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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Mirror Of Laughter: Mediation, Self-Reflection, And Healing In E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla, Alexander M. Schlutz
The Mirror Of Laughter: Mediation, Self-Reflection, And Healing In E.T.A. Hoffmann's Princess Brambilla, Alexander M. Schlutz
Publications and Research
E.T.A. Hoffmann’s capriccio Princess Brambilla explores a narrative realm of liminality and metamorphosis that reveals the fundamental instability of our most basic epistemological distinctions. Set during the irreverent days of the Roman carnival, Brambilla delights in a disorienting chaos of masks, costumes, dream images and hallucinations as Hoffmann pulls all the stops in a fantastical narrative of extraordinary complexity. The text unfolds a carnivalesque universe that – in the spirit of Early German Romantic irony – plays with the inescapable mediatory “distortions” brought about by the structures of human consciousness itself. Just as the carnival is a ritual of life-affirming …
E.T.A. Hoffmann's Marketplace Vision Of Berlin, Alexander M. Schlutz
E.T.A. Hoffmann's Marketplace Vision Of Berlin, Alexander M. Schlutz
Publications and Research
This essay discusses E.T.A. Hoffmann’s late novella My Cousin’s Corner Window. On the one hand, Hoffmann’s text offers a narratological experiment on how to best represent the experience of seeing the modern city, and combines to that end Enlightenment, Romantic, and Modern aesthetics. On the other hand, the text paints a portrait of the people of post-Napoleonic Berlin at a time of intense state surveillance. Hoffmann defies such state control by means of an ironic meta-narrative perspective that remains invisible to the watchful eye of the censor.