The Art Of Recollection In Jena Romanticism

This study examines the ways in which memory is understood and aestheticized in Romantic texts, and argues that these works reveal serious doubt about the explanatory ability of the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic discourses against which modern thought is constructed. The Jena Romantics represent the experience and presentation of memory as privileged and creative, but also as not always capable of giving reliable information about the actual past. But rather than depicting signifiers with no stable referents, their portrayal of memory and remembering as creative displays a belief that meaning is accessible through its representations. This belief results in an emphasis on originality over imitation, but also blurs distinctions between memory and historiography. The form of the fragment embodies the dilemmas and possibilities that the Romantics associate with memory. The book includes a survey of theories of memory and how they contribute to a specifically Romantic model for memory that can lead to new interpretations of Romantic fragments; chapters on eighteenth-century aesthetic and psychological theories of memory that precede and influence Romantic texts, and on understandings of memory in critical and idealist philosophy; interpretations of the poetic and philosophical production of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel; and a conclusion that demonstrates the persistence of the Romantic model for memory in contemporary memory theory and cultural production.

Winner of the Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize given by the International Conference on Romanticism This original study explores the new idea of theory that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Leon Chai sees in the Romantic age a significant movement across several broad fields of intellectual endeavor, from theoretical concepts to an attempt to understand how they arise. He contends that this movement led to a spatial treatment of concepts, the primacy of development over concepts, and the creation of metatheory, or the formal analysis of theory. Chai begins with P. B. Shelley on the need for conceptual framework, or theory. He then considers how Friedrich Wolf and Friedrich Schlegel shift from a preoccupation with antiquity to a heightened self-awareness of Romantic nostalgia for that lost past. He finds a similar reflexivity in Napoleon's battle plan at Jena and, subsequently, in Hegel's move from substance to subject. Chai then turns to the sciences: Xavier Bichat's rejection of the idea of a unitary vital principle for life as process; the chemical theory of matter developed by Humphry Davy; and the work of Évariste Galois, whose proof of the solvability of equations using radicals ushered in the age of metatheory. Chai concludes with reactions to theory: Coleridge's proposal of the conflict between reason and understanding as a model of theory, Mary Shelley's effort to replace theory with a different kind of relationship to external others, and Hölderlin's reflection on the limits of representation and the possibility of fulfillment beyond it.

Memory in German Romanticism treats memory as a core element in the production and reception of German art and literature of the Romantic era. The contributors explore the artistic expression of memory under the categories of imagination, image, and reception. Romantic literary aesthetics raises the subjective imagination to a level of primary importance for the creation of art. It goes beyond challenging reason and objectivity, two leading intellectual faculties of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and instead elevates subjective invention to form and sustain memory and imagination. Indeed, memory and imagination, both cognitive functions, seek to assemble the elements of one’s own experience, either directed toward the past (memory) or toward the future (imagination), coherently into a narrative. And like memories, images hold the potential to elicit charged emotional responses; those responses live on through time, becoming part of the spatial and temporal reception of the artist and their work. While imagination generates and images trigger and capture memories, reception creates a temporal-spatial context for art, organizing it and rendering it "memorable," both for good and for bad. Thus, through the categories of imagination, image, and reception, this volume explores the phenomenon of German Romantic memory from different perspectives and in new contexts.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the philosophical dimensions of German Romanticism, a movement that challenged traditional borders between philosophy, poetry, and science. With contributions from leading international scholars, the collection places the movement in its historical context by both exploring its links to German Idealism and by examining contemporary, related developments in aesthetics and scientific research. A substantial concluding section of the Handbook examines the enduring legacy of German romantic philosophy. Key Features: • Highlights the contributions of German romantic philosophy to literary criticism, irony, cinema, religion, and biology. • Emphasises the important role that women played in the movement’s formation. • Reveals the ways in which German romantic philosophy impacted developments in modernism, existentialism and critical theory in the twentieth century. • Interdisciplinary in approach with contributions from philosophers, Germanists, historians and literary scholars. Providing both broad perspectives and new insights, this Handbook is essential reading for scholars undertaking new research on German romantic philosophy as well as for advanced students requiring a thorough understanding of the subject.

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw an extraordinary flowering of arts and culture in Germany which produced many of the world's finest writers, artists, philosophers and composers. This volume, first published in 2004, offers students and specialists an authoritative introduction to that dazzling cultural phenomenon, now known collectively as German Romanticism. Individual chapters not only introduce the reader to individual writers such as Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Eichendorff, Heine, Hoffmann, Kleist, Schiller and Tieck, but also treat key concepts of Romantic music, painting, philosophy, gender and cultural anthropology, science and criticism in concise and lucid language. All German quotations are translated to make this volume fully accessible to a wide audience interested in how Romanticism evolved across Europe. Brief biographies and bibliographies are supplemented by a list of primary and secondary further reading in both English and German.

The nineteenth-century Romantic understanding of history is often confused with the longing for the past Golden Age. In this book, the Romantic idea of Golden Age is seen from a new angle by discussing it in the context of Friedrich Schlegel’s works. Interestingly, Schlegel argued that the concept of a past Golden Age in the beginning of history was itself a product of antiquity, imagined without any historical ground. The Golden Age was not bygone for Schlegel, but to be produced in the future. His utopian vision of the Kingdom of God was related to the millenarian expectations of perpetual peace aroused by the revolutionary wars. Schlegel understood current era through the kairos concept, which emphasized the present possibilities for public agency. Thus history could not be reduced to any kind of pre-established pattern of redemption, for the future was determined only by the opportunities manifested in the present time.

Rather than solid frames, some less than perfect aesthetic objects have permeable membranes which allow them to diffuse effortlessly into the everyday world. In the parallel universes of music and literature, Linda Cummins extols the poetry of such imperfection. She places Debussy's work within a tradition thriving on anti-Aristotelian principles: motley collections, crumbling ruins real or fake, monstrous hybrids, patchwork and palimpsest, hasty sketches, ellipses, truncated beginnings and endings, meandering arabesques, irrelevant digressions, auto-quotations. Sensitive to the intermittences of memory and experience and with a keen ear for ironic intrusion, Cummins draws the reader into the Western cultural past in search of the surprisingly ubiquitous aesthetic of the unfinished, negatively silhouetted against expectations of rational coherence. Theories popularized by Schlegel and embraced by the French Symbolists are only the first waypoint on an elaborately illustrated tour reaching back to Petrarch. Cummins meticulously applies the derived results to Debussy's scores and finds convincing correlations in this chiasmatic crossover.