On Mediality of Romanticism. Transcendental Poetics, Optical Devices and the Godwi Case
Abstract
The article explores how, around 1800, the German Romantics redefined poetics as a transcendental, self-reflexive device that transformed literature into a self-reflective medium. More specifically, it highlights optics as a key paradigm for the Romantic imagination, presenting it as a means of mediation – much like a magic lantern – that reshapes the relationship between subject and object, fantasy and reality. In this context, the Romantic novel emerges as an open, digressive, ironic and metaleptic form where reflection and invention converge. In this context, the Romantic novel emerges as an open, digressive, ironic, and metaleptic form where reflection and invention converge. A close reading of Brentano’s Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or the Stone Image of the Mother) demonstrates these principles at their limits: breaches of mimetic representation, authorial self-insertion, and a network of optical devices function as metapoetic tools. In Godwi, the “romantic” is compared to a colored, form-shifting glass – giving rise to a theory of form (Gestalt) not as a closed structure, but as a dynamic process – akin to a soap bubble. This leads to a medial reframing Romanticism: representation is constitutively mediated, aesthetics and poetics converge, and form becomes process.
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