On Novalis’ Pivotal Role in Early German Romanticism

Early German Romanticism

This article examines the origins of modernism/postmodernism and their presentation in the light of aesthetic and philosophical treatises or literary works of Friedrich Schlegel, Heinrich Kleist, Friedrich Schiller, as well as in the triad model of the world history and the biblical story of the fall of the man. The common idea which lies at the basis of the works presented is the contrast between the principles of nature and reason and the search for opportunities for their synthesis. The main thesis of the article is to present the commonality between the maxims of modernism/ postmodernism and early German romanticism, as well as to consider postmodernism as late romanticism with its inherent manneristic features. The basic concepts of modernism and postmodernism are presented through the prism of works and theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Wolfgang Welsch, Christoph Bode, Rolf Günter Renner, as well as Victor Žmega?. The central concept in the article is the concept of self-reflection of literature and art as the most vivid feature of modernism and postmodernism.

Given the obvious grounding of the Buber-Rosenzweig translation (1926-1930) of the Bible in general (german) culture, it is interesting that in most reactions to the first publication the specifically Jewish character of this translation is noted. The A. examines the extent to which this translation can be regarded as a bridge between German culture and Jewish tradition: (a)the translation and traditional Jewish sources; (b)the translation and «Wissenschaft des Judentums»; and (c) the translation and early German Romanticism

Early German Romanticism. Its Founders and Heinrich von Kleist.

The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism

This essay traces the philosophical precursors of Lacan’s theory of the gaze back to the semiotic theory of representation developed by the German philosopher Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and his questions about the contours of the self or what happens to the self when it begins to seek consciousness of itself.